Assassin’s Creed Shadows is tearing up the sales charts

By Patrick Hearn Published March 31, 2025

One of the protagonists in Assassin's Creed Shadows. — Ubisoft

Assassin’s Creed: Shadows has debuted in the top ten most-played games in its first week amid runaway sales and resounding success. According to the most up-to-date numbers, Shadows was the best-selling game of the week in the United States, falling just behind Monster Hunter Wilds in week-one revenue. Though Ubisoft has been more eager to share player counts than sales data, it’s clear the game is a big win from just about any metric.

Ubisoft touting player numbers caused some players to conclude the game was performing poorly on the sales front, but the latest data shows that this is clearly not the case. The game generated the highest-ever day-one revenue for a Ubisoft game on the PlayStation Store and the second-highest day one sales in Assassin’s Creed franchise history. The total number of players shot past one million within 24 hours and left Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s record in the dust.

Assassin’s Creed: Shadows features two protagonists: the powerful-but-slow Yasuke and the lightning-quick Naoe, offering varied play styles and approaches to encounters that keeps gameplay feeling fresh. It’s also easily one of the most beautiful games in the series, with many players praising the quality of its graphics (particularly when maxed out in 4K.) It provides players with a solid 25 hours of gameplay for the main story, but like the other games in the franchise, you can play for dozens of hours more exploring the world and finding all its secrets.

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Although the game has been subject to an unnecessary amount of controversy, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is off to a rousing start. Ubisoft has already announced (and released) additional content for the game, providing even more varied experiences and more gameplay for diehard fans to enjoy.

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Gaming

How to get Knowledge Points and what they do in Assassin’s Creed Shadows

One of the protagonists in Assassin's Creed Shadows.

By the time we get to Assassin's Creed Shadows, most of us will be familiar with how the games work. Since transitioning more towards RPGs than stealth games, the titles have not only gotten longer but also embraced skill trees. Naoe and Yasuke each have unique progression paths to work through, but right away you will notice that most of the best abilities are gated off. Like Scouts, Knowledge Points are a new feature that you will need to master if you want to be the best assassin possible. We'll share all our knowledge about Knowledge Points with you.
How Knowledge Points work and how to get them

Knowledge Points are a separate system to XP that allows both Naoe and Yasuke to unlock the better and more powerful skills in all their skill trees. Unlike XP, you can't earn them by performing normal tasks or taking out enemies. Instead, Knowledge Points are rewarded for doing specific non-violent activities in Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Gaming

How long is Assassin’s Creed Shadows?

Yasuke in Assassin's Creed Shadows fighting an enemy. He's dressed in his samurai armor.

It's no secret that the Assassin's Creed games have gotten longer and longer over the years. This is typical for Ubisoft open-world titles, but many are hoping that Assassin's Creed Shadows has scaled back on the bloat a bit. There's always fast travel and finding the fastest ways to earn XP to cut down on the grind, but there's only so much time that can be saved. If you're worried that this game might be another 100-hour time investment to fully complete, let's use our Eagle Vision to scout out how long Assassin's Creed Shadows is before you start playing.
How long is Assassin's Creed Shadows?

As you would expect, the amount of time you could put into Assassin's Creed Shadows will vary wildly based on how you approach it. You can focus on just the story and nothing else, tackle a handful of side missions and activities, or attempt to complete anything and everything the game has to offer.

Gaming

Assassin’s Creed Shadows fixes my biggest problem with the series

The two protagonists in Assassin's Creed Shadows

The Assassin's Creed games have been on a steady path away from stealth ever since the series' first entry. I don't mean that stealth options were stripped out or haven't evolved, but it lagged behind the pace of a more direct approach. While Origins is seen as the major splintering point for the series into a full-blown action RPG, the series' identity crisis can be traced back much further. By the time we got Black Flag, stealth had become so inefficient and inessential that there was hardly a reason to bother with it at all outside of self-imposed challenges.

When the series did pivot into action RPGs, complete with weapon and armor scores, and made the protagonists more and more powerful, I fell off of the franchise. It not that I don't enjoy that style of game, rather that it wasn't what I came to Assassin's Creed for. With Assassin's Creed Shadows Ubisoft finally fixed that power creep problem without stripping those options out of the game. And that's thanks to its two character setup.
Jack of all trades, master of all
What caused me to fall out of favor with Assassin's Creed isn't that the series wanted to give players more options outside of a stealthy approach. Plenty of games proudly boast how they offer players the freedom to play sneaky or go in guns blazing. However, the issue with Assassin's Creed's for me was that one method invalidated the other.