Ubisoft reveals plans for Assassin's Creed Shadows first year, without attaching a date to Claws of Awaji

Due to the delays and issues that Assassin's Creed Shadows faced ahead of launch, Ubisoft made the very bold decision to effectively cancel the Season Pass and to offer the first expansion for the game entirely for free for those who pre-ordered the RPG. This likely means that many are looking forward to this chapter that claims to add around 10 extra hours of additional content to the game.

If you were hoping that Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Shadows post-launch update show would dispel some of the fog around the Claws of Awaji expansion, we unfortunately have some bad news for you. While Ubisoft intends to launch the expansion later this year, we're still in the dark about when exactly it will debut. What we do know about it is the following:

"This expansion opens up the island of Awaji - a brand-new region for you to explore which continues Naoe and Yasuke's story right after the end of Shadows' epilogue. You can expect new enemies, new abilities for both characters, and a new weapon specific to Naoe - the Bo staff."

Otherwise, the show shared a roadmap of plans for the first year of the game, with a specific emphasis on the next few months. Each will offer some minor gameplay enhancements and new features, as well as free story drops, and while it's something to be excited about, the general consensus seems to be that these are more minor and subtle additions to the game.

We're told that May will offer two free updates that add the first story drop, codex updates, quality of life improvements, a special collaboration, Photo Mode enhancements, and then a big update to the parkour system that adds new moves to master. After this comes a June update that offers the second story drop, new difficulty settings, more immersive gameplay options, an open-world alarm system, and the ability to hide or make headgear visible in cutscenes.

The rest of the first year of content includes New Game+, community feedback updates, more story drops, additional special collaborations, further codex updates, Animus content, new rewards, paid store drops, and then Claws of Awaji at some point as well.

Check out the roadmap and the update video below.