'Assassin's Creed Shadows' Creative Director Says You Are Not Missing Out If You Only Play As Naoe Or Yasuke
Jonathan Dumont, the Creative Director for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, shared that players will not being missing out on much of anything in the game if they only choose to play one of the two protagonists in the game.
In an interview with ScreenRant, Dumont was asked, “And I know with Shadows you can go through, I think you've said either like 80 or 90% of the game playing just as one of them if you want to. But I'm curious how much players will miss out on if they do that. And, as a sort of related question, if you have one you prefer to play as in the game?”
He replied, “I hate that question, pick your children, all right! Okay. So I don't think you're missing out on things too much. I think it's more on your preference to [say], ‘Okay, I'll see how the game will adapt a little bit to the character if you choose one over the other.’”
Dumont did go on to reveal that there are specific introductions for both Yasuke and Naoe and they each have their own questline as well.
He explained, “They get individual introductions and then they get their own questline also. So that one is, let's say Naoe, a personal questline cannot be played by Yasuke and those are two distinct things. But the core of the game can be pick your character and the game adapts.”
Nevertheless, he then reiterated you won’t be missing much if you choose to just play one over the other.
“So I guess you can switch for gameplay reasons, you can switch if you think that you like one of the other [protagonists] better, but I don't think you're missing out,” he stated. “That's more, all right, have fun with the game, just play it as you want. And there's going to be a couple of choices here and there that I wonder what happened, what would happen with this character, but I don't think you're missing out.”
Dumont elaborated, “We're not imposing players try to split the time. So if you prefer one character for any reason, you can play maybe - I don't know, I'm not going to put a percentage - but quite a bit of the game using one of them. But if you want to balance it out.”
He concluded by sharing how he’s played the game, “I play quite a bit balanced out and what happens is, I play with one for three, four, five hours, and then I switch, and then I just play two, three hours. Usually I play stealth and then I play, all right, let me destroy some camps and stuff all right for a while. And then I just change like that.”
Dumont’s comments are extraordinarily interesting given Ubisoft has touted its dual protagonist system in its marketing for the game.
In fact, on the official Assassin’s Creed Shadows website, one of the first things that you see is Ubisoft touting that “a new creed rises” and that the game allows players to “live the intertwined stories of Naoe, an adept shinobi Assassin from Iga Province, and Yasuke, the powerful African samurai of historical legend.”
Back in May 2024, Game Director Charles Benoit also stated, “With our dual protagonists, we have two fantasies: the samurai and the shinobi. We want the player to experience both.”
What do you make of Dumont’s comments?
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Sounds like they started with the same male/female protagonist system of the last few games and then decided to make the male an optionally gay definitely not George Floyd fantasy non samurai with a different playstyle.