The Assassin's Creed Shadows open-world map is about the same size as Origin's Egypt, but exists on a more realistic scale because Ubisoft "really wanted the mountains to feel like mountains"

Assassin's Creed Shadows will have an open world roughly the size of Egypt from 2017's Assassin's Creed Origins.

In an interview with IGN, creative director Jonathan Dumont offered a little extra about the Assassin's Creed Shadows map, which takes up a chunk of 16th-century Japan. According to that interview, the region is about the same size as Origins' chunk of ancient Egypt, but it's based on a more realistic scale.

Dumont explains that "the environments feel wider" in Shadows when compared to Origins. That's because Ubisoft "really wanted the mountains to feel like mountains" in its version of Japan, and also because the era's castles took up so much space.

Acting as major dungeons throughout the games, game director Charles Benoit teases that the castles are so large that "it's a level designed by itself." It's so big, it's like an adventure each time you go in the castle."

That's likely to be particularly good news for one of Assassin's Creed Shadows' dual protagonists. While Samurai Yosuke is more of a warrior, Shinobi Naoe is a more nimble fighter, who seems like she'll shine in these castle environments. All that space should give her plenty of shadows to hide in, but if you do fancy taking the fight directly to your opponents, you'll still have plenty of opportunity to play as Yasuke instead - Shadows is set to allow players to swap between the two characters pretty seamlessly, even between objectives in the same mission. It seems like Ubisoft could be taking the tech seen in games like GTA 5 and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 a little further than we've seen before.

Are we looking at a new contender for our list of the best Assassin's Creed games?