Assassin’s Creed Shadows: Inside Ubisoft’s Ambitious Open World Japan [IGN]

To learn more IGN embarked on an exclusive tour of Ubisoft’s Québec studio, where the development team revealed the vision and ambition for their latest game, built specifically for the new generation of consoles. And now we get to take you inside Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and tell you all about its setting, its two playable protagonists, and the dynamic world they live in, where every season promises to change the way you play.

“As always for an Assassin’s Creed game, we try to pick a setting that is a pivotal moment in history that can also allow plenty of gameplay opportunity,” explains Stéphanie-Anne Ruatta, world director and historian at Ubisoft Québec. For Shadows, that pivotal moment is 16th century Japan – specifically the Azuchi-Momoyama period, an era of transition between the civil war-stricken Sengoku period and the peaceful Edo period.

“It would be the last time that samurai would fight a major battle and the last time that they would have a strictly military role,” Ruatta adds.

With the samurai an active fighting force during the era, it’s unsurprising to discover that you’ll be playing as one. What is surprising, though, is this samurai’s heritage: in a first for Assassin’s Creed, Shadows will allow you to play as a real historical figure. If you know your Japanese history, you may be familiar with Yasuke, the legendary ‘African Samurai’. Likely born in Mozambique, he was brought to Japan in 1579 by a Jesuit missionary, and went on to serve the mighty daimyō, Oda Nobunaga.

“Yasuke is somebody who is going to tie together many of the most powerful figures in our era,” says associate narrative director, Brooke Davies. “He really is a great point of entry to this as well, with Oda Nobunaga on one side, and on the other side the Portuguese that he arrives with. He really does a lovely job of connecting the dots historically, what we know factually. And then narratively, we had so much fun imagining the kind of person who would have this trajectory.”

Strike from the Shadows

Through Yasuke’s foreigner eyes, Shadows will explore a tale of honour, justice, and belonging. But his isn’t the only story you’ll experience. Replicating the format of 2015’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Shadows will feature two unique protagonists played in tandem. Starring beside Yasuke is Naoe, a swift and agile shinobi whose talents more closely align with Assassin’s Creed’s traditional hero archetype.

The fictional daughter of real historical figure Fujibayashi Nagato, Naoe is a very different character to Yasuke. Where he is a bold fighter, she’s the hidden blade in the shadows. It’s through her that Ubisoft are seemingly rediscovering the series’ stealth roots in a manner that surpasses even last year’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage.

“The thing that shines the most, I feel, in Assassin’s Creed, it’s really the hidden blade, the assassination, being able to stay hidden,” says game director Charles Benoit. “So that’s the core that we want to keep. What we needed to push forward [was to make it] feel a bit more modern in the approach.”

That needed modernity has been found in a fully dynamic lighting system, in which the radiance from sunlight, torches, and lanterns can illuminate both the land and you. Escape into the shadows, though, and you’re invisible. And if you can’t escape the light, you can snuff it out – lamps (or their carriers) can be eliminated to create pools of darkness. If, like me, you were raised on Splinter Cell, this is all very enticing.

“Parkour has always been something that’s pretty iconic and pretty core to the stealth experience because they go hand-in-hand,” adds Jonathan Dumont, Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ creative director. To enhance the parkour, the team has given Naoe a grappling hook. “It’s all physics-based, so there’s a little bit of improbability sometimes when using it,” he says. “There’s a danger to using it, but you could also perform assassinations from it.”

These shinobi skills make Naoe the ideal choice for players who want to get back to an Assassin’s Creed that’s actually about assassins. But the sneaking systems also pull on other aspects of the stealth genre that Creed has typically ignored. For instance, enemies can now be knocked out, unlocking the option for a more pacifist playthrough.

Of course, the RPG era of Assassin’s Creed has demanded a robust combat experience, too, and that’s where Ubisoft plans to let Yasuke shine. “We want the combat to feel spectacular, so we’ve pushed quite a bit on having a lot of the objects destroyable or sliceable,” explains Dumont. The upgraded Anvil engine upon which Assassin’s Creed Shadows is built can now realistically replicate the damage caused by every type of weapon, from accurate sword slices to perfect arrow puncture marks. Think Fruit Ninja but with, well, almost every prop that’s in Shadows’ world.

Of course, the real samurai fantasy comes alive in Kurosawa-like duels. While Ubisoft Québec isn’t using the legendary director’s filmography as a direct influence, they still want that level of tension. “When we have a mini-boss type of fighter, we really want it to feel like a duel,” says Benoit. “So this exchange of blocking, parrying, dodging. So it’s always like a dance.”

For the most part, stealth or combat will be your choice. Each character has a number of personal quests in which they are compulsory to play as, but beyond that you can freely choose who you control. This goes as far as being able to switch characters between objectives. “That’s the beauty,” says producer Karl Onnée. “Because during a quest there are several steps and you’re going to go from one place to another, you want to have this autonomy and agency to choose how you want to play the setup.”

Seasonal Gameplay

Much of Shadow’s new design is focused on creating a living, reactive world. You can see that in the dynamic lighting and destruction, but there’s a much greater system at play: seasons. The open world progresses through spring, summer, autumn, and winter, with each new period bringing its own weather conditions and terrain shifts. While this helps lend a sense of realism to the land – dynamic winds will procedurally blow swirls of pollen in the spring and pull leaves from branches in the fall – each season can have a dramatic impact on gameplay.

“We’ve really been pushing about making sure that gameplay and art are not separate, but they’re intertwining,” explains Onnée. He offers an example of how, in summer, you can use the new prone stance to crawl into a pond and hide beneath the surface of the water. But in the winter, that pond will be frozen over. “You create new, and you remove at the same time, different ways and routes of infiltration,” he says.

As spring blooms, grass grows tall enough to hide in. Bushes become leafy, perfect to crouch behind. But as the months go by, the approaching winter kills off these natural hiding spots. Hanging icicles threaten to snap and fall, revealing your rooftop position. But at the same time, the worsening weather limits the view of enemies. Howling winds obscure your footsteps. Guard patrols stick to areas of warmth, allowing you to take new, colder paths. “Players will have to adapt constantly to what the environment is giving them,” says Dumont.

Seasons will change based on your progress through the campaign, which art director Thierry Dansereau tells me is to ensure the world stays “authentic as possible to match historical events.” If it was spring when a certain moment occurred in history, the world will be in the right place. “But when in an open world [side] quest, it might happen that you will play a quest in autumn and I will play the same quest and I’m going to be in summer,” he says. “So that’s up to the system and the way you play your game.”

These seasonal conditions affect the entire map, which covers the central area of Japan – the provinces where Oda Nobunaga organised his stronghold and the unification of the country. In terms of area, the region is similar in size to Assassin’s Creed Origins’ Egyptian map, although based on a more realistic scale ratio. “Because castles took a lot of space, and we really wanted the mountains to feel like mountains, [we’ve made] the environments feel wider in the game,” reveals Dumont.

Those castles, all prominent historical landmarks, are set to be Shadows’ centrepiece dungeons. “The way they were built, it’s a level designed by itself,” enthuses Benoit. “It’s so big, it’s like an adventure each time you go in the castle.”

The Hunt

While Ubisoft is thus far very open about Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ setting, protagonists, and world, it’s not yet ready to talk too much about what you actually do. What little they will say points to a more open, non-linear approach that’s focused on killing targets. It’s a format that instantly calls to mind the structure of last year’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage, or the Cult of Kosmos web of targets that needed to be hunted down in 2018’s Odyssey (also developed by Ubisoft Québec). You’ll be free to track your prey in any order, and quests will “guide” you with hints rather than directly point out your objectives.

“One thing that we really wanted is [to make] sure the world feels alive, and those targets are always in the world,” says Benoit. “So it’s possible that you’ll encounter some of them without really knowing about them before.”

“It’s less of ‘follow a quest up to a point’, but it’s much more, ‘I want to do this’ and then you’ll find the way how to do it,” says Dumont. He notes that the campaign is still very much objective-based, but that players will have a little more agency in how they go about things now. This is partly exemplified by a change made to Assassin’s Creed’s iconic synchronisation points. Visiting them in previous games used to plot up to a dozen new objective markers on your map, telling you exactly where to find new activities. In Shadows, they’re now simply vantage points to be climbed, from which you can look around and spot highlighted locations worth seeking out.

As for the targets themselves, I’m hoping that Shadows’ renewed stealth values will mean it offers a worthy successor to the Hitman-esque ‘Black Box’ missions from Assassin’s Creed Unity, in which kill quests featured multiple methods of dispatching your prey. Ubisoft won’t indulge my curiosity, but Dumont thinks “people will like some of the variety that we try to put in our targets,” and notes that there will be “options to be able to take them down, and having some negatives and sometimes some surprises.”

During the studio tour I’m afforded very few glimpses of actual gameplay. I watch a designer take Yasuke for a test drive to showcase his combat abilities – it’s a far cry from the perfect shinobi swordplay of Sekiro, but does look like an appropriately retooled version of Assassin’s Creed’s RPG fight system. Paries turn into strikes that break enemy armour plates, and a chain of attacks concludes in a flashy decapitation finisher move. The developer then switches to Naoe, who fends off a group of attackers using a kusarigama, swinging its chain in wide arcs to enforce space between her and her foes. At another desk, Naoe takes down unsuspecting foes by hiding in the rafters, Sam Fisher-style, and impales enemies through Shoji paper doors. It’s all barely a taste, but it’s promising.

A substantial gameplay reveal, I suspect, will arrive with this year’s Ubisoft Forward presentation on June 10. Hopefully that’s where we’ll see how the many fascinating dynamic systems combine with the series’ traditions and tropes, and provide the first proof that Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the shinobi sim that so many fans have been waiting for. A long wait that’s almost over – Shadows launches on November 15.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.