Assassin's Creed: Shadows' Rumored Co-Op Mode Has Been Reportedly Canceled

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Assassin's Creed Shadows' Co-Op Mode Has Been Reportedly Canceled

Published Feb 5, 2026, 6:00 PM EST

Eric Warner is a Journalist and Multimedia Producer based in New England with over seven years of experience producing stories for multiple print, online, radio, and video publications.

Eric has been a gaming fan ever since getting an original Xbox for Christmas in the early 2000's. From then on, he has become enthralled in the gaming world, spending thousands of hours in Halo multiplayer matches, climbing dozens of towers across the Assassin's Creed games, and 100% perfecting every single Horizon game to date.

When not writing for DualShockers Eric can typically be found playing games on his PS5, PC, and Xbox or reading sci-fi, horror, and fantasy books/comics.

For a few years in the early 2010s, the Assassin's Creed franchise was well-known for delivering multiplayer experiences that were just as unique as their single-player narratives.

This started with 2010's Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, with a stealth and Templar-focused PvP multiplayer that continued in every mainline game up until 2014's Assassin's Creed Unity, which instead featured four-player PvE multiplayer featuring four clones of Arno Dorian completing heists and assassinating targets.

While these multiplayer modes weren't universally beloved by all gamers, they offered exhilarating experiences that only AC could have provided, and many have called for AC multiplayer's return in one form or another.

Aside from the dedicated multiplayer game Assassin's Creed Invictus, rumors and leaks have long suggested that Assassin's Creed Shadows would receive a new PvE co-op mode, but recent developer insights have suggested that the mode may already be canceled.

Assassin's Creed: Shadows' Multiplayer Cancellation and Future

Rumors and leaks about Assassin's Creed Shadows receiving a co-op mode can be traced back to 2024, with the mode reportedly being codenamed LEAGUE, with details suggesting the mode would have appeared as post-launch content for the game.

Since Shadows launched in 2025, rumors persisted that Ubisoft was working on the co-op mode, but nothing substantial was revealed until the France-based news outlet Origami spoke with multiple anonymous Ubisoft employees recently.

The anonymous Ubisoft staff members detailed to Origami that the Ubisoft subsidiary studio, Ubisoft Annecy, was working on LEAGUE with the mode originally intended to be a co-op feature for Shadows, allowing four players to play through scripted missions similar to co-op missions seen in Unity.

Ubisoft Annecy was working on LEAGUE with the mode originally intended to be a co-op feature for Shadows.

However, in 2025, Ubisoft Annecy's management deemed the co-op mode as being too time-consuming to reach the desired quality and shifted development towards making a brand-new, standalone cooperative AC game that would have also been set in feudal Japan and use elements of Assassin's Creed Shadows' open world.

Sources later affirmed that this new development and Shadows' original co-op mode were canceled earlier this year following internal reviews by Ubisoft Vantage Studios, but a few members of the co-op team at Annecy are reportedly being asked to pitch co-op modes for future AC titles.

This suggests that, while Shadows' co-op future may be squashed and its second year may be devoid of even more content, fans of AC may soon see the long-awaited return to multiplayer relatively soon, even beyond the scope of Invictus.