A few weeks back I wrote some very positive things about Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and so it should be of little surprise given the series’ contentious, recent past that I have since found that I am an idiot, and now have to write some less positive things as well.
Why am I an idiot? Because I should have seen this coming. Here’s a quote from an article I wrote complaining about AC Odyssey’s ending all the way back in November 2018:
As Odyssey dragged itself towards its final few story missions, though, I noticed the pacing was off. Having spent dozens of hours spinning its wheels, everything seems to ramp up out of nowhere, then end abruptly with much of the story and its mysteries—especially the fate of the Cult—left unresolved. I was very disappointed.
Here’s me, again, talking about how Valhalla’s ending sucked in January 2021:
Ultimately, Valhalla’s length added a little despair to my final thoughts on the game. The bloat created grind, which diluted the whole experience, and often felt like it was keeping my attention solely through brute force and checklists. It left me parting with a game I LOVED on less than lovely terms, which was a damn shame.
And here’s me remembering all of that earlier this month:
Their problems aren’t that they suck, but that they were just too big. Too long. Odyssey and Valhalla especially vastly overstayed their welcome with drawn-out (sometimes multiple) storylines and DLC, meaning a lot of people parted with those games on poor terms. Those negative views have perhaps coloured both game’s legacy in ways unfair to their core experience.
Despite that mountain of evidence I had naively thought, having as much fun as I’d been having with Shadows up to that point, that it surely wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes its predecessors had made. That Ubisoft, with nearly a decade of experience and feedback that its open-world games were too damn long, would have taken steps to do something, anything, to address that.
Nope! Shadows absolutely botches its landing, and just like its predecessors. It botches it so badly that it’s soured my feelings on the entire game.
Here’s what happens as you approach the end of Shadows, which is much the same as happened in Valhalla and Odyssey before it: Over the course of dozens of hours of fantastic video game, a few different storylines begin to emerge. In Shadows’ case, there’s the main saga, which involves a shadowy cabal of mask-wearing villains and their evil deeds, but there are also branching, more intimate tales, telling the personal stories of our two heroes, Naoe and Yasuke.
You would think, given the way each supporting story elegantly branches off and is intertwined with the main one, that Shadows would also find a way to tie them all back together again at the end. They do not. What happens in Shadows is that you finish the main story with a limp cutscene, and are then returned to the game to tie up your loose ends. Which, with the main storyline now done, also lack any kind of real impact or satisfaction. Indeed all three storylines don’t just end poorly, they don’t feel like they end at all, the credits somehow managing to roll 2-3 missions before you’d think they would have and, thanks to the game’s incessant grind for levels and repetitive tasks, 10-20 hours later than they should have.
After 70-80 hours of gameplay, during which emotional stories are told and you’re drawn deep into your character’s journey, to have it all end so abruptly is a HUGE disappointment. I wanted to see these guys get revenge–indeed, how each of them deals with the concept is a huge part of the narrative and your choices–and while Yasuke gets a little, Naoe’s backstory has barely begun before it’s abruptly shuttered.
What’s maddening here is that this clearly isn’t a strictly narrative decision. The way each storyline pulls up short is a good reminder that this game isn’t done, and that, like Odyssey and Valhalla, there is more to come via at least one expansion. Argh! You can’t end the main game with teasers of what’s to come, that’s bullshit. The decision to cliffhang an 80-hour game has left me in the same position I was left in after the last few games: soured, my good times relegated to the rearview mirror as I file away Shadows on the shitty terms I parted with, not the glee which took up the bulk of my time with it.
My Assassin’s Creed piece earlier this month was mostly about how, for all Ubisoft’s talk and publicity, Shadows was a lot more similar to the last few games in the series than we’d maybe been expecting. Which was fine for the good stuff, but it’s a real shame to see those similarities extend right through to Shadows’ ending, and it’s something Ubisoft are going to need to address going forwards if they want people to stop parting with these games on such depressing terms.
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