Assassin's Creed Shadows is about to take us to Feudal Japan to explore the intertwining story of shinobi assassin Naoe, and samurai Yasuke. For one of the most anticipated settings in the series, Ubisoft Quebec is using new-gen tech to bring us into what art director Thierry Dansereau calls the "most advanced visual Assassin's Creed game to date". As Dansereau goes on to outline in a tech demo at Gamescom, the Anvil engine, which has been used to develop every AC entry, has been pushed further to support and introduce innovations, such as the new weather system, changing seasons, enhanced lighting and shadows, and "dynamic wind and spray" - which can show up to 10,000 particles on screen that move with the wind flow.
Everything is intended to come together to transport us into what will hopefully be a living and breathing environment. Not only is it intended to look visually impressive, but Dansereau says the open-world setting is also designed to be more interactive and responsive to you, with footage showing Naoe slicing through bamboo, while Yasuke tears his way through paper screen doors.
"Our goal is to immerse the player as much as possible in the world," Dansereau says. "So we didn't want our world to feel like a background that has nothing to do with your gameplay experience. This is why we have put a lot of attention and detail [into] our props and foliage destruction so that the player can interact with the world - break stuff, break foliage, bushes[…] because we wanted to support the fantasy of the katana being the sharpest blade made by humans at this time, but we apply the same principle to all of the weapons that you'll be able to use in the game."
Weather and seasons
The world of Assassin's Creed Shadows' is equivalent to that of Assassin's Creed Origins in "terms of play size", with Dansereau adding that the team reworked the setting to a "much more realistic scale ratio compared to the previous titles" to reflect the mountains within the landscape of Japan that they wanted to capture. During the tech demo, I get to see some of the ways the team is trying to make its world feel more alive and immersive, with picturesque environments that move with the wind, and reflect light in realistic ways. As one of the most long awaited settings in the series, it's clear from speaking with Dansereau that the team felt pressure to bring something new and go beyond what has been done before.
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"This time around was difficult, because we knew it was a highly anticipated setting, and we knew that the expectations were very high," Dansereau says, "and so we pushed ourselves, [and said] 'okay, let's do something very ambitious'. So we needed that very strong support from the Anvil team, because they're working end to end with us making sure that we have the support we need."
The weather and changing seasons are some of the biggest changes introduced to the Anvil engine, with conditions brought on by the weather feeding into missions and giving us more ways to navigate through areas. Every season will have "two steps", like early and late spring, and after a certain amount of time, when you fast travel or load, the "the next logical step will be loaded in". As an example, Danserau says that if you're in autumn, then after loading into the game again or another location, you might be in winter. Sometimes certain quests will be tied to specific seasons for narrative reasons, too.
"The seasons offer the ability to go and see the same location in a different season, but also a different weather state, so from a player point of view, it's a different visual experience and also [a different] gameplay experience," Dansereau says. "This, for us, was something great to achieve in a new-gen game. This is part of what's new for AC that we wanted to do. Of course, it was challenging because we had to rethink the way we were producing assets and how we rig them to the wind tech that was built, [which] is completely new."
In motion
As Dansereau says during the demo presentation, "the world is in constant motion", and the wind tech is a big part of that. I watch as the wind causes rainfall to bounce off of the rooftop of a temple in a certain direction, or richequot off of Naoe's armor as she runs through a storm. I can also see how it interacts with the landscape, picking up leaves or causing snowflakes to swirl off the ground.
"It [the wind tech] really follows the world in the environment," Dansereau says. "We are constantly reviewing the game, and at some point we were in a field and just looking at the particles, how they were carried over with the wind. They were swirling around, and we just stopped and looked at the game. And we said, 'wow, this is real'. This is what the system is giving us."
While it certainly looks impressive, I'm more interested in experiencing how all of these systems will impact the way we play. As an example, Dansereau explains that the weather and seasons can affect how NPCs behave. So, if you were to knock an icicle from a rooftop during winter, that will naturally draw attention, while weather states like fog or the day and night cycles will affect your visibility. Guards can even fall asleep during warm weather, and if it's colder or raining, they might seek shelter and change position. Ultimately the hope is that the various systems introduced will offer more variety and make it so that each player will have a different experience.
Everything shown certainly looked like it's capturing the "photorealism" the team is striving for, not just in terms of how picturesque it appears, but how it moves, and how light reacts in different ways to make it appear more realistic. How it will actually change how I approach every mission remains to be seen, but from slicing through bamboo, to snuffing out lights, and using the weather for added cover, all of the new systems promise to offer up some new ingredients I'm looking forward to playing around with as Naoe and Yasuke.
See what else is in store in the stealthy series with our roundup of all of the upcoming Assassin's Creed games on the way.
