Following the new delay, Ubisoft is throwing Assassin’s Creed Shadows fans a bone in the way of a new deep dive into the exploration part of the game. Game Director Charles Benoit reckons the studio won’t hold the player’s hand too much, unlike previous installments in the franchise:
We didn’t want to hold the player’s hand too much with icons and markers. 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 Assassin’s Creed 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. When exploring the world, you should look out for undiscovered locations (i.e. “?” icons), because there are so many interesting places to seek out, whether in a destroyed camp or a hidden shrine, we want you to always feel a sense of discovery.
Players will still climb to high places, the so-called Viewpoints. However, rather than revealing vast amounts of the map, they’ll only uncover nearby interests after tagging them through the new observe mechanic (which does not include any companion Eagle, this time around). Each Viewpoint still unlocks a Fast Travel Point, but some are located in the heart of locations filled with enemies, so fast traveling there may not necessarily be a good idea.
While exploring each region, safehouses called “Kakurega” will become available for players to purchase. They become small extensions of the Hideout (the central, fully customizable home base) and offer some of its more practical functions, such as restocking rations/tools/ammunition, accessing gear stash, managing and accepting contracts, restocking scouts, and managing which allies can be called for help. Kakuregas also have Fast Travel Points of their own, and unlike the Viewpoints detailed above, they’re always safe.
Interestingly, in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, several of Japan’s mountains won’t be climbable due to their steepness. Due to this, Ubisoft warns players may sometimes be better off simply following roads, while supposed shortcuts may turn out to be unhelpful. If you get lost, though, there’s a new toggleable Pathfinder feature that draws a white line overlay to highlight the best path to the objective, provided a quest is tracked and its location has been revealed to the protagonists by a scout.
The quest log in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is called Objective Board, which Ubisoft says will be key in investigating and locating the assassination targets. Zooming in on a specific target will reveal Opportunities – quest steps that can be individually selected and tracked.
Players are provided with clues as to the location of each opportunity, and they have to deduce where to investigate or go next by connecting the clues to your map. For those who prefer to have clear quest markers, deploying Scouts in the general area indicated by these clues will make things easier.
Throughout Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the protagonists will be joined by various Scout NPCs who will help them locate quest objectives, gather resources to upgrade the Hideout base, and even cover their tracks by resetting Provincial alerts.
Deploying Scouts lets players scan ahead and reveal a more accurate location for their quest objectives. The more scouts are deployed at once, the greater the scouting radius, increasing the chances of actually finding the target. This is also particularly useful if you have not collected all the clues to reveal your objective, as they can help fill in the gaps in your knowledge. Once deployed, Scouts return at the end of the season and become available again. However, players can choose to pay some in-game currency to a Kakurega to speed up their return to the base.
Lastly, Scouts are also useful to loot the various resource caches of the Wealthy clans, which are simply too large to be carried by a single person. Instead, you’ll mark them with a flag to be smuggled out over time by the Scouts. At the end of the season, all flagged stockpiles will be cashed in to upgrade your hideout.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is out on March 20 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
