In some way, Assassin’s Creed Shadows marks the end of an era for the Ubisoft series, being the last entry in the franchise to feature the role-playing game mechanics originally introduced in Assassin’s Creed Origins. In other ways, however, the upcoming next entry in the series will mark the beginning of a new era for the franchise, sporting some technological advancements that will not only make it the most immersive and visually advanced Assassin’s Creed game to date but that will also benefit future games.
During last month’s Gamescom, I attended a preview session focused on the game where Art Director Thierry Danserau provided an in-depth look at how Ubisoft Quebec recreated feudal Japan. To understand Japanese culture, the developer went back to school, painstakingly analyzing documents and pictures to properly represent such a unique culture. All the hard work, according to the game’s Art Director, will pay off, as players will be pleased by how the game will represent the Japanese culture of the time.
Right from the start, Assassin’s Creed Shadows was developed as a current-generation-only game, and its creation was centered around three pillars – photorealism, realization, and dynamism. To support photorealism, the development team spent some time in Japan and took a lot of photos to better represent the country’s unique aspects, which are unlike most locations in the world. As such, they also had to revise shaders to properly recreate the region in the game. Also, this recreation will be rendered at a more realistic scale, and it won’t feature the entirety of the country but only its central regions.
Adding to photorealism will be ray-traced global illumination, which will also provide better ambient occlusion. Global illumination will be further enhanced by the use of virtual geometry for static objects, a first for the series, and evidently inspired by Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite.
As for realization, the team went all out to make Assassin’s Creed Shadows the most visually advanced entry in the series. This will be immediately evident to players thanks to one of the most dynamic worlds ever made for the franchise, powered by the next iteration of the Anvil engine, which now supports a huge number of objects on screen and a new wind engine that allowed the team to create dynamic wind and spray. Thanks to the advancements of the Anvil Engine, this dynamic wind affects almost every object in the game’s world, including bodies of water, leading to the creation of dynamic spray. Up to ten thousand particles can be shown on screen at a time.
The Assassin’s Creed Shadows world will be made more dynamic than ever with some other very interesting features, such as the implementation of different seasons and a lot of weather conditions. These not only influence how the world and even clouds look but also have a deeper impact on gameplay, as during Winter, for example, there’s no grass to hide in, which can make some stealth sequences more challenging. Weather changes also influence gameplay, as there could be situations where visibility is reduced, forcing players to adapt to the situation.
Check out some of these improvements in the newly released world trailer, embedded below.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to actually experience how all this will come into play in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, as the presentation featured very little gameplay, but on paper, this sounds very interesting and could definitely help the game set itself apart from the previous entries in the series as well as other open-world games based on a similar setting, such as Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima. Thankfully, we won’t have to wait too long to experience all this ourselves, as the game launches on November 15th on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S worldwide.
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