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Ubisoft Quebec’s four-year journey on Assassin’s Creed Shadows ran from the start of production to the game’s 2025 release. Managing director Nathalie Bouchard, who joined the studio at production’s beginning, describes a project built by a Quebec City-led team, supported by Ubisoft studios elsewhere, and shaped by research into Japan, two contrasting protagonists, and technical ambitions for a more responsive world.
What Ubisoft means by a four-year journey
In a retrospective published April 8, 2025, Bouchard looked back on the full production cycle, from its beginning through release. She singled out the scale of the work, its production milestones, and the return to in-person studio work after pandemic confinement as defining parts of the experience. Her account is a leader’s retrospective, not an independently audited schedule or measure of production outcomes. Ubisoft’s retrospective
Bouchard also pointed to how many different disciplines contribute to a modern game. “What really surprised me was the role of technology in video game development and the multitude of professions involved in the process.”
Quebec City led a wider Ubisoft collaboration
Ubisoft Quebec was the lead studio, but Shadows was not made by an isolated team. Ubisoft’s launch material thanked colleagues in Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Sherbrooke, and Saguenay, while its art-development feature credits teams around the world for work on the game’s world and characters. Ubisoft’s launch announcement Ubisoft’s art-development feature
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- Only at Amazon Limited Edition Content includes the base game and Sekiryu Character Pack
- Explore the captivating open world of feudal Japan, from spectacular castle towns and bustling ports to peaceful shrines and war-ravaged landscapes. Adventure through unpredictable weather, changing seasons, and reactive environments.
- Become Naoe, a shinobi Assassin, and Yasuke, a legendary samurai, as you experience their riveting stories and master their complementary playstyles.
- Make information your weapon as you explore the world, and build your own network of spies to be your eyes and ears across locations to hunt down your next target. Along the way, recruit new allies with unique abilities to help accomplish your missions.
- Create a fully customizable hideout for your growing shinobi league as you train your crew, craft new gear, interact with key characters, and choose your base’s layout, decorations, and accessories.
The Quebec team also brought experience from earlier projects, including Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and Immortals Fenyx Rising. Bouchard said familiarity among core team members helped communication and team dynamics during a stressful production. In an interview with MobileSyrup, game director Charles Benoit described an ongoing exchange with Ubisoft Montreal: “We learn from them, they learn from us, so it’s always a learning process in terms of what you can do and production.” MobileSyrup’s March 25, 2025 report
How the team approached Japan
The game is set in late-sixteenth-century Japan, during the Azuchi-Momoyama era and the country’s unification in the late Sengoku period. Art director Thierry Dansereau told MobileSyrup that the team worked with Japanese experts, external partners, and Ubisoft’s Japanese studios. He also described watching films, consulting museum databases, visiting Japan, and engaging with the community as parts of the development process. Those are reported methods; they do not establish that every element of the game is historically exact.
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- ENTER FEUDAL JAPAN - Explore the captivating open world of feudal Japan, from spectacular castle towns and bustling ports to peaceful shrines and war-ravaged landscapes. Adventure through unpredictable weather, changing seasons, and reactive environments.
- MASTER COMPLEMENTARY PLAYSTYLES - Become Naoe, a shinobi Assassin, and Yasuke, a legendary samurai, as you experience their riveting stories and master their complementary playstyles. As Naoe, use stealth to avoid detection and agility to confound your enemies. As Yasuke, strike your foes with lethal precision and power. Unlock new skills, gear, and progression independently for each character.
- MAKE INFORMATION YOUR WEAPON - Travel the world and build your own network of spies to be your eyes and ears across locations to hunt down your next target. Along the way, recruit new allies with unique abilities to help accomplish your missions
- BUILD A PLACE TO CALL HOME - Create a fully customizable hideout for your growing shinobi league as you train your crew, craft new gear, interact with key characters, and choose your base’s buildings layout, decorations, and accessories.
Dansereau acknowledged the challenge of approaching the culture from North America: “Being North Americans, we knew that it was a challenge to get to know that Japanese culture. So we paired ourselves with Japanese experts, internal and external partners, but also our Ubisoft Japanese studios. We’ve watched lots of movies as well. We’ve looked at museum databases.”
Masumi, the actress and singer-songwriter who plays Naoe, also described discussing language, mannerisms, and cultural details with the team for voiceover and cinematics. These accounts show how developers say they informed the portrayal; they are not a substitute for an independent historical assessment.
Rank #3
- Only at Amazon Limited Edition Content includes the base game and Sekiryu Character Pack
- Explore the captivating open world of feudal Japan, from spectacular castle towns and bustling ports to peaceful shrines and war-ravaged landscapes. Adventure through unpredictable weather, changing seasons, and reactive environments.
- Become Naoe, a shinobi Assassin, and Yasuke, a legendary samurai, as you experience their riveting stories and master their complementary playstyles.
- Make information your weapon as you explore the world, and build your own network of spies to be your eyes and ears across locations to hunt down your next target. Along the way, recruit new allies with unique abilities to help accomplish your missions.
- Create a fully customizable hideout for your growing shinobi league as you train your crew, craft new gear, interact with key characters, and choose your base’s layout, decorations, and accessories.
Why Naoe and Yasuke play differently
Ubisoft designed the two protagonists as distinct gameplay fantasies rather than interchangeable leads. Naoe is presented as a quick-witted, agile shinobi focused on stealth, while Yasuke is a powerful, charismatic samurai oriented toward direct combat. The pairing connects the franchise’s stealth roots with its more recent emphasis on intricate melee fighting. Ubisoft’s art-development feature
- Naoe: agility and stealth, for players who want to avoid detection and use a shinobi’s approach.
- Yasuke: strength and combat, for players who prefer confronting opponents directly.
Technology shaped the world and its gameplay
Ubisoft’s September 12, 2024 technical feature called Shadows the first Assassin’s Creed built solely for current-generation hardware. It described several technologies and design goals intended to make the environment more detailed and reactive—not independently measured performance results. Ubisoft’s technical-development feature
- Ray-traced global illumination: lighting is designed to respond to changes in the environment.
- Micro-polygon technology: assets can be rendered at suitable levels of detail without authoring and swapping multiple versions.
- Destructible objects and dynamic weather: environmental changes can affect how the world looks and how players approach it.
- Seasonal changes: locations shift in appearance and feel over time.
Ubisoft’s examples connect weather and light to stealth decisions: rain can muffle footsteps, darkness can make enemies less likely to detect the player, and frozen ponds can remove underwater cover. These are the publisher’s descriptions of intended gameplay effects.
What the studio says it will take forward
After launch, Bouchard said the studio needed to pause, identify what it had learned from the production cycle, and use those lessons to establish stronger foundations for its next game. “We need to take everything we’ve learned from the last production cycle and clearly identify, as a studio, how we can improve the way we make games.” That frames the four-year journey not just as a release effort, but as a production experience the studio intends to learn from.
At the time of MobileSyrup’s 2025 report, Ubisoft Quebec had around 600 employees, compared with 4,000 in Montreal. Those are approximate staffing figures reported for that period, not a count of the developers who worked on Shadows.
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