With Assassin's Creed Shadows Ubisoft "didn't want to hold the player's hand too much with icons," so you have to hire scouts to mark the world map for you

Ubisoft is continuing the drip feed of information leading into the launch of Assassin's Creed Shadows this March, and this time the devs are breaking down what to expect from exploration. Basically, you're going to have to work a little bit harder to find your way this time around.

"We didn't want to hold the player's hand too much with icons and markers," game director Charles Benoit explains in a new blog post. "We wanted to craft an open world where information was key and would become a form of reward. This made sense in the context of playing a shinobi and fighting for information. In Shadows, information is something you need to look for and earn, whether through your spies, NPC encounters, or through your own eyes. In short, we want players to discover all our cool secrets on their own terms through investigation, their spy network, or by observing the world."

In previous Assassin's Creed games, you'd unlock giant sections of the world map and details on all nearby activities by climbing and synchronizing viewpoints. As Ubisoft has previously confirmed, viewpoints now serve as a more narrow place to gather information and discover nearby points of interest. The world map will also slowly fill in around you as you explore, pushing back the fog of war effect and popping up question marks indicating nearby points of interest.

Throughout the game, you'll build a crew of scouts that you can deploy to explore bits of the world map for you. As in other recent Assassin's Creed games, some quests will initially provide you with a vague list of information about your target, but scouts can narrow that down to a precise quest marker. More scouts deployed to the same location will give you a wider search area, revealing more of the world map for you.

None of this is truly groundbreaking stuff for an open-world game, but it does sound like it'll combine to make you more of an active participant in exploring the world this time around - a feeling recent Assassin's Creed games have often struggled to nail down. Ubisoft is certainly putting a big focus on making Shadows more challenging and engaging, as another recent blog detailed how unclimable surfaces were leading a "more thoughtful" approach to parkour.

The series has often ranked among the best open-world games, so here's hoping some of the upcoming Assassin's Creed games can recapture the magic.