Yasuke (TBA) practices his katana movements in Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2024), Ubisoft
In providing some insight as to just why the upcoming franchise entry looks to be of such low quality, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise head Marc-Alexis Coté has revealed that “probably half” of the devs currently working on Shadows are “building a game for the first time”.

Yasuke (TBA) prepares for a snow-covered showdown in Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2024), Ubisoft
Coté spoke to the Shadows dev team’s level of experience while delivering the keynote speech for the recent 2024 XDS entertainment industry summit.

During a Q&A session held at the end of his talk, the Ubisoft exec was pressed by an attendee if he could speak to which “strategies that you find are working in building trust with your internal and external partners when you’re communicating.”

In turn, Coté asserted, “I think it’s about being transparent. People see the problems if you try to hide them. They will find it and they will lose trust in you for trying to hide it from them. And building games is hard. I think we need to always be honest about that.”

“There’s one thing in my career that I keep remembering,” he then recalled. “That comic strip on Penny-Arcade – I don’t know if you guys used to read it – but at one point they build a game and one of the comic strips was about realizing how difficult it is to build games. And I think one of the titles or one of the things that was written is like, “a game is s–t until it’s good.”

(Notably, this quote did not come from a specific PA strip, but rather from author Jerry “Tycho” Holkins, who used the phrase “a game is s–t until it’s awesome” in multiple interviews concerning their game, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness).

“And I think this is something we’ve all experienced,” Coté continued. “You’re like, ‘It sucks, it sucks, it sucks’, and then suddenly, it starts to be good. But I think it’s walking people through that.”

Yasuke (TBA) and Naoe (TBA) look to the future in Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2024), Ubisoft

And it was here, in discussion of ‘the difficulty of building video games’, that the franchise lead revealed his team’s overall lack of development experience.

“One of the things that I’ve noticed since the pandemic is that we have a lot of juniors on our team,” Coté detailed. “And I don’t know if this is something that’s your case as well, but the seniority has lowered globally and probably half the team that’s building an Assassin’s Creed game is building a game for the first time. They don’t know, so you have to explain to them that even though they’re playing the game right now and they think it’s the worst thing they’ve ever seen, ‘it’s going to be good, we’re going to get there, and explain that you’ve been there before as a leader.”

Naoe (TBA) prepares to strike in Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2024), Ubisoft
“I remember my first time on Assassin’s Creed like it was July and the game was shipping in October,” he recalled of his time working on Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. “I was like, there’s no way this thing ends up shipping. And then we got a 91 Metacritic, and I was like, ‘Oh okay, that’s good’. So I was wrong, because again, it’s not good until it is, and you need to be try to be as transparent as possible.”

Drawing his answer to a close, Côté ultimately affirmed, “But like, the play test results, the appreciation, what’s working, what’s not working – I think genuinely sharing with your teams is, in my experience, what has allowed me to maintain the communication channels open. Making sure people can come and see me if they see a problem.”

“So I think it’s really about trust and making sure you don’t break this trust with your team,” he concluded. “And if you do that, you’re honest about it, and that you make sure you don’t do it again.”

Yasuke (TBA) draws his rifle in Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2024), Ubisoft
Barring any further delays, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is on track to leap its way on to store shelves on February 14th, 2025.