If you were one of the many slightly put off by the absolutely gigantic open world of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, then it looks like the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be much more your speed.
In a recent interview with VGC, Simon Lemay Comtois, the associated game director at Assassin’s Creed Shadows developer Ubisoft Quebec, confirmed that the game will be a lot smaller in scope than its overwhelming predecessor. “It’s about roughly similar to Origins, so it’s smaller than Valhalla in terms of territory,” he said.
He went on to discuss the types of geographical features that players can expect to encounter compared to previous games. “It’s much more mountainous in Japan, small mountains and valleys,” he explained. “What we discovered with the team who went scouting in Japan is that most of the interesting stuff is in the valleys.”
He also confirmed that the game's map would only cover a small portion of Japan and provided some of the reasons behind this decision. “The story that we focus on is mostly on central Japan, so we don’t expand all the way to the entirety of Japan, so therefore we knew we had a rough idea for the territory we wanted to cover,” he argued.
“So something important happens in Kyoto, something important happens in Osaka, Azuchi [...] and then we think about how much of the world do we need between those castles so that it becomes credible and feels like an adventure as you move between them.”
We were particularly impressed with everything that we saw of the world in a recent behind-closed-doors preview event, which led us to describe the Feudal Japan setting as “the perfect backdrop for an Assassin’s Creed adventure”. The game is set to launch on November 15 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC.
