Assassin’s Creed Shadows commits a great RPG sin, but I’ll forgive it

I spent 20 hours playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows before I spent my first skill point. I was cleaning out castles like it was House Flipper: Sengoku Edition and I never once needed an extra 4% vulnerable damage, or even the ability to assassinate two people at once. Naoe is a capable ninja from the start — thanks to all the training from her father — and Ubisoft included a skill tree that is unnecessary until you’re well into the game.

Every Assassin’s Creed game has been guilty of this since the series adopted RPG-style skill trees in 2017 with Assassin’s Creed Unity. You assassinate your first target and are confronted with multiple skill trees full of either meaningless stat upgrades or abilities you should have had from the start. The games pretend that your choices matter even in the first several hours, but the most impactful upgrades always come much, much later. That would be fine in an RPG where you level up fast and develop a build for your character, but Assassin’s Creed has never really been that kind of series.

Shadows isn’t that kind of game either. And yet, it still dumps six whole skill trees on you with bonuses that do almost nothing early on. The moment I see an option to increase my damage by a tiny percentage, I know I’m in for a bad skill tree. You can’t convince me that doing 6% more damage with my kunai matters in a game that doesn’t even show how much damage you deal in the first place. These are the kind of tiny bonuses that should be moved to the end of the tree, after you’ve earned all the exciting stuff.

Better skill trees present you with interesting choices from the start. Diablo 4 does this incredibly well, and even though it’s a very different type of game, it’s a great example of how to make your decisions interesting from the beginning. You won’t find bland damage increases at the top of its skill trees. Instead, you’ll have to decide what kind of basic ability you want and then how to enhance it, empowering your character and specializing them at the same time.

Rogues, for example, pick what kind of basic bread-and-butter attack they want with the very first skill point. Next, they can make it even better by giving it a unique bonus, like a burst of movement speed. The following point is where you have to decide what direction to take the ability. Do you want your attack to make enemies vulnerable to follow-up attacks or for the skill itself to do more damage? Diablo 4’s skill tree immediately settles you into a loop that feels distinct from the other choices. It’s not quite a build that early on, but it’s the foundation for one.

Shadows has all the building blocks for a similar approach, but ignores them for boring damage increases and slight changes to the basic mechanics, like being able to breathe in shallow water. When you’re just starting out, these barely change anything about how you perform in combat. While your inventory fills up with weapons and gear with all kinds of stats on them, like vulnerable damage and poison damage, the skill trees have nothing in them that makes them matter.

So for the first several hours, leveling up felt superfluous. It wasn’t worth loading into the menu to put my points in because I was having fun without them. I played Shadows like an action game and never suffered for it. The only hangup was not being able to assassinate high-level enemies in one blow — a series staple ruined by its RPG-ification over the years. By hour 20, I was seriously questioning the point of including RPG systems in the first place.

I was fully ready to say Shadows would’ve been a better game without all the loot and the skill trees until I spent a little more time with it. Once you explore enough of the world, though, you unlock the ability to engrave items with unique effects. Engraving bonuses like dealing double damage after deflecting an attack or reloading Yosuke’s gun with two bullets at a time start to add interesting wrinkles to how you play. You can actually invest in a playstyle with engravings, mirroring the spirit of Diablo 4’s skill trees.

After opening up the second tier of skill tree options and engravings, Shadows finally started to justify its RPG systems, even if it’s still rather light on them. My Naoe invested in all the points to make her great at assassinating anyone she sneaks up on, but very weak in fights. When I dodge attacks, I gain some resource to use on special attacks that deal way more damage than her normal hits. I’ve been in fights where I caught the attention of a whole group of samurai, and I wished I had taken the engraving that empowers Naoe in lopsided brawls. There are actual consequences for the decisions I make with my gear and points, and they have a noticeable influence on the game’s hyper-polished action. And now I’m eager to discover more things I can specialize in.

It just shouldn’t have taken that long to get good. I can imagine a different version of the game that doesn’t even show you a skill tree until you’ve familiarized yourself with its basic systems, or maybe one that only has gear engravings. Shadows acts like it’s going to be a robust RPG in its opening hours, and then takes forever to find a middle-ground where you actually care about its skill trees and loot. It gets by because its stealth action is so slick. Shadows gets a pass, but I still wonder if the series would be better off ditching the RPG systems completely and sticking to what it does best.