Assassin's Creed Shadows' roadmap is filled with content to keep fans engaged for months. Among the updates, there's a special, and rather funny, parkour patch that will essentially add new jumping animations as DLC.
Announced on April 30, Ubisoft unveiled the AC Shadows Year 1 roadmap. As you'd expect, it highlights both quality-of-life and bigger DLC drops coming to the open-world game set in feudal Japan.
Despite being heavily loved by the crew at Gfinity (I called it an incredible podcast game), there was still room for improvement in some key areas the series is known for, and that's traversal. The current iteration of parkour feels a bit clunky. It lacks the smoothness of previous entries, and that's about to change.
Framed as the developers listening to community feedback, AC Shadows will get a parkour update in late May that will add several animations and prompts to make climbing much easier. Granted, most of these changes will impact Naoe's gameplay, as Yasuke isn't particularly built with stealth in mind.
Three changes are coming to parkour:
- Height-gaining back ejects
- Height-gaining back ejects
- New vertical ledge jump
It might not sound like much, but seeing it in action does already look like it'll be a much-needed improvement over the current parkour system. Part of me even wonders why these animations weren't shipped with the game initially.
Assassin's Creed Shadows Year 1 Roadmap
Elsewhere, Ubisoft promised a healthy slew of free and paid DLC, with the premium Claws of Awaji expansion scheduled to hit later this year. It will introduce new zones to explore, more story content that takes place after Shadows' epilogue, and even a new weapon for Naoe.
You'll still get free story content, with the first coming in early May. The second is scheduled to hit in June, so there'll be reasons to come back to the game in the coming months. On top of that, there are special collaborations teased as well, with no news as to what they entail.