Despite A Great Start On Steam, Players Are Swamped With Issues In Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Assassin’s Creed Shadows has had one of the most tumultuous pre-launch cycles of any game in recent years. Multiple delays, complaints about historical inaccuracies, and discontent from Japanese officials all plagued the title in the lead-up to yesterday’s launch.

Despite its pre-launch cycle, though, Shadow’s launch went pretty well. It released with an 81 on Opencritic, including a 4/5 from us here at TheGamer, and has been met equally well on Steam.

Related

Assassin’s Creed Shadows Politely Asks You Not To Climb On Torii Gates

Shadows doesn’t want Naoe and Yasuke to climb all over the torii gates.

At the current time of writing, the game has “Very Positive” reviews on the Valve-owned platform, with 82 percent of players leaving a positive review. Unfortunately, however, the game does seem to be plagued with optimisation issues, with many of the 18 percent negative reviews complaining about its PC performance.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows Launches With “Very Positive” Reviews On Steam, But Does Have Issues

Launching to “Very Positive” reviews on Steam is no easy task, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows deserves to be commended for it. Not many games manage this feat straight off the bat, and it often takes a few patches before reviews start to reach the 80+ percent mark.

However, for some players, their experience seems to be far from positive. A quick look at the game’s reviews on Steam shows that more than a handful of players are having issues with the its PC performance.

After 1.9 hours of play, one player wrote, “The optimization of this game is atrocious, it cant even maintain 30 fps. Going to wait a few days for hopefully a performance patch if not I’m refunding. AMD rigs beware, would steer clear for now,” however, they did note that “Messing with the raytracing and weirdly turning off HDR gave me a massive performance boost.” Another player complained about “very weak performance for the relatively old-fashioned graphics level.”

While the actual optimisation was the main bone of contention, other players were unhappy with the fact that the game’s cutscenes were locked to 30 fps. Various reviews referenced it on Steam, and it’s been mentioned multiple times across both the Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed Shadows subreddits.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the latest game to face complaints about its PC optimisation this year. Monster Hunter Wilds was slammed for its performance on PC, and both Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and GTA 5 Enhanced faced similar fates. However, unlike the other three, Shadows kicked off with a positive review score.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Released

March 20, 2025

ESRB

Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language

Developer(s)

Ubisoft Quebec