Assassin's Creed fans have waited years for a game set in Japan, but Ubisoft thinks Shadows is "great timing" and part of the developer's "natural evolution"
Sep. 20, 2024The wait has allowed Ubisoft to develop some “new-gen features” that were “much needed” for the setting
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Assassin’s Creed fans have been begging for a game set in Japan for years, andUbisoftis finally set to deliver whenAssassin’s Creed Shadowslaunches in November. While some might say it’s taken a long time for the concept to materialize, the action RPG’s art director argues that it’s actually “great timing” for it to arrive now.
Speaking to Play inissue 45 of the magazine, art director Thierry Dansereau explains that taking this long for Ubisoft to get to Shadows has ultimately allowed the developers to work on its “new-gen features” first, which he reckons were “much needed” for the highly requested Japan setting. “I think it’s great timing, though, because it allowed us to really develop the new-gen features, which I think were much needed for such a setting to fully exploit it,” Dansereau says.
Play was also told that Shadows' art team has been focusing on dynamism, photorealism, and realization. The latter is reportedly described as “total attention to detail so as not to break immersion,” which sounds very exciting. At this point, only time will tell if the game meets fans' lofty expectations of its setting.
In the same magazine issue, Dansereau noted that fans canexpect the upcoming RPG to be “about Origins big”– so smaller than Valhalla but larger than Mirage. No doubt this has been helped by the fact that Shadows doesn’t attempt to recreate all of Japan in immense detail, but instead focus on Honshu, “where all the events related to Oda Nobunaga are taking place.” Fingers crossed the final result will be a rich, detailed slice of Japan.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows' gameplay will be affected by Ubisoft’s fancy new weather tech, and the studio says its future games will incorporate it “in much more depth.”
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