It may have been recently pushed back, but Assassin's Creed Shadows' release is close on the horizon, and players can expect its open-world Japanese setting to be quite different from what Ubisoft has created before when it comes to its detail and scale.
GamesRadar+ recently had the chance to go hands-on Assassin's Creed Shadows, and in an interview with creative director Jonathan Dumont, we're told that the devs "were surprised by a few things" when they visited Japan for 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,'" he explains. "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."
"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 continues. "So we had to adjust to sort of wrap our mind around, well, we needed much more fidelity on the scale."
Elaborating on this, Dumont says that "it's not a one-for-one scale," but about "having that impression that that large castle exists within an ecosystem." As such, he says: "The travel time is a little different – it's not a point of interest [followed immediately by another] point of interest, [every] 50 meters. 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."
But how long can we expect to spend exploring the open-world Japanese setting? That remains to be seen, but it sounds like the main story could be anywhere between 30 and 60 hours long as Dumont previously said he thought that "Shadows' main journey is comparable to Origins/Odyssey and Valhalla." With that in mind, it sounds like we're going to be rather busy come March 20.
Be sure to check out our Assassin's Creed Shadows hands-on preview for our latest thoughts on Ubisoft's upcoming game.
