Assassin's Creed Shadows may be shaping up to be the hit Ubisoft needed. On social media, the Assassin's Creed team announced that the game, which was released on Thursday, has so far drawn in two million players. Assassin's Creed Shadows was originally slated to come out last fall, but was delayed twice as developers worked to further polish the game and try to ensure everything would be running smoothly on day one. So far, (mostly) so good, it seems. Engadget's Kris Holt noted in his review this week that the game is for the most part running well on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and PC.

Japan, 1581: Iga province is burning down around you. You watch on, injured and helpless as the Oda Nobunaga - the warlord responsible for numerous civil wars and the eventual unification of the country - smirks from a nearby hill. You draw your katana, the blade shining in the flickering light of the flames. This is Assassin's Creed: Shadows – part exciting ninja game, part history lesson. It's an odd combination but it comes together in a sprawling historical-fiction adventure full of discovery and deception.

It's no secret that the video game industry is struggling. The last two years have seen more than 25,000 redundancies and more than 40 studio closures. Thanks to game development's spiralling costs (blockbuster titles now cost hundreds of millions to make), overinvestment during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a series of failed bets to create the next money-printing "forever game", the pressure for blockbuster games to succeed is now higher than ever. It's a predicament that feels especially pertinent for Ubisoft. Employing in the region of 20,000 people across 45 studios in 30 countries, its most recent big licensed games Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws underperformed commercially.

The long-running Assassin's Creed video game industrial complex has finally reached Japan – and I've been waiting. Assassin's Creed Shadows is set in feudal Japan, in the late 16th century, to be precise, at a time of political upheaval that birthed the ninja. While I didn't get to play Shadows, at Summer Game Fest 2024, Ubisoft offered a hands-off gameplay demo, revealing how the game will play with two different but equal protagonists. If you missed the initial reveal, Shadows' protagonists are Yasuke, a powerful outsider samurai who can strike the armor off enemies, and Naoe, an assassin/ninja with a killer "sickle on-chain" kusarigama and those traditional AC killing methods -- she has a wrist blade. Instead of choosing a single character to play the entire game, you can switch between the characters for assassination runs and exploration segments.

Assassin's Creed Shadows will be available globally on November 15. The latest iteration of the historical murder sim will be playable on a bunch of devices, including PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC via the Ubisoft Store and the Epic Games Store. It'll also be available for Apple silicon Mac computers right at launch, which is something of a rarity, and on cloud gaming platforms like Amazon Luna and Ubisoft . If the name sounds unfamiliar, the game used to be called Assassin's Creed Codename Red and it's been in development since at least 2022. It's set in feudal Japan and the developer promises "a very different type of Assassin's Creed game."

The game Assassin's Creed fans have been asking for years is finally on its way. During its Ubisoft Forward event on Saturday, the publisher revealed Codename Red, a new entry in the series that will be set in feudal Japan. Franchise head Marc-Alexis Côté called Red the "next premium title" in Ubisoft's open world series and said Ubisoft Quebec was leading work on the project, suggesting it will hew closer to Odyssey than next year's Mirage. Côté also shared a teaser for Codename Hexe and called it "a very different type of Assassin's Creed game." Ubisoft Montreal, the studio that first created the series is leading development on the project, with Clint Hocking involved as creative director.

The first entry in the franchise, Shogun: Total War, balances the combat simulations that strive for realism and authenticity, alongside the political strategy that is aimed to give context and stakes to each conflict. The original Total War is set in 1530, during the Sengoku Jidai period of feudal Japan: a time largely popularised in contemporary fiction by the works of Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, with films such as Kagemusha, Seven Samurai and Ran proving influential on the design and development of the game - with clips of the latter being used as part of the games cinematics. Both the player and opposing AI assume the role of the'Daimyo': local-lords who control provinces of Japan with a need to conduct both diplomatic strategy alongside military movements. When rival factions are drawn into conflict, players take control of the'Taisho' (General) and move hundreds if not thousands of troops across the battlefield. Sengoku Jidai made for an ideal period of history for the game, given the politics and even the economics of the period was built around the logistics of fielding armies in defence of the Daimyo and his ambitions. Total War deviates from many traditional real-time strategy games in that it removes mechanics such as Fog of War from combat gameplay as well as the need for resource management outside of unit counts from combat decision making.