Now that Assassin's Creed Mirage has added the much-requested jump button, there's a chance Shadows may also make the leap. It's a harder addition to make than you might think, but one of the game's directors suggests it could be feasible.
Associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois addresses the desire in an interview with JorRaptor. "Hope is not lost," he starts. "We don't want to rework the entire control of Shadows because of all the fight mechanics that we have embedded on it. So it makes it trickier, for us at least, the addition of a manual jump, so we cannot implement it the same way Mirage did."
Besides the control scheme itself, the other issue is the game's world. "The biggest challenge is to make it work with the complex geometry of Japan, because we have so many bits and pieces sticking out of things that you can now easily target," he adds. The added control of a manual jump to the targeting would complicate how you interact with the environment, presenting all sorts of potential hurdles.
"It's a million little knobs that we're tweaking in seeing how we can make it work," he continues. "But don't lose hope. You might very well see a manual jump addition." He praises how the devs brought it into Mirage, stating it "puts pressure" on his team to follow suit.
To his point, the host mentions they had to tinker with the entire control scheme and UI in Mirage to make the jump button work close to how they'd like. Assassin's Creed games have become so specific and intricate, with combat depth and RPG-esque progression systems and huge, historic worlds, that giving up a whole button just for jumping simply isn't as easy as it may sound.
It seems like you might still get one, but the change came two years into Mirage's time on shelves, so don't hold your breath waiting for it.
