Assassin’s Creed Shadows director: players ‘aren’t missing out’ if they mainly play as one character
Players can swap between Yasuke and Naoe, but it sounds like they don’t have to
The creative director of Assassin’s Creed Shadows says he doesn’t think players are “missing out” if they favour one of the game’s two protagonists.
Shadows allows players to control either the ninja Yaoe or the samurai Yasuke, with the former offering stealth and speed, and the latter being focused more on brute strength attacks.
While players can switch between Yaoe and Yasuke throughout the course of the game, creative director Jonathan Dumont says they shouldn’t have to worry on missing large swathes of content if they’d rather play mainly as a single character.
“I don’t think you’re missing out on things too much,” Dumont told Screen Rant. “I think it’s more on your preference to [say] ‘okay, I’ll see how the game will adapt a little bit to the character if you choose one over the other’.
“They get individual introductions, and then they get their own questline also. So that one is, let’s say Naoe, a personal questline cannot be played by Yasuke and those are two distinct things. But the core of the game can be pick your character and the game adapts.
“So I guess you can switch for gameplay reasons, you can switch if you think that you like one of the other [protagonists] better, but I don’t think you’re missing out. That’s more, all right, have fun with the game, just play it as you want.
“And there’s going to be a couple of choices here and there that I wonder what happened, what would happen with this character, but I don’t think you’re missing out.”
Further reading
Choosing not to commit to a specific percentage, Dumont said players can play “quite a bit of the game” using just one character, because Ubisoft is “not imposing players [to] try to split their time” between both. However, he also adds that he personally prefers to switch every few hours.
“I play quite a bit balanced out and what happens is, I play with one for three, four, five hours, and then I switch, and then I just play two, three hours,” he said. “Usually I play stealth and then I say, all right, let me destroy some camps and stuff all right for a while. And then I just change like that.”
Originally planned for release last November, Assassin’s Creed Shadows was delayed until February 14, then delayed again to March 20.
Despite previously saying it was confident a second delay wouldn’t be necessary, Ubisoft said the additional development time would allow it to “better incorporate the player feedback gathered over the past three months and help create the best conditions for launch by continuing to engage closely with the increasingly positive Assassin’s Creed community”.
