Assassin’s Creed Shadows Art Book Leaks on a Hentai Site, of All Places

New details about the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows are circulating online after an artbook purportedly leaked on, among other places, a hub for hentai.

Spotted over on r/GamingLeaksAndRumours, an artbook entitled “The Art of Assassin’s Creed Shadows” has been spreading like wildfire around the internet. It contains several hundred pages of concept art, quotations, and development info surrounding the next Assassin’s Creed.

The leak itself is notable, but the post on Reddit also alleged it originated from a site known for hosting hentai. Bizarre, to say the least. IGN has asked Ubisoft for comment.

The gallery had already been removed from the site in question, but has since been archived in other file-sharing sites and galleries.

Several interesting details are shown throughout, including concepts for famous historical characters, major cities, and a variety of weapons. The art also, presumably, leaks some potential spoilers for the plot of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. We can’t confirm as much until the game is actually out, but the images we have seen seem real enough.

The leak arrives just ahead of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ launch on March 20, 2025, after a previous delay pushed it out of 2024 into February.

At a recent preview event for Shadows, IGN spoke with Assassin’s Creed Shadows game director Charles Benoit, who confirmed that the month delay was “mostly about polishing” and did not change any big systems. The team did update “a couple of things in progression to make it more engaging, also balancing a bit more,” Benoit added, but the main feature that needed extra tweaking was the parkour system, which was running up against an obstacle unique to Feudal Japan.

“The Japanese architecture, the roofs [are] super complex,” he said. “Probably the most complex thing that I ever worked with if we compared to Odyssey and Syndicate. We needed specific codes and specific animations to support something super fluid, changing the transition of the parkour to make it even more fluid. So that’s one of the specific feedback that we heard that we wanted to address, and it really improved since the last few months.”

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.