In an open world game, clouds take up a quarter of the screen at all times. They’re massive, important, and – all too often – completely overlooked. I can list a few of my all-time favourite in-game worlds (Destiny, The Witcher 3, Bloodborne, to name a few), and you know what they all have in common? Gorgeous skyboxes that do so much to help fold you into the fiction you’re playing; god rays and weather systems and a sense of scale that firmly roots you in whatever make-believe setting you’re playing in today.
But Assassin’s Creed Shadows isn’t make-believe. Not fully, anyway. As is now tradition for the series, Ubisoft is transporting you back in time, to a real historical location and time period, rooting this fantasy, very much, in reality. This time, we’re off to late-Sengoku period Japan, exploring the central regions of Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka in 1579 as civil war threatens to choke the life out of this blossoming empire.
Like Mirage, Valhalla, Odyssey and Origins before it, Shadows is keen to project an idealised version of its setting to us – it’s not going to be a perfect, to-scale version of Japan, no. That would be a ludicrous undertaking. Instead, Ubisoft will be cherry-picking the most aesthetically- and mechanically-rewarding elements of the region, crunching them down to a scale that isn’t too overwhelming for your average Open World Enjoyer, and serving them up in a mouth-watering digital package that we can spent 100s of hours gawking at (that’s roughly the size of Origins, by the way).
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