Assassin’s Creed Shadows delay due to Ubisoft finally listening to developers "pushing for a delay for some time", says report

rockpapershotgun.com:

Last week, Ubisoft announced they’d be delaying open world Tsushima-like Assassin's Creed Shadows until 2025, citing concerns over a "softer than expected launch for Star Wars Outlaws" in a financial targets update. A new report by Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson has shed a little more light on the situation after talking to several developers on the project, who say they’ve been pushing for a delay "for some time", only for higher-ups at Ubi to just now take heed.

"While the game is feature complete, the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title," read last week’s statement. "This will enable the biggest entry in the franchise to fully deliver on its ambition, notably by fulfilling the promise of our dual protagonist adventure, with Naoe and Yasuke bringing two very different gameplay styles." Ubisoft also announced they’d be dropping the odious play-early season pass model, and releasing the game day-one on Steam rather than keeping it captive behind the (dogshit, very dogshit, unbelievably dogshit) Ubisoft Connect launcher.

Both Ubisoft’s claims of the game needing more time in the oven, and of taking lessons from Outlaws’ release - the game has apparently shifted just 1 million copies - are true to an extent, says the report. What’s new here is the revelation that, short of being the sort of humble, savvy pivot based on new information Ubisoft are framing it as, developers on the project have allegedly been pushing for the delay for a while now. Here’s how the report frames it:

So why was Shadows delayed? It’s a complicated question without a single answer, but it boils down to a strict development timeline, polishing, and addressing the Japanese community’s cultural and historical accuracy concerns.

As to that last point, sources told Insider Gaming that "the team has been actively addressing many of the historical and cultural concerns, which started before the game’s reveal following external