After 67 hours, I've realized that Assassin's Creed Shadows' brilliant open world comes at the cost of narrative continuity

I'd just killed someone important in Assassin's Creed Shadows and had no idea who they were. Naoe, on the other hand, sounded like she had it all figured out. Upon checking my Objectives board, I was dumbfounded to discover that I'd just offed the first of many new assassination targets, an organization called The Twisted Tree – but I wouldn't encounter the official quest-giver until 50 hours later.

The novelty of stumbling upon accidental objectives is, in itself, a pretty cool idea. Shadows puts many a spin on the norm established in the best Assassin's Creed games that came before, but this case reminds me of assassinating random members of the League in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Ticking surprising names off my hitlist as warrior Kassandra was one of the many joys of exploring Ancient Greece, but the structure differs in Shadows. Here, I'm not told the names of fringe criminal syndicates until they're happened upon naturally or handed out by NPCs, with the game encouraging a more explorative approach to its vast open world. But lacking any narrative context, I'm often left wondering what the heck just happened in Assassin's Creed Shadows – and that's a tricky place to be in a massive RPG.

Whose Guy Is This Anyway?

For a game that largely lets its players loose in an open world of targets to pick and choose from, there are certain hidden costs incurred when you stray from a given order in Assassin's Creed Shadows. I soon discover that the Twisted Tree whoopsie was down to its baked-in connection to The Fool's main mission chain, and perhaps if I'd been more heavily pushed to pursue that target earlier on, I wouldn't have had this problem.

If The Twisted Tree had been a one-off, I'd perhaps blame myself instead of the game. But even after completing that entire target board having never met the quest-giver, the same happens again for the Godai Shinobi and Butterfly Collector questlines. Each time one of these accidental assassinations takes place, Naoe or Yasuke says something to insinuate their existing knowledge of the matter – or even predetermined intent on killing them, which is simply not true. "It looks like this story runs deeper," the duo might say gravely, or even something more targeted at the person specifically. Naturally, it confounds me. This speaks to a broader problem at play, largely the fault of Assassin's Creed Shadows' push for more open world exploration. Instead of a meticulous series of events, I'm free to select the order in which I approach my targets. But at the same time, each group of targets is involved in often fairly insular storylines, and by being free to hop across the map and pursue multiple at once, I quickly lose my grasp of those threads.

There is one occasion where a target board seemed to overlap meaningfully with my hunt for the Shinbakufu, and that's the Pirate Alliance. Exploring the coastal village of Tsuruga, northwest Wakasa, I come across two major finds: a poster calling for aid in ridding the area of pirates, and a young girl called Oni-Yuri, who stands accused of poisoning some soldiers.

Connecting the dots

I decide to help the obviously guilty Oni-Yuri first, her saccharine sweet demeanor absolutely dripping with sarcasm. She's just a kid, after all – even if her pirate father went by the nickname The Poisoner, we can trust her as part of our ikki… right? The ultimate evidence against her, though, comes when I finally check out the poster and unlock the Pirate Alliance target board on my Objective list. One such target? Oni-Yuri herself, ringed in gold as a marker of being spared in my earlier exploits.

After deciding to leave this target board and pursue other leads, I get embroiled in some other provincial drama and totally forget about the pirates. That is, until a certain biwa master elsewhere in Wakasa reveals himself to be the nameless hand behind the poster I'd found in Tsuruga. I meet the wise old musician during The Performer's mission sequence, and only by completing the target board will he agree to help Naoe and Yasuke take down the Shinbakufu. That's what I love about the Pirate Alliance chain: it has two ins, one you can find naturally while exploring the map, and the other handed to you as part of the main story arc. Add Oni-Yuri's existence as a recruitable ally to the mix, and you have a target board with threefold relevance and plenty of context regardless of how you find it. For me, the layers of narrative importance make it all the more compulsive, so much so that I actually focus on clearing the whole Pirate Alliance board in one go rather than dotting between various missions.

The same, sadly, cannot be said of some other Assassin's Creed Shadows organizations. The Twisted Tree and Yamabushi Imposters storylines feel like the biggest casualties of its open world, "walk around and find out" framing. I had the latter sitting as an "unknown organization" on my objective board for tens of hours before finding the quest-giver, while Yasuke hunting down his deceased lord's enemies in The Betrayers feels far more natural and targeted.

Ultimately, The Pirate Alliance is a hint of what Shadows would have done well to mirror in other organizations: non-linear pursuit of a specific group that still has overlap with main missions, keeping the stories tightly woven together in an interconnected web of corruption. I'm yet to finish my Feudal Japan adventure, so I'm hoping for some more meaningful overlaps soon – even if I only have three Shinbakufu targets left…

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