From bloated open worlds to a combat-heavy focus, Assassin's Creed Shadows is addressing and hopefully fixing many of the series' biggest problems. It is great to see Ubisoft attempt to innovate, especially with its legacy franchises that feel as if they've been stagnating for quite some time. While past entries are certainly far from bad, Assassin's Creed Shadows promises to be something special, especially for those who have missed its focus on stealth and longed for more substantial stealth mechanics.

While it remains to be seen whether Shadows will save Ubisoft, it has vastly improved approach to stealth makes it an appealing entry in the series. It not only sees a return to the stealth mechanics that made Assassin's Creed so much fun in the first place, but is also adding plenty of new ones to help spice things up. However, while all of that is amazing, and great news for fans, Shadows is still missing one key stealth mechanic that could make it go from being a great game to a truly perfect one.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows Has New Stealth Mechanics

They Vastly Improve The Experience

There are a lot of new stealth mechanics being introduced in Shadows to not only make playing as Naoe more enjoyable, but also to bring Assassin's Creed back to its roots. The most notable improvement is the dynamic lighting system, which allows Naoe to use shadows to hide from enemies. She can also shroud rooms in darkness by putting out lights, and use the cover of night to be less detectable. To further assist with sneaking around, both Naoe and Yasuke can go prone, as well as crouch walk.

These may seem like somewhat trivial improvements, especially to those fond of Ubisoft's other stealth series, Splinter Cell, but Assassin's Creed has always lacked these basic tenets. Their inclusion in Assassin's Creed Shadows will make it the most robust stealth experience in the series, which is definitely a win for fans. Of course, there's plenty more, such as the fact that when enemies lose sight of the player after detecting them, they'll hunt for them in pairs, with samurai enemies even cutting into bushes to test if there's anyone hiding there.

Servants will also alert nearby enemies to the player's position, so they'll need to be avoided or killed. Furthermore, detection is localized to certain areas, meaning that if one group of soldiers discovers the player on the east side of a castle, those in the west won't automatically come searching. It should all come together to offer a drastically different Assassin's Creed experience, one that makes stealth more dynamic and immersive, rather than simply shooting a bird up and having it mark everything before whistling at nearby enemies and picking them off one by one.

Shadow's several stealth changes are one of the main differences between Yasuke and Naoe, as few of them really apply to the hulking samurai. He won't need to worry about putting out lights or diving beneath ponds to evade enemies. In many ways, stealth will be a lot harder in Assassin's Creed Shadows, but more rewarding as a result, meaning that those who have missed it being a focal point of the franchise can get stuck in. There are also plenty of skills players can unlock to make assassinations - and thus stealth - easier, including the return of the double assassination.

Stealth Has Been Mostly Stagnant In Assassin’s Creed

The Focus Has Been On Action

Stealth used to be a significant focus of the Assassin's Creed franchise. In fact, some may argue it was the primary focus of gameplay, as, while players could - if they mastered the combat - overcome overwhelming groups of enemies, they were largely relegated to relying on sneaking around and assassinating from the shadows, much like the series' name would suggest. However, once the series moved into its new, open-world combat-centric RPG age, starting with Assassin's Creed Origins, stealth quickly fell into the background. Assassin's Creed Valhalla's terrible stealth was arguably the tipping point, as it felt obsolete by that point.

That's not to say that the newer entries didn't introduce anything good, as the significant combat changes were for the better, and the open worlds added a lot to the historical side of the series. In fact, Shadows is inspired by Odyssey in a lot of ways, taking many of its best elements while abandoning the things that didn't work, such as the bloated open world. However, while the newer games have been more action-packed, and fallen in line with typical open-world trends, they have lost much of what gave the series its beloved identity in the first place.

Ubisoft attempted to fix that with Assassin's Creed Mirage, a game that was supposed to see the return of beloved stealth mechanics and a smaller world. While, in many ways, Mirage delivered, it never quite felt like the return to form that Ubisoft promised. Of course, much like it has with Odyssey, Shadows has taken Mirage's best features, while attempting to improve many of its supposed stealth improvements. It is great that Ubisoft is hopefully finally giving Assassin's Creed its identity back, but there's a lot more that Shadows could do when it comes to stealth.

Assassin’s Creed Needs To Revisit Social Stealth

It Could Massively Improve Stealth

Social stealth was a key part of the earlier Assassin's Creed franchise. It allowed players to blend into moving crowds and hire certain factions to follow them around, thus keeping them away from the view of nearby guards. It was a novel addition to stealth, one that benefitted the world design of those older entries but wouldn't have worked quite as effectively in something as gargantuan as Odyssey. That's why Ubisoft scrapped the mechanic, with it being completely absent for multiple games, occasionally replaced with another similar feature like kidnapping.

Eventually, Ubisoft brought it back with Mirage but implemented it poorly. Crowds wouldn't move with the player, but in pre-set directions before eventually abandoning the player at the end of their route. They also required one of the most expensive in-game currencies to use, which made them redundant. Players could distract guards using mercenaries or musicians, but these would often be positioned too far from nearby guards to make them effective. Simply put, social stealth may have made a return in Mirage, but it wasn't very good.

That doesn't mean that social stealth shouldn't have made a comeback in Shadows. It would have offered Yasuke a better way of blending in when there are too many enemies for even him to deal with, or Naoe a way of reaching a point that is heavily guarded and thus otherwise impossible to get to. Social stealth added another layer to the world design that elevated exploration and stealth. It is inherent to the series' DNA, and without it, Assassin's Creed Shadows may have great stealth, but it still lacks that final feature that would make it perfect.

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