Why is the skill tree so boring?
I spent 20 hours playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows before I spent my first skill point. I was cleaning out castles like it was House Flipper: Sengoku Edition and I never once needed an extra 4% vulnerable damage, or even the ability to assassinate two people at once. Naoe is a capable ninja from the start — thanks to all the training from her father — and Ubisoft included a skill tree that is unnecessary until you’re well into the game.
Every Assassin’s Creed game has been guilty of this since the series adopted RPG-style skill trees in 2017 with Assassin’s Creed Unity. You assassinate your first target and are confronted with multiple skill trees full of either meaningless stat upgrades or abilities you should have had from the start. The games pretend that your choices matter even in the first several hours, but the most impactful upgrades always come much, much later. That would be fine in an RPG where you level up fast and develop a build for your character, but Assassin’s Creed has never really been that kind of series.
Shadows isn’t that kind of game either. And yet, it still dumps six whole skill trees on you with bonuses that do almost nothing early on. The moment I see an option to increase my damage by a tiny percentage, I know I’m in for a bad skill tree. You can’t convince me that doing 6% more damage with my kunai matters in a game that doesn’t even show how much damage you deal in the first place. These are the kind of tiny bonuses that should be moved to the end of the tree, after you’ve earned all the exciting stuff.
Better skill trees present you with interesting choices from the start. Diablo 4 does this incredibly well, and even though it’s a very different type of game, it’s a great example of how to make your decisions interesting from the beginning.
