Ubisoft has confirmed it no longer plans to launch a second major Assassin's Creed Shadows expansion, something that previously would have formed part of the game's now-abandoned season pass.
Shadows' first — and now, it seems, only — major expansion launched in September. The 10-hour Claws of Awaji had previously been described as the "first expansion" included in Shadows' season pass, an offer that was formally scrapped a year ago when Ubisoft delayed the game's launch from November 2024 to February 2025.
As an apology to fans for the game's delay, Ubisoft said it instead would gift Claws of Awaji for free to all pre-order customers. But fans still assumed a second expansion would follow at some point, as has become custom for every other major Assassin's Creed title over the past decade.
"As of now, at this moment for Year Two, there is no expansion on the size of Awaji that is planned," associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois said in an interview with JorRaptor.
Lemay-Comtois caveated his answer by noting some exceptional examples in the past where Ubisoft had changed its plans to make more add-on content than it had originally envisioned (such as with the recent Saudi-funded DLC that arrived two years post-launch for Assassin's Creed Mirage). But, currently, it seems clear that no second expansion is on the cards, and there's no suggestion that Shadows' post-launch plans will extend into a Year Three.
It's an extremely surprising decision by Ubisoft, which followed up the launch of 2017's Assassin's Creed Origins with two expansions (The Hidden Ones and The Curse of the Pharaohs), 2018's Assassin's Creed Odyssey with two expansions (Legacy of the First Blade and The Fate of Atlantis), and 2020's Assassin's Creed Odyssey with three expansions (Wrath of the Druids, The Siege of Paris, Dawn of Ragnarök) alongside numerous other smaller DLC drops. 2023's smaller-scale Assassin's Creed Mirage was itself originally planned as yet another Valhalla expansion, before it was ultimately released as a standalone game.
"We're still working on content for post-launch and supporting it, but it's not a full-on DLC the way a season pass would have had in the previous years," Lemay-Comtois said, confirming at least that Ubisoft still had plans for smaller additions to Shadows within 2026.
"We're trying to re-adjust for Year Two a little bit," he continued. "There's learning from Year One we can apply to Year Two. Any content we want to do in Year Two will probably be more sparse, not a drip-feed... but chunkier updates that shake things up a little more. I'm not announcing anything at this point but our strategy for Year One was to be quick and reactive, so it means smaller drops often, but for Year Two we don't need to put fires out or anything, so it's more what good, chunky little piece of meat... we can drop and have people come back and enjoy it."
Digging into Lemay-Comtois' comment, the suggestion here is that Ubisoft's decision to change course on Shadows following its pre-release reception impacted the company's plans for post-launch support, with priority placed on fighting immediate "fires." And indeed, Shadows has enjoyed a series of recent patches that have added numerous fan-requested features, in a clear bid to turn sentiment around. Going into further detail, Lemay-Comtois also suggested Shadows had been a tougher game to develop technologically, further complicating plans to get post-launch content ready.
"I think with Shadows, we had a big jump in generations," he continued. "The engine work that we had to do on Shadows took a lot of time and a lot of our resources. So the planning for the post launch was not really clear as soon as it would have been on another [game] where the technology was more stable and well known.
"We started fairly late on Shadows... because I remember during pre-launch we had the Season Pass," he admitted. "And the situation changed when we pushed back on the release date. That plan changed quite a bit and then we had to kind of adapt to the situation. So because of the new tech, because of the new generation, because of the pushes we had in production, we chose an approach that was way more, let's put our ear to the ground when the game launches... and react."
For 2026, Lemay-Comtois suggested Shadows would receive updates "not to the size of a DLC or expansion, but like yesterday's update plus," referencing the free update that arrived this week that added a new story quest, the game's Attack on Titan crossover, as well as a significant Isu Easter egg. "At minimum this size," he emphasized, without stating whether these updates would continue to be provided for free or not.
"And whether or not this is the right way to go, or a good learning, I think it's more of an experience we're trying with Shadows, to keep things small and reactive and see how the community feels about it and reacts to it," he concluded. "And the learnings that come out of that will be applied to whatever other projects we do next."
Of course, it's to be expected that Shadows' lead developer Ubisoft Quebec is already planning its next major Assassin's Creed project (and indeed, it was previously reported that the studio had begun early pre-production work last year on a now-scrapped entry set in the post-U.S. Civil War period). But the mention here of those projects is interesting, alongside confirmation of what sounds like smaller plans for Shadows in 2026 than fans have seen this year.
And then there's what else fans expect is coming: a remake of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag reportedly waiting in the wings, as well as numerous other Assassin's Creed projects that Ubisoft has already confirmed, including a multiplayer spin-off and the witchcraft-themed Assassin's Creed: Hexe. Amongst all that, and coupled with Shadows' delay drama, Ubisoft seems to have simply decided a second Shadows expansion isn't necessary.
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Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
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