Assassin's Creed Shadows is set to release in only a few, negligible weeks, but you shouldn't prepare for its impending reveal by practicing your stealth kills in Assassin's Creed Mirage, or by refreshing your understanding of the franchise's sci-fi underpinnings – who cares? Go pick out some paint swatches for the new Hideout, what Ubisoft's calling the series' first "fully customizable sandbox!"
Concealed behind towering hills in a lush and flowering valley, the Hideout will act as warrior protagonists Yasuke and Naoe's home base, the same role it's had in previous Assassin's Creed titles. But Shadows' leafy green sanctuary comes with an RPG twist – Ubisoft explains in a blog that you'll be able to personalize it almost as extensively as your very own WooHoo pad in The Sims. With more noble, samurai intentions, of course.
"It's pretty ambitious," says systems associate director Dany St-Laurent. "After fortresses, villas, homesteads, pirate coves, café-theatres, moving trains, ships, settlements, assassin bureaus... we knew that if we wanted to make anything new on that front, we had to take a bold step forward. That meant giving players the option to build their homebase with complete freedom."
You'll have over an acre of land to plow and place as many buildings, bushes, and sakura trees as you need to feel true happiness. In the layout example video Ubisoft shares, it seems like the Hideout can be hammered into all kinds of evocative shapes, too, from an austere camp area, to a summer palace surrounded by trees, to a snowy training ground punctured by rock.
To begin customizing everything, even what your inconsequential floors are made from, you'll have to collect wood, minerals, and crops that you either find throughout Shadows' open world, or require your scouts to slowly smuggle in. Through similar sneaky looting and skulking, you'll accrue additional decor for important main rooms like the forge, which lets you upgrade and remodel your weapons, or theme rooms like the Zashiki, which improves Yasuke and Naoe's health regeneration.
As the game progresses, the Hideout will fill with more and more sake-sipping allies, which St-Laurent says "makes the Hideout feel like the beating heart of the league."
"We gathered the writers [...] in a meeting and had them create interactions inspired by questions like, 'What would happen if these two characters suddenly became roommates?'" St-Laurent explains. "I really love all the cool little moments they came up with."
Then, all that's left to do is populate your welcoming household with enough little baby animals to make your eyes water.
These domesticated angels can be unlocked by petting puppies and kitties throughout Japan, but you can also capture wild fauna through Sumi-e paintings, which let you bring home fluffy tanuki, foxes, and other roaming creatures. To demonstrate, Ubisoft shares an outrageously cute video of the fierce samurai Yasuke lowering to one knee to call the tiniest, trotting deer "beautiful" and scratch its happy face.
"There are progressions, of course," Ubisoft creative director Jonathan Dumont tells Apple about the Hideout in a recent interview. "But it's peaceful. You can say, 'I feel like putting some trees down, seeing what I collected, upgrading my buildings, and petting the cats.'"
