I’ll be honest: I’ve been living my best shinobi life in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The open world? Gorgeous. The combat? Brutally satisfying. The weather system? Dramatic enough to make me pause mid-assassination just to admire a storm rolling over a pagoda. But the moment I fast-travel back to my Hideout on console, my frame rate drops faster than a guard’s health bar after Naoe lands a fully upgraded assassination. 🥷
For a while, I actually convinced myself this was intentional. “Oh, all these cats, dogs, bushes, and training dummies must be stressing the engine. This is the price I pay for wanting a fortress of fluffy chaos.” I wasn’t alone—plenty of players theorized the chuggy Hideout was a deliberate framerate trade-off to accommodate the absurd level of customisation. That sounds logical, right? But no. Ubisoft has officially stepped in and said the dreaded words: it’s a bug.
The Hideout FPS Saga: A Very Unwanted Tradition
The Hideout isn’t just a place to sleep off your wounds. It’s a deeply customisable base of operations where you can place buildings, decorations, animals, and all manner of carefully arranged scenery. On PC, players can have a smooth experience whenever Naoe or Yasuke head home. On PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, though, the frame rate takes a total nose dive and becomes incredibly chuggy for seemingly no reason.
Did I spend 45 minutes placing a single cherry blossom tree just to get a PowerPoint slideshow? Yes. Was it worth it? Also yes, but I would like both beauty and frames.
Ubisoft Says It’s a Bug, Not a Feature
Over on the Assassin’s Creed subreddit, Ubisoft community manager ubi-louu shared a big list of all the known issues with Shadows right now, including ones that will be fixed in the next title update. One of the issues mentioned on the list is exactly what many of us have been suffering through:
“FPS can be capped at 30 within the Hideout” even when playing on performance mode.
There it is. The smoking gun. The confirmation that your Hideout was not supposed to feel like a stop-motion film every time you wanted to pet a cat. Ubisoft is aware of the issue and working to resolve it. The debate about whether a low frame-rate is an intentional sacrifice for all that customisation can finally be put to rest. It’s not. It’s just broken.
Why Did We Ever Think It Was Intentional?
Let’s be fair to ourselves. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is an absurdly detailed game. You can fill your Hideout with so many cats, dogs, bushes, buildings, and decorative items that the engine might reasonably be expected to sweat a little. Many of us looked at the chug and thought, “Well, that’s the cost of having ten dogs and a fully themed tea house.” In a weird way, it almost made sense.
But “almost made sense” doesn’t fix a 30 FPS cap in a performance mode. And if you’re like me, you spent more time than you’d care to admit wondering whether you should delete half your animal collection just to get back to 60 FPS. The good news? You don’t have to choose between your beloved pixelated shiba inu and a functional frame rate. At least, not once the patch arrives.
What This Means for Your Console
Let’s break it down with a table, because tables make me feel like I’m managing a real shinobi estate instead of just hoarding dogs.
| Platform | Hideout Performance | Status |
|---|---|---|
| PC | Generally smooth, even with full customisation | Fine, but still can vary with hardware |
| PS5 / Xbox Series X | Drops heavily, often capped around 30 FPS | Confirmed bug, fix coming in a title update |
| My emotional state | Choppy every time I return home | Being monitored 👀 |
The key takeaway is that performance mode players on console are getting hit hardest. There’s no exact date for the big title update yet, but Ubisoft has confirmed it won’t always be this way. If you’re in the middle of building your dream Hideout, you don’t need to tear it all down. Just maybe stock up on patience and keep an eye out for patch notes.
The Bigger Picture: A Pretty Polished Shinobi Sim
For the most part, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a pretty polished experience across the board. Sure, there’s the normal Ubisoft level of open-world jank—random NPCs walking into walls, the occasional physics freak-out, a horse that suddenly decides it’s a ninja. But there hasn’t been much that’s truly game-breaking or especially noteworthy. That’s what made the Hideout frame rate so frustrating: it stood out like a sore thumb in an otherwise smooth adventure.
Now that we’re in 2026, it’s still a little wild that we once debated whether a 30 FPS cap inside a player base was an artistic choice. If anything, this whole saga is a reminder that we should trust our instincts. When something feels wrong, it usually is. And when your Hideout runs like molasses while the rest of Japan runs beautifully, you’re not asking for too much by wanting both.
So yes, I’m relieved. I can finally stop gaslighting myself into believing my decorative pond was responsible for the frame rate. Did I already rename my Hideout “Slide Show Castle”? Maybe. Will I change it back after the update? Absolutely not. Some scars are memorialized in property names. 🏯