The rumored co-op mode for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, reportedly codenamed LEAGUE, has seemingly been cancelled. According to French publication Origami, LEAGUE was being developed by a team of 85 people at Ubisoft Annecy, and was originally slated to get an invitation-only playtest in May 2026.
The project’s cancellation apparently came shortly after Ubisoft announced its restructuring, which would put development of the Assassin’s Creed franchise under one of the new “Creative Houses” at the company, dubbed Vantage Studios. Following play sessions with the top management of Vantage, executives heading up LEAGUE were notified of its cancellation.
Not all is seemingly lost, however. The report has also noted that a small group of employees that worked on LEAGUE will be tasked with bringing over the technical advancements and R&D that went into making the co-op mode into Ubisoft’s in-house Anvil game engine. After this, Vantage Studios will start accepting pitches for co-operative game modes for future Assassin’s Creed titles.
LEAGUE itself was seemingly deemed too expensive to develop, and the future pitches for a co-op mode are mandated to offer high replayability while also keeping development costs down.
Rumors of a co-op mode coming to Assassin’s Creed Shadows first popped up back in October 2024. While it didn’t have any confirmed release date, the mode was expected to be added to Shadows as part of the open-world title’s post-launch support. This mode was originally believed to feature protagonists Yasuke and Naoe as playable characters. However, another report from May 2025 indicated that it would feature a “deeper narrative” that goes “beyond just the two of them”.
Ubisoft had announced its organizational overhaul last month, and in the process, had also confirmed that it was cancelling a host of projects. Among these was Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake. As part of this restructuring, the company has started to establish its five Creative Houses, with each one being put in charge of specific franchises, genres, and platforms.
Since then, the company has come under fire from France-based unions. Earlier this week, union representatives and Ubisoft Paris employees Marc Rutschlé and Chakib Mataoui demanded the resignation of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. Among the reasons for this was his penchant for nepotism, as could be seen with him assigning his son Charlie as a co-CEO of Vantage Studios.
“If you just put your white male friends in [those jobs], then you don’t promote any diversity or get any new opinions or ideas,” Mataoui said. “We are in a creative job. We need new ideas to come in to [help us] make great new games. But we don’t have that. We don’t have this mindset for creativity.”
Other issues that have been brought up by the unions include the company’s return-to-office mandate, demanding that employees spend five days of the week in the office. This, noted Mataoui, caused many employees to panic since “they started their lives very far from Paris and from their studios”.
In the meantime, check out our reviews of Assassin’s Creed Shadows and its Claws of Awaji expansion for more details.
