Assassin's Creed Shadows is the latest game in the series and the first to launch exclusively on the PS5 and Xbox Series generation of consoles. They skipped last-gen entirely, and a lot of you have already noticed just how much attention to detail has gone into every aspect of the game's world. But how has it felt for the developers?
"When you start with a new generation, you always feel like you're unshackled, in a way," Pierre Fortin, brand and pipeline technology director, tells us. "But then you're developing, and you introduce new systems, and you find new barriers at some point. But with Shadows, I think we've really tried to push the world dynamism to a new level."
In Shadows, the seasons change as the story progresses, and weather effects differ dynamically. Beaches become waterlogged, and the ground becomes muddy when it rains. Fortin is very proud of the trees, though.
"Now in AC Shadows, we leverage the new power of those new consoles and this new hardware to implement a fully physically-based animation for our trees, so they react and move with the wind with a thread simulation that drives that nicely. So we really went with that vision of having something much more dynamic, because that's what we felt was new-gen – adding more movement on-screen, more dynamism."
I'm a big fan of game worlds that somehow feel real. Deus Ex was good at that for its time, and Red Dead Redemption 2 is a marvel, considering it's only on last-gen consoles. We asked Fortin what was most challenging in Shadows.
"The complexity of the world was something at some point," Fortin remembers. "We have four seasons, we have two protagonists, we have a world that's pretty big, we have dynamic time of day. And on top of that we have weather."
Ensuring all three of these systems worked well concurrently was a challenge on a performance level, as the developers had to make sure current-gen consoles could support these effects while still delivering high performance. We all love pretty, dynamic games but don't want to play them at 20fps.
"I'm pretty happy with what we've been able to achieve there," says Fortin. "No matter the circumstances, we have a good experience that is on par with the performance target we had. To me that's been our biggest challenge. Technically speaking, also size. Just putting all of that data into the disc is a challenge by itself. We don't want to force one terabyte of data on the players. We put a lot of effort into having clever compression techniques to make sure that we're ok, that we fit within our desired SSD space. As soon as we have new hardware, we're pretty good at maximizing it, and reaching those new limits, but it's through clever optimization techniques that I think we go beyond them."
I don't need most games to have realistic tree movement and multiple seasons, but I'll always support it when big companies use their resources to push the technology that powers video games, just like PlayerUnknown Productions is doing with Prologue: Go Wayback.
For now, take a look at the past and check out our ranking of the best Assassin's Creed games. Our Assassin's Creed Shadows review had some high praise, where do you think it lands on our list?
