Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be the first new entry since 2020’s Valhalla. In that game, players initially had to choose whether to play with a female or male main character (Eivor Varinsdottir), but in the new installment there will be two separate protagonists: the shinobi Naoe and the samurai Yasuke.
If you’re wondering how much Assassin’s Creed Shadows will dictate who you play as, associate director Simon Lemay-Comtois told GamesRadar that players can stick with their favorite protagonist for most of the game if they wish.
If you want to be just one character, you can do that for most of the game. So we’re not really arming anyone to switch back and forth. There are setups that are definitely better with Naoe, like: if there are a bunch of bandits in a cave that is very, very dark, you can definitely go with Yasuke, but if you go with Naoe it will be faster because it’s in the dark. So there are some hints like this, but aside from story missions tailored specifically for one or the other, we don’t specify who should be playing 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 Miles Morales or Peter Parker during most open-world missions.
If you’re interested in the differences between Naoe and Yasuke, our just-posted Assassin’s Creed Shadows preview from Summer Game Fest outlines them very clearly:
A huge studded club was Yasuke’s main weapon in the Assassin’s Creed Shadows demos, swinging it around like a baseball bat and squishing ashigaru skulls like overripe tomatoes. For enemies that take more than one hit to take down, Yasuke’s mighty swings tear through the air and crash into their armor to rip off their breastplates in the street. Charged attacks and a trio of special abilities each used on cooldowns combine to give him brutal swings while giving him the power to shrug off intense blows.
On the other hand, Naoe hearkens back to the more refined killing styles. In addition to the single hidden blade, this brave shinobi wields a shorter katana and a chain-and-sickle weapon called a Kusarigama. The latter allows Naoe to swing a huge chain around for crowd control, as well as stun enemies with the weighted end before closing the distance and stabbing the enemy with the sickle end (sometimes requiring more than one stab to brutally way to finish). As a much smaller and more agile combatant, Naoe does more with her nimble frame to dodge and jump around the battlefield to avoid enemy attacks that glow red (blue-highlighted attacks, on the other hand, can be blocked and parried).
In the aforementioned Gamesradar interview, Simon Lemay-Comtois also talked about introducing a more engaging exploration loop that rewards information gathering in a Sherlock Holmes-esque manner.
Early on, we decided to break the rules as much as possible when creating Assassin’s Creed Shadows. So we tried to change the formula as much as possible. That is one of the places where we have heard the criticism. We wanted to encourage exploration itself to be more attractive to the player, to want to discover things instead of getting lost in 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 in for all the quests and missions you can do in the game. Now I will say that there is still a guided mode that players can sign up for, which is classic. It’ll tell you where to go and stuff like that, but the basic mode, our new exploration loop, is more about playing a bit of Sherlock Holmes and having to work for the reward at the end.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be released on November 15 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, Mac and iPad.