Assassin's Creed Shadows is making a big change to the series' iconic towers to encourage you to explore its open-world Japan

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Rather than specific objective markers, there will just be highlighted areas to explore

Assassin's Creed Shadows cinematic screenshot
(Image credit: Ubisoft)

After last year's Mirage returned to series roots with a linear design, Assassin's Creed Shadows reverts to the series' modern open-world format, but it's making a significant change to a series mainstay: the climbable synchronization towers.

New and longtime Assassin's Creed fans - and even just Ubisoft fans generally - will be well familiar with these towers. They serve slightly different functions from game to game, but generally they act as a means to fill out the map with specific points of interest. However, in Assassin's Creed Shadows, they'll simply be vantage points you can climb up to view highlighted locations around the map.

This comes from an interview with IGN, in which creative director Jonathan Dumont said it's in service of Shadow's more open-ended approach to gameplay. Ubisoft is tightlipped about many aspects of Shadow's gameplay, but similar to Mirage, there's a focus on tracking down and eliminating targets. When and how you do that, however, is up to you.

"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," Dumont said.

Shadows' open-world map is about the same size as Egypt from 2017's Origins, but Ubisoft says it's on a more realistic scale because it "really wanted the mountains to feel like mountains."

Jordan Gerblick
Jordan Gerblick
Staff Writer

After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.