The new chapter in a 20-year action-adventure saga, released on March 20 for PC, Playstation 5 and Xbox Series, allows players to freely explore a 16th-century feudal Japan inspired by real historical events and samurai movies.

Developers have crafted an immersive world, with lush vegetation buffeted by wind and doused with rain under a dynamic weather system and ultra-detailed recreations of temples and walled cities.

As seasons change, players will be slowed by deep snowdrifts or be able to find hiding spots in tall summer grasses.

Ubisoft gave developers at its Quebec studio and 16 others around the world months longer than originally planned to polish the game, a highly-anticipated release after a string of flops.

The French gaming giant, already struggling financially and facing rumours of a takeover, faces a still more uncertain future if its cash-cow series fails to deliver.

Its budget for "Shadows" may have stretched into the hundreds of millions of euros (dollars) based on CEO Yves Guillemot's statement that the game's first three-month delay would cost 20 million.

"Obviously we've felt enormous pressure," said Marc-Alexis Cote, executive producer for the "Assassin's Creed" series, a few days before launch.

- Fan request -

He described an "extremely intense" final months of work on the game, developed by hundreds of staff over five years.

Today's intense competition means that "we have to be outstanding from the very first day", Cote said, rather than relying on gradual downloadable updates as Ubisoft has in the past.

With a frame story in which players relive the experiences of ancestors through a DNA-reading machine, different episodes of "Assassin's Creed" have since 2007 ranged from ancient Greece to the French Revolution.

But Cote, who has worked on the series for 16 years, pointed out that feudal Japan had been a long-standing request from fans, some of whom had begun to tire of familiar gameplay formulas.

"We're hoping to shake things up with Shadows," he said.

The new game stays true to the model established by "Origins" in 2017 -- but with some tweaks, like encouraging players to explore to find characters and objectives rather than being steered to a point on a map.

With two playable protagonists, "Shadows" offers different approaches to its challenges: violent frontal assaults with black samurai Yasuke or stealthy infiltration with shinobi (ninja) Fujibayashi Naoe.

Players will have to put in a solid ten hours before unlocking both characters, however.

Beyond delays, further setbacks hitting "Shadows" even before Thursday have included copies of the game leaking a month before release and Japanese gamers posting angrily about the fact players can destroy the interiors of venerated temples.

- 'Hurtful' comments -

Most controversial of all has been the inclusion of Yasuke, a historically documented African man in the service of warlord Oda Nobunaga.

Some historians have contested whether the real Yasuke was a samurai at all, while many social media users have accused Ubisoft of pandering to inclusive sensibilities.

"Many of these comments have been hurtful and demoralising," Cote acknowledged.

A report from the European Video Games Observatory found that many of the most virulent attacks stemmed from a small clutch of posters surfing on the game to score culture-war points during the US presidential campaign.

Ubisoft told employees last week that it was launching a global anti-harassment campaign, offering teams "psychological support" and legal backup faced with such attacks, one elected worker representative told AFP.

Several follow-up titles in the "Assassin's Creed" series are already in development, including "Hexe", themed around 16th-century witch-hunts, and a possible remake of piratical episode "Black Flag".

With the franchise's future seemingly assured, the question remains whether Ubisoft will still be the ones making it happen.

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UBISOFT ENTERTAINMENT