Assassin’s Creed Shadows didn’t win at the Game Awards, but Ubisoft still considers it a win

Losing an award you were nominated for can be a truly soul-destroying moment. Even if you politely applaud the winner, it’s natural to feel a little disappointed. But that’s not the case with Jonathan Bedard, Shadow of the Assassin’s Creed‘ director of user experience. He and his team were nominated for Best Accessibility at the 2025 Game Awards, an honor they ultimately achieved Doom: Dark Ages. For him, it was not a loss at all.

“This is one of those disciplines where we don’t mind if someone beats us,” Bedard told Polygon. “When someone wins, we all win.”

This isn’t just a healthy mindset for awards shows; it’s an attitude that’s helped Ubisoft transform its flagship Assassin’s Creed series into a more inclusive space built through innovation. In an interview with Polygon at this year’s Game Awards, Bedard explained why it’s so important for studios to incorporate accessibility into their development cycles early on and how features designed for players with disabilities can ultimately benefit everyone.

Accessibility has been a priority for Assassin’s Creed games for nearly a decade. The series’ transitional moment came in 2017 with The Origins of the Assassin’s Creeda game featuring several innovations, including ambient subtitles and eye tracking control support. But Ubisoft’s commitment to accessibility goes even further. Bedard joined the company in 2010 and has worked alongside the larger team to make the company’s games accessible to more players ever since. Before Shadowhe did it Assassin’s Creed Adventure And Immortal Fenyx Rises.

“It aims to be inclusive,” Bedard said. “I want to create worlds and games where everyone feels welcome, and can play the way they want. This is Ubisoft’s mission statement. One way to achieve this is to actually look for solutions. For me, the goal is to help players overcome unexpected obstacles. Often, we don’t see the obstacles ourselves because we don’t face those challenges.”

Shadow of the Assassin’s Creed was a daunting project for the team. It’s not just that this is a huge open world game; it will also be the first Assassin’s Creed game to launch exclusively on current-generation technology. This means extra work, but also an opportunity to build forward-looking accessibility considerations that can have an even further impact Shadow.

“When we started Shadowwe on many levels had to refactor certain things like the UI engine,” Bedard said. “That forced us to start from scratch or redo things. We started thinking about shareability. The things that we develop, we pay extra attention to making sure that other projects after that can benefit from it if they want to. It’s always about the needs of each game and its own obstacles, because every game is a little different.”

As GI Joe said: Knowing is half the battle.

To outsiders, creating more inclusive games might sound like an easy task. Just throw in a menu full of buttons that players can turn on and off, right? The reality is much more complex than that, and that’s the reason Ubisoft has been able to push the industry forward in recent years. For Bedard, accessibility cannot be an afterthought; it needs to be built into the project from the start.

“When we play games like Shadowbasically we start with a plan, we validate that plan, and we meet with our players,” Bedard said. “Then we gather all that input and ask what we can do. The workshop was invaluable because we got feedback like this: Your subtitles are some of the best, but sometimes the way they are written is ambiguous! I’m not sure what I decided! This is something that is not too complicated to do if you have a plan and plan it early.”

Bedard cited several examples where early planning allowed his team to create a more robust accessibility suite. Take for example, Shadow‘ world map, allowing players to more easily find the icons and locations they are looking for. The idea came from a conversation with a legally blind player, who stated that it would be helpful if he could sort the map to show only the forts. It’s not something Bedard considered beforehand (“It’s like GI Joe says: Knowing is half the battle,” he jokes), but it’s something he was able to implement more easily early in the development process once he knew it would be useful for visually impaired players.

“Accessibility often takes the form of features. However, there is such a thing as accessible design,” says Bedard. “This can only happen if you consider things early on. Legends on the world map is a perfect example. If I had come up with that idea late in production, we might have had other fish to fry and it would have been harder to make that choice. But early on, when we created the brief for the feature, it became a lot easier.”

Shadow features several such innovations, all compiled to form a strong list of options. You can map combo strings with the press of a single button. You can enable more descriptive subtitles that indicate tone of voice and show who is speaking more clearly. You can activate a screen reader that will tell you how close you are to nearby destinations when you travel. And because the ideas are embedded from the start, it’s easy for the team to build on them. Shadow recently received the release of the Nintendo Switch 2, which Bedard said went smoothly in terms of accessibility thanks to that basic planning phase. In fact, things went so well that the team had more time to experiment with the console’s touchscreen.

“Our first goal is to offer the same level of quality experience in terms of accessibility, whether through design or through features and options,” Bedard said. “That said, Switch 2 offers new interaction schemes, especially with the touch screen, so this is an opportunity to support some of these in an intuitive way, while always keeping the initial offerings available.”

Sometimes we think of accessibility in terms of disability. It’s not always like that.

As we discussed the needs of different players, I brought up the debate that has emerged in recent years around difficult games. We get another round of that discourse in 2025 when Hollow Knight: Silk Song released. The lack of accessibility considerations associated with its high difficulty means the game is not widely playable. Team Cherry stands by its vision, stating that they ultimately made the right decision for the experience they wanted to provide. Bedard agrees that all games are different and need to be adapted on an individual level. He had no thoughts to share silk songHis approach, but keeping the difficulty level in the right place is something he put a lot of thought into with Assassin’s Creed.

“It always starts with understanding what your game needs and what your players need,” he explains. “When we look at the experiences we’re planning, we try to identify what makes them stick. It’s not about being difficult, it’s about meeting challenges at some point. We always try to respect that. With accessible features or designs that change things up, we’re just going to make sure the challenges stay where we want them. What happens is we have misunderstood barriers and that creates challenges in the wrong places.”

Bedard is less concerned with the discourse of difficulty than with the bigger picture: His goal is to ensure gaming can be a consistent experience for people in very different life situations. What is easy for one person, may be difficult for another. And it’s not always about a medical condition.

“Sometimes we think of accessibility as a barrier, but that’s not always the case,” he said. “I have two kids. The first six months of my kid, I only had one hand. If I could turn on one-handed mode, I would. I have no problem understanding English, but sometimes I’ll turn on subtitles. Why? Because my wife is sleeping, and I have the child in my arms. There are a lot of examples like that. It’s not about accessibility, but personalizing your experience and determining how you want to play the game. And for us it’s about defining the core experience, and figuring out how we can do it to make it more fun and interactable.”

All of this explains why someone like Bedard doesn’t care whether his team wins the award or not; he is the definition of “happy to be nominated.” The game is not a competition in which the most skilled player wins bragging rights over others. In fact, Bedard loves seeing other games innovate in the area of ​​accessibility, because it gives him new ideas. (He told me he’s already planning to bring some of the features he’s seen in recent games to future projects.) It’s the spirit of collaboration that makes gaming a more welcoming space for all players.

“One thing we really encourage Shadow is an auto-description cinematic,” he said. “It’s something that’s a first for Assassin’s Creed and I’m very proud of it. In the end, we were beaten to the finish line Star Wars villain. That makes us second at Ubisoft! But I’m not angry or angry. I was like, damn, I didn’t see that coming, but that’s great! Together, we win.”