200 minutes with Assassin's Creed Shadows, including 11 extra-important ones

I played Ubisoft's make-or-break upcoming game: I saw dashes of old AC greatness, had mixed feelings about the dual protagonists and discovered an excellent new side activity.

Yasuke, one of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ playable protagonists, with Oda Nobunaga. Image: Ubisot

Recently, a number of video game journalists and critics played Ubisoft’s upcoming mega-game Assassins’s Creed Shadows for four, five and even six hours.

I played the third-person assassin game, too, for about three-ish hours. But, just as I started, the time count that I was really focused on was 11 minutes, 47 seconds.

That’s the conspicuously specific amount of time that Assassin’s Creed franchise executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté mentioned to me last June, after I asked him about Elon Musk and others hating on the then-newly-announced game. Their issue, more or less, was that one of the game’s two lead characters was a historically-inspired Black samurai and how that represented, to them, the supposed shoe-horning of diversity into a franchise that had previously let gamers play as a Syrian opponent of the Crusades, an ancient Greek warrior woman, a Native American reluctantly allied with America’s founding fathers, that last guy’s dad, that last guy’s dad’s pirate dad, Jack the Ripper, and others.

“People will have to play the game for themselves,” Côté said at the time, about the naysayers.

“And if, within the first 11 minutes and 47 seconds, they are not convinced of what we're doing, we can have the discussion.”

What a precise amount of time, huh?

I remembered that comment as I began playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows on Wednesday. I was home on my PC in New Jersey. A limited build of the game was being streamed to my PC from a Ubisoft server in North Carolina. It ran quite smoothly.

As the game’s first scene played, I grabbed my phone and started a timer.