With Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ final Black Tides update bringing in a brand-new ending for the stories of its two protagonists – Naoe and Yasuke – Ubisoft has revealed how community feedback played a major role in its development. Associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois also acknowledged the fact that Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ story wasn’t as well-liked as Ubisoft was hoping for.
“We acknowledge some story elements from the main game that the community didn’t resonate with as much as we hoped, so we’re taking those elements and that feedback and trying to put them to good use and address them in this final chapter,” wrote Lemay-Comtois. “I hope the community is satisfied with where we leave our two protagonists – and hopefully get even more excited for Black Flag Resynced in the process.”
To deal with this, the story will have more Templar involvement as well, with Yasuke and Naoe taking on a duo known as the Black Cross. Lemay-Comtois has noted that community feedback like, “give us more Templar stuff” or “give us more reasons to craft equipment builds” guided the update’s direction.
“Black Tides, which is our final story mission for Naoe and Yasuke, is how we kick that door wide open and add more Templar-focused story content to wrap things up,” he wrote. “If you are craving Templar content and deep lore connections, you won’t want to skip this one.”
Lemay-Comtois also called the challenge of creating a satisfying ending for Assassin’s Creed Shadows while also getting the franchise ready for its next entry “a fun problem to solve.” Interestingly, he also mentioned Black Flag protagonist Edward Kenway, whose presence in the update was teased by Ubisoft earlier this month.
“There are connections to other entries in the franchise, and bringing all of that together and adding those little cryptic nods to past and future was really challenging, but fun to work on,” he explained. “Like connecting Edward’s story, for example; he lived in a different time period, so we can’t just have him show up in Shadows as it wouldn’t make sense. We had to find a way to create that link that fits into both worlds. It was also an interesting challenge to bring the threads from Shadows’ story and post-game content together while also trying to meet player feedback on everything we’ve released so far.”
The Black Tides update for Assassin’s Creed Shadows is also going to bring in a new endgame activity – Domains. Lemay-Comtois has described it as “a new Animus-bending activity that remixes some parts of Shadows and puts them into a very different, more fantastical context.” Its difficulty has seemingly been tuned to give players a “final exam” for the skills they have honed during their time with Shadows.
The game mode will feature five maps with unique modifiers. While objectives themselves will remain simple, the modifiers will make matters more complex, giving players more obstacles to deal with as they go up in difficulty. Players will also have access to Animus Exploits to deal with them.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2.
