For nearly eight years, the Assassin’s Creed franchise has primarily consisted of open-world RPG titles, with the latest entry in this category being Ubisoft Quebec’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Starting with 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins, each subsequent mainline Assassin’s Creed game has further delved into the open-world RPG genre. Origins introduced the first vast open-world setting with Ptolemaic Egypt, Odyssey introduced romance and dialogue options, and Valhalla introduced customizable hair, war paint, and tattoos, to name a few RPG elements. However, Assassin’s Creed Shadows differs from these other games in a particular way, in that it doesn’t expand much upon the development of the Assassin Brotherhood or Templar Order.
How One Mysterious Character Could Tie Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Codename Hexe Together
An enigmatic figure from Assassin's Creed Shadows' past and manga could potentially appear in the upcoming Assassin's Creed: Codename Hexe.
How Assassin’s Creed RPG Titles Developed the Assassin Brotherhood and Templar Order
As its name would suggest, Assassin’s Creed Origins focused much of its story on the origins of the series' ongoing millennia-old conflicts between the Assassin Brotherhood and Templar Order. Here, players got to witness the creation of the Hidden Ones by former Medjay Bayek of Siwa and Aya of Alexandria, the latter of which would later be known as Amunet. Over the course of the game, the two were betrayed by the Pharaoh Cleopatra VII and discovered that her ally, Roman General Julius Caesar, was a prominent leader of the manipulative Order of the Ancients, recognized as the Father of Understanding.
After Bayek and Aya’s son was killed by the Order, and after they were betrayed by both Cleopatra and Caesar, the two created the Hidden Ones to protect and defend the lives of the innocent from the shadows and maintain various civilization’s liberty from corrupt and power-yearning individuals. While Origins showcased the beginning of the Assassin Brotherhood through its Hidden Ones precursor, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey brought players 400 years into the past to witness the early development of the Order of the Ancients as well as the first use of a Hidden Blade. In 465 BCE, a man known as Darius first used the Hidden Blade to assassinate King Xerxes I of Persia, an early leader of the Order of the Ancients.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s Origin of the Templar Order
By the late 9th century CE, the Hidden Ones and Order of the Ancients had fought each other for nearly a thousand years over the dominance of nations and control over powerful ancient Isu artifacts known as Pieces of Eden. While many members of the Order worshiped the Isu and their technology, one leader of the Order, Alfred the Great, saw its worship of the Isu as heretical to Christian ideals. Over the course of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s events, both Eivor Varinsdottir and Alfred would dismantle the Order’s presence in Europe. However, Alfred subsequently rebuilt the Order of the Ancients' remnants into the Templar Order, which would go on to battle the Hidden Ones and Assassin Brotherhood for another thousand years worldwide.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Exploration of the Assassins and Templars
About 700 years after Valhalla’s events, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is set in a time when the Hidden Ones and Order of the Ancients have fully transitioned into the modern Assassin Brotherhood and Templar Order. However, both factions seldom appear in Shadows’ events directly. It’s eventually revealed that Fujibayashi Naoe’s parents were both a part of the original Kakushiba ikki, the Japanese Brotherhood of Assassins founded by excommunicated Spanish Assassin Alvaro Catarribera. Meanwhile, Yasuke is revealed to have been a slave of the Portuguese Rite of the Templar Order and briefly learns of the fall of the Italian Borgia Templar family as seen in Assassin’s Creed 2 and Brotherhood. Yasuke later leads the assassination of several Portuguese Templars and their Japanese recruits.
While both Naoe and Yasuke encounter members of the Assassins and Templars in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the two factions are never the main subjects of the game, at least not to the degree of earlier Assassin’s Creed titles. Shadows does reveal background information on the establishment of the Assassin and Templar presence in Japan, but it doesn’t shed much of a light on the two organizations' development as prior Assassin’s Creed RPG games have. However, this may change with a potential renowned emphasis on the Assassins and Templars in the upcoming Claws of Awaji Expansion as well as future entries in the ongoing Assassin's Creed: Shadows – Iga no Monogatari prequel manga.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes place about 74 years after the events of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and about 70 years after Assassin’s Creed Revelations.
Assassin's Creed Shadows
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 81 /100 Critics Rec: 82%
- Released
- March 20, 2025
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language
- Developer(s)
- Ubisoft Quebec
- Publisher(s)
- Ubisoft
