How long it takes to beat Assassin’s Creed Shadows depends on you — specifically, on how much you focus on certain quests and how much you leave exploration for later. There are a multitude of activities in this game that can easily sidetrack you.
While the individual experience of discovering all the game’s secrets might take a long time, finishing the main campaign isn’t exactly quick either. Below, we explain how long it takes to beat Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
How long to beat Assassin’s Creed Shadows main story
If you’re focused on finishing the main story quests and only spend your time doing the bare minimum amount of side activities to meet main story level thresholds, it takes around 40 hours to finish the main story for Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
However, if you want to see the credits roll, then you should add a few hours to that total. The credits only appear if you finish all of Naoe’s missions.
With the above in mind, for context, our playthrough took exactly 41 hours and 43 minutes. In addition to completing all the missions involving the primary group of assassination targets, that figure also factors in time spent exploring a considerable number of castles, temples, and other optional objectives in order to meet level requirements.
How long to beat Assassin’s Creed Shadows optional objectives
If you have higher aspirations beyond the main story, finishing Assassin’s Creed Shadows will take, by our estimates, at least twice the time it takes you to beat the main story.
In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, quests are organized by boards on your Objectives menu. There are a total of 22 boards, with most of them focused on a certain set of characters to help or enemies to eliminate. (The Animus board is a bit different: It offers Anomaly missions that change after a set time schedule. These are weekly missions that offer an in-game currency used to earn bonus items.)
Besides the regular missions offered on boards, Assassin’s Creed Shadows offers other kinds of activities. One such activity is Contracts, run-of-the-mill missions that aren’t tied to any narrative but only serve as a means to earn materials (for your Hideout base) and experience.
Beyond that, Shadows is full of optional activities. Exploration activities like Temples (home to Lost Pages), Kuji-kiri, and Hidden Trails can reward you with knowledge points necessary for making new skills available to unlock. Castles, meanwhile, are a bit more intense in terms of side content. They are guarded by strong samurai who you must defeat to unlock a special chest that gives you strong weapons or armor. There are also dedicated activities for parkour, archery, weapon training, tomb raiding, and more.
And that’s to say nothing of the most classic Assassin’s Creed activity of them all: unlocking every single synchronization point on the map.
Just starting Assassin’s Creed Shadows? Beyond our full Assassin’s Creed Shadows walkthrough, here are explainers on when you unlock Yasuke, plus if you should play canon, immersive, or guided exploration modes.
