Assassin’s Creed Shadows creative director Jonathan Dumont has revealed that the studio decided to make the open-world in the upcoming title leaner, with less clutter than previous games in the franchise. Speaking to GamesRadar, Dumont spoke about how visiting Japan to do research on Assassin’s Creed Shadows changed the developers’ minds on how to tackle things in the game.
“When you go on location, there’s always something that even if you looked at all the books, the movies, everything, you say ‘oh man, that’s surprising,’” said Dumont. “It was the density of the trees and the forest and how much there was. You had a lot of little mountains that created overlapping views that typically we didn’t quite get.”
Dumont talks about the studio needing to focus on crafting a world with an immense level of fidelity even at smaller scales, thanks to having their perspectives changed after seeing a Japanese castle fortress in person.
“And the scale of castles and things like that. Castles are big, you know, the castle fortresses – holy crap, when you go there, it’s like ‘I didn’t expect that,’” he said. “So we had to adjust to sort of wrap our mind around, well, we needed much more fidelity on the scale.”
Owing to this, the studio is working on making sure that players will feel a similar level of awe, which can only be achieved when they aren’t constantly being bombarded by new points of interest.
“The travel time is a little different – it’s not a point of interest [followed immediately by another] point of interest, [every] 50 meters,” explained Dumont. “There’s more open, natural landscaping that will be a little bit longer to travel, but when you get to a place there’s a lot more to it. The scale ratio changed from Odyssey, and what we had done before, and then just the fidelity of trying to make incredible attention to detail in the environment, so that we craft the crap out of it.”
After facing quite a few delays, Assassin’s Creed Shadows finally got a release date of March 20. Game director Charles Benoit revealed that, in this latest delay, the studio isn’t working on overhauling any of the game’s major mechanics. Rather, the studio is spending the extra time to polish what’s already in the game.
Adding on to this, Benoit also mentioned that a key area of polish in the upcoming title is its parkour system. Since the roofs of the buildings of Feudal Japan tend to be more complex than the places we’ve previously seen from the franchise, extra work was needed to make sure that protagonists Naoe and Yasuke will be able to run up and down these buildings without looking awkward.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Pre-ordering the game also gets players the Claws of Awaji DLC, which will feature an additional 10 hours worth of content, complete with a new zone and new equipment for players to find. The DLC is slated for release later in the year.