Assassin’s Creed’s modern day timeline has been a problem for a long time. As I’ve written before, the Layla Hassan parallel storyline explored across Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla has grown more convoluted and confusing with each entry, and adds very little to the overall meaning and themes of each game. It would be far more compelling if the historical and modern timelines played against each other and told a more cohesive story, but instead they feel completely separate.
Where Did The Modern Day Timeline Go?
Assassin’s Creed Shadows was supposed to fix that problem by rebooting the modern day timeline’s formula. Franchise boss Marc-Alexis Coté said that the modern storyline “struggled to find its footing” after Desmond Miles was killed off at the end of AC3, and that Shadows would “aim to restore the balance that was once the hallmark of the franchise” by “drawing meaningful contrast between past and present”.
Ubisoft has kind of kept its word. But the odd thing about Shadows is that the main game, the campaign that most players will finish, doesn’t tangle with the modern storyline at all. You only really see the modern timeline through optional Animus rifts strewn across the map and through audio logs with static visuals. Everything else is gated behind the battle pass, in text logs. Understandably, this has made many players feel like the modern day timeline is being shoved to the margins entirely.
From what we’ve seen of the modern day storyline so far, Shadows has largely abandoned what’s happened with Layla, Shaun, Rebecca, and Basim in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. It seems more like a new Desmond is being positioned to take over the modern day storyline, replacing Layla entirely.
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Why Include A Battle Pass At All?
This shift in focus, in itself, isn’t really a problem. The modern timeline was a mess – rebooting it entirely and ignoring all the annoying, brain melting Basim stuff might be a step in the right direction, though it’s far too early to say if this was a good decision on Ubisoft’s part. What I’m more concerned about is that all this information is locked behind a battle pass that most players aren’t going to bother with.
Obviously, it’s very weird that Shadows, a single-player game with a full campaign, has a battle pass at all. There’s very little point in a battle pass existing in this situation, apart from keeping players logging in week after week in the hopes that they’ll spend a little money in the store. After all, the battle passes are (at least for now), free. Ubisoft isn’t making any money off of this.
This isn’t really problematic, per se. It’s silly, but not predatory, to entice players to keep playing week after week, especially since it doesn’t take a ton of time to complete the (very pointless) fetch quests and combat encounters they ask you to tackle. Ten minutes a week is… fine, I guess. It’s just a weird choice to gate a completely separate timeline behind a battle pass at all, when it could have been integrated into the game properly instead of tacked on as a live-service addition.
It does also make me worry a little that the battle passes won’t be free forever. After all, what does Ubisoft really stand to gain otherwise? Not to get mad at the company prematurely for something it hasn’t even done, but it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that microtransaction king Ubisoft slaps a price tag on its modern timeline reboot at some point in the future.
At that point, you will probably see me writing yet another angry article about how Ubisoft loves ripping us off. Stay tuned!
Ideally, this hypothetical never becomes reality. But even if it doesn’t, the whole thing is stupid, and completely unnecessary in a single-player game. I suspect Ubisoft realised it would be too complicated to tackle this in a holistic narrative way, and therefore separated it from the main Shadows storyline to make it less of an issue, but there’s really no way of knowing for sure. It really just makes no sense.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
- Released
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March 20, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language
- Developer(s)
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Ubisoft Quebec
- Engine
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AnvilNext