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"

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Prepare for a climb

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

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.

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?

Ali Jones
Ali Jones
Managing Editor, News

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.