Assassin’s Creed Shadows probably won’t get a second major DLC expansion on the scale of Claws of Awaji, Ubisoft’s associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois has revealed. It’s a blow to fans who are accustomed to getting a couple of major expansions per Assassin’s Creed, and a boon to people who haven’t even played Shadows yet, let alone the 10-hour-long Claws of Awaji, and are getting dry heaves from FOMO. It’s me, I am people.
“As of now at this moment for Year Two there is no expansion on the size of Awaji that is planned currently,” Lemay-Comtois revealed in an interview with JorRaptor, via Ian Games. “We’re still working on content for post-launch and supporting it, but it’s not a full-on DLC the way a Season Pass would have had in the previous years.” The developers are trying “to keep things small and reactive and see how the community feels about it.”
Claws Of Awaji aside, the first year of Shadows updating brought self-driving horses, posher parkour, Balatro collaborations, nightmare difficulty, and a more conveniently made open world, amongst other tweaks to the furnishings. The second year “will probably be more sparse, not a drip-feed, but chunkier updates that shake things up a little more,” Lemay-Comtois suggested in the interview.
“I’m not announcing anything at this point,” he went on, “but our strategy for Year One was to be quick and reactive, so it means smaller drops often, but for Year Two we don’t need to put fires out or anything, so it’s more what good, chunky little piece of meat we can drop and have people come back and enjoy it.”
As IGN note, 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins and 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey both had two expansions, while 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla got three, with 2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage starting out as yet another Valhalla expansion. Why is Shadows getting stiffed with a measly single expansion? Because it was uncommonly hard to develop, Lemay-Comtois explained, with a major technological overhaul that contributed (along with the “soft” performance of stablemate Star Wars Outlaws) to a delayed release.
“I think with Shadows, we had a big jump in generations,” he said. “The engine work that we had to do on Shadows took a lot of time and a lot of our resources. The planning for the post launch was not really as clear as it would have been on [previous AC games] where the technology is more stable and well known.”
Shadows originally had a proper season pass, but Ubisoft canned it alongside the delay announcement, and decided to give away Claws of Awaji for free. “I remember during pre-launch we had the Season Pass,” Lemay-Comtois added. “And that situation changed when we pushed back on the release date. That plan changed quite a bit and then we had to kind of adapt to the situation. So because of the new tech, because of the new generation, because of the pushes we had in production.”
It seems possible the decision to stop at one Shadows expansion also reflects wider turmoil at Ubisoft, who are busily restructuring around a Tencent-funded subsidiary dedicated to Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Rainbow Six. Anyway, the upshot is that you AC diehards now have around 10 hours of playtime back to fritter away on something else. I recommend the similarly shadowy and backstabby Mark Of The Ninja. Alternatively, you could spend it playing the Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag remake that absolutely isn’t coming in 2026.
