Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be the first update since Valhalla in 2020. In this game, players had to choose at the beginning whether to play with a female or a male main character (Eivor Varinsdottir), but in the new installment there will be two separate protagonists: the shinobi Naoe and the samurai Yasuke .
In case you’re wondering how much Assassin’s Creed Shadows will dictate who you play with, Deputy Director Simon Lemay-Comtois told GamesRadar that players will be able to stick with their favorite protagonist for the majority of the game if they wish.
If you only want to be one character, you can for most of the game. So we’re not really arming anyone to switch back and forth. There are settings that are definitely better with Naoe, like if there’s a bunch of bandits in a cave that’s very, very dark, you can definitely go with Yasuke, but if you go with Naoe, it’s faster because it’s dark. So there are some hints like that, but aside from story missions that are specifically tailored to one or the other, we’re not specifying who to play at this point, it’s up to the players.
This is a similar approach to Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, another dual-protagonist game where you could play as either Miles Morales or Peter Parker during most of the open-world missions.
In case you’re wondering about the differences between Naoe and Yasuke, our freshly released Assassin’s Creed Shadows preview from Summer Game Fest outlines them very clearly:
A massive spiked staff was Yasuke’s primary weapon in the Assassin’s Creed Shadows demos, wielding it like a baseball bat and cracking ashigaru skulls like overripe tomatoes. Enemies who take down more than one hit will have Yasuke’s powerful swings rip through the air and crash into their armor to strip them of their armor in the streets. Packed with attacks and a trio of special skills that each work on cooldowns, he mixes up his brutal swings while still having the guts to parry powerful blows.
On the other hand, Naoe returns to more subtle assassination styles. In addition to a single hidden blade, this brave shinobi wields a shorter katana and a sickle weapon called a kusarigama. With the latter, Naoe can swing a massive chain for crowd control, but also stun enemies with the weighted end before closing the distance and impaling the enemy with the sickle end (sometimes it takes more than one stab to finish them off in brutal fashion). As a much smaller and more agile fighter, Naoe does more with her agile frame to dodge and jump around the battlefield to avoid enemy attacks that glow red (on the other hand, blue highlighted attacks can be blocked and parried)
In the aforementioned Gamesradar interview, Simon Lemay-Comtois also talked about introducing a more enticing exploration loop that rewards information-gathering in a Sherlock Holmes-like fashion.
In the beginning, we decided to break the rules as much as possible in the concept of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. So we tried to go and change the formula as much as possible. That’s one of the places where we’ve heard criticism, we wanted to push exploration ourselves to make it more engaging for players to want to discover things rather than digging into something and getting information. So it’s something new that we’re trying to incorporate into the game. And because it works, we built it into all the quests and missions you can do in the game. Now I will say that there is still a managed mode that players can log into which is more classic. It tells you where to go and stuff, but the core mode, our new exploration loop, is more about playing Sherlock Holmes a bit and having to work for the reward at the end.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is set to launch on November 15 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, Mac and iPad.