The current era of gaming has a weird relationship with loot. On one hand, giving players new loot with better stats gives them a clear way of understanding how far they’ve progressed, but on the other, so many games struggle with the balance of how often they should be rewarding the player with new loot.
I tend to stay away from loot-based games because I’ve never found them to be compelling, but it’s impossible to avoid loot altogether. It feels like it creeps into every game at some point or another.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows brings back the loot system from Origins and Odyssey, a system that was largely downplayed in Valhalla, and I just can’t quite get to grips with it. Maybe I’m having an ‘old man yells at cloud’ moment, but I simply don’t understand loot in Assassin’s Creed.
Incremental Progression Loops
Ever since it started embracing RPG mechanics, Assassin’s Creed has leaned on its loot to help players progress in power level. Every few minutes in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Origins, and Odyssey, the player is given new weapons, new armor, and random trinkets that buff their stealth damage by 1.5 percent or add an additional 12 HP to their health bar.
I find this type of incremental progression to be extremely boring and disruptive to the flow of gameplay. Finding loot that increases damage to solo attackers by one percent does not feel exciting. I cannot quantify how little of a damage boost is given when the multiplier is a single percentage. While I understand that a sword that deals one percent more damage sometimes is better than a sword that doesn’t do that, I can’t wrap my head around how anyone designing the game thought that a one-percent damage boost would be engaging, exciting, or fun.
On top of that, finding lackluster gear every few minutes or so completely interrupts the flow of the game. As I stealth my way through Osaka castle, tensely gripping my controller, looking for more samurai to hunt, I enter a room with a chest. I open it and groan when I discover it’s a new hood for Naoe. I open the menu to see if it’s any good, find that it increases my sneaking skills by 0.5 percent, spend a minute or two comparing it to the other identical hoods in my inventory, and by the time I settle on wearing the same hood I had on before I found the new one, the sense of tension I had when I found the chest has been lost.
It all makes me wonder why Assassin’s Creed Shadows even bothers with the loot if it’s such a nothing-burger of a mechanic. It’s empty calories, a system that feels like ‘something to do’ because other RPGs have loot systems in them, so if Assassin’s Creed wants to entice fans of The Witcher 3, it needs a loot system too.
What’s The Point Of Legendary Gear If We’ve All Got It?
Not only is the loot system disruptive and boring, but I just don’t understand how rarity works in Assassin’s Creed. I’ve played about ten hours of the game, and so far, I only have two types of loot: common loot and legendary loot.
I understand the typical colors associated with loot. White is common, green is uncommon, blue is rare, purple is very rare, and orange/gold is legendary, but I don’t understand why I’ve already found multiple pieces of legendary loot in Assassin’s Creed Shadows before I’ve even accessed Yasuke as a playable character. At my current level, all the common loot I find is better than the legendary loot I found an hour ago.
How am I supposed to be excited about the legendary loot if the random garbage I find on the side of the road will do just fine – even better – in most cases? If finding legendary loot doesn’t mean anything for how the game plays or how my character scales with power, then why even have loot rarity at all? If loot doesn’t do anything other than increase my stats by imperceptible metrics, then why not just give me those stats as I level up? Why have loot at all in a game if there’s nothing to it?
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla scaled back the amount of loot that players got by a significant amount, but this didn’t solve Assassin’s Creed’s loot problem because Ubisoft didn’t replace the system it removed with anything. There was still some loot to be found in Valhalla, but by the end of my 75 hours with the game, I only ever used three different weapons, and that made things stale pretty quickly.
It’s clear that Ubisoft is still experimenting with its loot system since Shadows has gone back to the constant shower of loot that Odyssey had. If the studio is struggling so much to find the proper balance nearly a decade after Assassin’s Creed shifted focus to become an RPG, then perhaps it’s time to rethink the systems that surround the loot instead of trying to force a mechanic that just isn’t taking shape. Maybe that’s the key to making the Assassin’s Creed franchise 1.2 percent more enjoyable.
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