Assassin's Creed Shadows now available for Mac, PC, and consoles
Ubisoft's "Assassin's Creed Shadows" can now be downloaded from the macOS App Store, as the game debuted across all compatible platforms, including Mac, PC, and various consoles.
Assassin's Creed Shadows is now available on the Mac App Store.
takes the iconic franchise to 16th-century feudal Japan. Players can switch between two protagonists of completely different backgrounds and skills: Fujibayashi Naoe, a shinobi assassin, and a legendary samurai known as Yasuke.
The dual-character approach allows for diverse gameplay mechanics and storylines, as players have the option to switch between Naoe's stealth missions and Yasuke's combat-packed scenes, although both are part of the main storyline. The game is a sequel to Assassin's Creed Mirage, and revolves around the conflict between the Assassin Brotherhood and their enemies, the Templar Order.
The action takes place across an incredibly detailed landscape, as the game itself features dynamic biomes, lighting, and weather conditions. Though it's playable on any Apple Silicon Mac with an M1 or newer chip, Ubisoft was able to harness the true power of Apple's M3 and M4 lines. Both chips support hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which allows for an immersive environment.
Assassin's Creed Shadows strives for historical accuracy by attempting to mimic 16th-century Japan down to the smallest detail, such as the exact shades of varnish found on wooden structures of the time. There's also a heavy focus on immersion, as the game itself is available in Japanese as well as English.
The macOS version of the game debuted alongside its PC and console equivalents -- a move practically unheard of in the world of Triple-A games. Mac ports tend to be more of an afterthought, with most prominent titles reaching the Mac years following their initial console or PC launch. Though Apple's efforts to promote Triple-A games haven't always led to success, the latest installment of the Assassin's Creed franchise looks like it has potential.
Ubisoft stayed true to its promise, and released the game for all platforms simultaneously, despite multiple delays. An iPad version of Assassin's Creed Shadows is also in the works, though Ubisoft has not yet provided any information regarding a potential release date.
Though iPad users will have to wait, owners of Apple Silicon Macs can already purchase the game from the App Store for $69.99.
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Comments
Yes, Apple did give me a full refund.
M3 Max looks playable around 50FPS after turning raytracing down but it doesn't look good without raytracing effects.
It runs poorly on low-end PCs too, the Nvidia 3050 is just above the performance of the Air and gets around 30FPS:
At 3:43 they enable frame-gen and get 60FPS. MetalFX will have frame-gen at some point, Cyberpunk 2077 was reported to support it, maybe they will enable it at a later date.
It should perform better on the M3 Max chip, maybe they haven't used the Metal hardware RT APIs properly and it's falling back to software RT.
The minimum requirements for the game at 1080p/30 are actually pretty high, roughly 8TFLOPs GPU. Only the Max chips and latest Pro chips are at this level.
Recommended GPU is around 13TFLOPs, which is essentially M3 Max or above.
This is why Apple having a reference renderer library would help developers. On Mac and iOS, game devs could use Apple's rendering engine and know it will perform ok. They probably have one internally already that they use to help 3rd party developers out with their proprietary engines. If they partnered with Microsoft, Sony and Valve, maybe Pixar, they could make a reference renderer that supports DirectX, Metal and Vulkan. This would support path tracing, approximated path tracing, shadow maps, mesh shading and multi-pass rendering. Royalty-free, possibly open-source so game studios can modify it. Post-production rendering software has multiple rendering engines like V-Ray, Redshift, Arnold, Octane etc, game engines should have the same.