Assassin’s Creed Shadows Year 1 roadmap: “Claws of Awaji” Expansion, New Game+, and more!

Assassin's Creed Shadows has only been out for about a month and a half, but Ubisoft was eager to share details of their plans moving ahead. Through a video, they revealed the AC Shadows Year 1 Post-Launch Roadmap, which includes a lot more AC in the form of story drops, game modes, gameplay updates, and even an expansion. See all the details here.

As this is a Year 1 roadmap, we can expect all of this content to arrive to our consoles and gaming stations by March 2026 at the very least.

The game's first expansion, Claws of Awaji, has been confirmed to come later this year. Even better news for some players: this expansion will be free for everyone who pre-ordered the game. Unfortunately, we don't have pricing details yet for those who didn't pre-order, but we'll keep you posted.

Claws of Awaji, as the name implies, will expand the map and add the island of Awaji. Now, players can explore its haunting forests while experiencing the continuation of Naoe's and Yasuke's stories post-epilogue.

Moreover, this expansion also adds to the gameplay. Claws of Awaji will introduce new abilities, new enemies, and even an exclusive weapon for Naoe: the Bo Staff.

The roadmap for AC Shadows' first year contains a ton of free content, primarily story drops. These will add new abilities, allies, and activities around the map alongside it, while giving us a more in-depth look at the stories of some characters.

The first of these story drops is called "The Works of Luis Frois" and will be available in early May 2025. Luís Fróis was a Portuguese Catholic priest and missionary who operated mainly in Japan. Smaller updates accompany this story drop, like the Codex Update and some Quality-of-Life improvements.

Also coming in May 2025 is a parkour update that adds new launches and jumps as requested by the player base. More choices for the Photo Mode, too, that adds new filters, stickers, poses, facial expressions, and even ambient music. This will be accompanied by the game's "first special collaboration," but the devs neglected to reveal any more details regarding this.

June 2025 will see the second Community Feedback update go live. The first update of this kind shipped on April 8, 2025 and added features that were a direct result of the dev team listening to their community. This included the horse auto-follow feature, speed improvements, mastery nodes reset, and multi-item selection at merchants and the forge.

The second Community Feedback update comes June. This update will allow players to toggle Head Gear during dialogues and cutscenes. In line with providing players more immersion, individual visual effects can now be toggled. Some examples provided were weapon glints in combat, ability filters, assassination celebration effects, and disabling stealth outlines.

This update adds a little more challenge to the open world, though, as the Alarm System will now be active globally. For even more challenge, a new difficulty setting that makes both combat and stealth more difficult is also set for June.

After all this, the biggest update to come this month is a new free quest and a new League ally, but again, Ubisoft did not disclose any more information on these apart from their existence.

The devs reassured the player base that more (free!) content will come to the game in the coming months, including more Story Drops, collaborations, and Community Feedback updates.

For those who can't get enough of Assassin's Creed Shadows, there is a "pretty fleshed-out" New Game Plus mode headed to the game. This will significantly raise the level cap.

Things are looking up for AC Shadows players with Claws of Awaji and the plethora of free content!