Introduction: So an Assassin’s Creed Shades DLC recently released, and I tell you, the general populace is very unhappy about what they are being offered. Internetlabour has been dispensing their attacks on these cutscenes; one gamer had said after watching some expansion footage, “holy cow the cutscenes are as boring as you’d expect.”
Well-not-a-single-voice here-that view got worldwide brutal knockdown. Gamers say the voice acting is “terrible,” “everybody sounded like someone reading a script for the first time;” one even said they couldn’t make themselves finish the main game’s story because of how bad the delivery of dialogue was!
The criticism goes well beyond acting; users are continually mentioning how stiff the characters look in these scenes-no body animations while they’re speaking, and the camera angles are terrible. They’re just standing there with roughly zero animation or emotion reading lines. One one gamer said they needed help to fall asleep-so, thanks, Ubisoft!
And so interestingly, there’s also some kind of split among people regarding the actual gameplay and story delivery. As I’ve seen multiple comments praising the actually fun game mechanics, saying that this might be “the best AC in awhile” just from a gameplay point. Then, the story drags down into “plagued with boring content” as one disgruntled player phrased it.
There’s also an argument talking about playing in Japanese or English. Multiple gamers said Japanese voice acting is better; one mentioned that he turned it off for just one cutscene to check the English version and found it “cringe.” Really; when your game is set in Japan, but the English voice acting is so bad that people are turning to another language, that’s probably not a good sign.
Getting to the really bad side-cutscenes are being compared to those in Horizon-they said they left Horizon Forbidden West after two hours because it just felt like that. Meanwhile, others bring up Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and even that recent Yasuke that just came out a few weeks ago. When DLC cutscenes get compared to some of the most criticized narrative moments in gaming, you know you’ve got problems.
Kind of stragenly, don’t you think? This DLC was more or less free for anybody who bought the deluxe or higher editions of the main game. Someone speculated that might somehow explain the quality – like why put too much money into something that itself isn’t going to make too much money? Interesting thought, though definitely not an excuse for bad quality.
What kind of tells you a lot is how much people say they’ll just skip all cutscenes. When your story content is so boring that players actively avoid it, that pretty much is a failure of game design. Someone even went on to call it “the first singleplayer game that become fun if you skip every cutscene.” And that’s not a good thing to happen for a series formerly famous for compelling narratives.
A few defenders arose in the comment section, one stating that there actually are some cutscenes in the DLC that are “way better”—just “extremely rare.” So even when a good moment is an exception rather than the rule, that’s not a great bit of advice to give.
It really all has people questioning the direction Assassin’s Creed is taking as a whole. Someone pondering it said how strange it is that there will still be excitement for any decent new mainline AC in 2025-the series “peaked with Black Flag” and has been downhill since. Ouch.
Looks like Assassin’s Creed Shadows is going to have fun gameplay buried under some seriously dull story presentation. The DLC seems to be continuing with cutscenes that were tossed together by the experienced a bind at the very last moments-an ineptly animated and horrifically voice-overed. For a series once heralded for its wonderful cinematic storytelling, this is certainly a step back. Hopefully, they will have their act together by the next title, until then, gamers look out for that skip button, especially those on PlayStation and Xbox.
