Assassin's Creed Shadows is the first game in the franchise to be developed solely for current-gen hardware. As such, Ubisoft Quebec has put in a tremendous amount of work to create an open-world environment that is as beautiful as it is alive.
A new trailer for the highly anticipated game shows off the captivating and ever-changing world of Feudal Japan. Ubisoft teases an open world "full of unexpected discoveries and wonders at a time when beauty, serenity, and tradition clash with treachery, violence, and war."
The trailer was accompanied by an interview with Art Director Thierry Dansereau and Technology Director Pierre Fortin as they discuss what this new hardware and tech allowed them to do with the world of Assassin's Creed Shadows.
One of the major improvements you'll see is the addition of ray-tracing global illumination and micro polygon tech. While previous Assassin's Creed games have used some form of global illumination, Fortin explains that ray-tracing global illumination allows the team to be "much more dynamic." Ubisoft explains:
In past Assassin's Creeds, global illumination was static; light would bounce off surfaces and diffuse realistically, but it wouldn't and couldn't adapt to environmental changes, and while previous games didn't allow for many environmental changes, Shadows is filled with them: Lights can be turned off and on, doors can be cut down or smashed through, and bamboo trees, market stalls, and fences can all be destroyed. Thanks to ray-tracing global illumination, the lighting interacting with all of these objects and environments will adjust accordingly.
Micro polygon tech is not as widely touted as ray-tracing, but it plays a pivotal role in processing the open world environment of Assassin's Creed Shadows. Because open worlds have long sightlines and draw distances, developers had to build assets with low, medium and high polygonal counts, and would swap them out as the player got closer to them. Rendering all visible assets at their full resolution would simply be too taxing on your GPU, Fortin says. Micro polygons remove the need to create multiple versions of the same asset to swap out.
"Think of micro polygons as sort of adaptable intelligent assets that know how to render themselves best based on their visibility and proximity to the player," explains Fortin. Ubisoft adds:
Not only does this eliminate the need for developers to create multiple assets, but it allows them to budget GPU bandwidth more efficiently, allowing for increased polygon counts and better graphical fidelity up close.
In addition to the improved lighting and visual processing, Assassin's Creed Shadows will feature distinct seasons. Locations will look and feel vastly different depending on the time of year that you visit them. And this isn't just a visual thing, it will actually impact your gameplay experience. Missions will have several environmental factors that can alter your gameplay depending on the season you play in. For example, in the winter, ponds will freeze over, preventing you from taking cover beneath the water. If you play that same mission during a spring nighttime rainstorm, your footsteps will be muffled by the rain and enemeis will be less likely to spot you in the dark.
"We wanted a dynamic new feeling," says Fortin. "Both at the micro scale and the macro scale, so that when you see a storm coming, you can adapt how you play the game, knowing that it's going to make you stealthier when it's time to sneak into that castle."
Assassin's Creed Shadows launches on November 15 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Amazon Luna, Macs with Apple silicon via the Mac App Store, and Windows PC through the Ubisoft Store and the Epic Games Store.