Assassin’s Creed Shadows is breaking a series pattern.
Ubisoft has confirmed that it won’t be moving forward with a second expansion for Assassin’s Creed Shadows. This breaks an ongoing pattern for recent entries in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, as the games typically get two post-launch expansions at minimum.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows received its first and now final expansion, Claws of Awaji, earlier in September this year.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows won’t get another major expansion
Unlike recent entries in the franchise, Assassin’s Creed Shadows will no longer get a second expansion. Two expansions were initially planned for the game, as part of its now-cancelled Season Pass DLC pack. The Season Pass was cancelled before launch, and its first planned expansion–Claws of Awaji–became free for all who pre-ordered the game. For everyone else, the expansion was a standalone purchase.
Seeing as two expansions were included in the originally-planned Season Pass, and recent Assassin’s Creed games have historically added multiple expansions post-release, players were expecting more paid DLC following the release of Claws of Awaji. To that end, Ubisoft had some disappointing news to share this week.
In an interview with JorRaptor, Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois confirmed that “As of now, at this moment for Year Two, there is no expansion on the size of Awaji that is planned.”
However, the developer noted that this came with the “caveat that anything can happen in the future, as [Assassin’s Creed] Mirage just proved, and as the crossover stories from Odyssey to Valhalla also proved before it, things could come up in the future [...].”
Hence, players shouldn’t expect any major paid DLC expansions for the game to launch anytime soon. The developer noted that more content is in the works for Assassin’s Creed Shadows Year Two, however; they’re just not on the scale of Claws of Awaji’s expansion.
Ubisoft’s last entry in the franchise, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, recently received a free DLC expansion entitled Valley of Memory. The game was originally planned as an expansion for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which itself received three expansions, by comparison.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is breaking a series pattern here with a singular expansion, and no indication of DLC support past its second year of content. Lemay-Comtois noted in the interview:
"We're trying to re-adjust for Year Two a little bit. There's learning from Year One we can apply to Year Two. Any content we want to do in Year Two will probably be more sparse, not a drip-feed [...] but chunkier updates that shake things up a little more.”
Lemay-Comtois also noted that upcoming DLC drops planned for Assassin’s Creed Shadows would be on a similar scale as the game’s recent Attack on Titan crossover update, if not larger.
