It has been confirmed by Ubisoft that the map of Japan for Assassin’s Creed Shadows is ‘around the same size’ as the Egyptian map featured in 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins. The latter title was the first ‘super-sized’ Assassin’s Creed game, bringing about a change in the formula that stripped away what previously existed and replaced it with an open-world RPG style of gameplay.
In a recent interview with IGN, it was claimed that AC Shadows won’t be as large as Valhalla or Odyssey, but it’s on par with Assassin’s Creed Origins.
That’s Still Huge
Last year’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage was praised globally because of it being a ‘return to form’ for the franchise, boasting a smaller, denser map that was a wonder to explore. It meant that users could tackle everything the game offered without worrying about pouring hundreds of hours into it – and even I, with my very limited time, managed to 100% the game.
It seems like Ubisoft is pivoting entirely on that short-form concept and returning instantly to the broader, more epic maps that we’ve come to know and (partially) love from the Assassin’s Creed series of late.
In an interview with IGN, Ubisoft’s creative director, Jonathan Dumont, said:
It’s in-line with the latest Assassin’s Creeds that we’ve done. On a scale level, maybe we can compare it a little bit more to the size of Assassin’s Creed Origins. We did want to have a much closer to real life scale ratio. So because castles took a lot of space, and we really wanted the mountains to feel like mountains, we’ve made the environments feel wider in the game. But I would say around the same size as Origins.
Assassin’s Creed Origins still feels massive to this day, incorporating the entirety of Egypt from border to border. It’s a staggering map but a beautiful one, and it wasn’t as ‘packed’ with things to do as Valhalla was, for example. That helped it feel less daunting. In 2020, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was released, becoming the most ambitious AC game ever made. If you want to complete everything this gargantuan game has to offer, you’ll be playing for a good two hundred hours or more.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes players to Feudal Japan and allows them to take control of a Shinobi and a Samurai. It’s an operating model that was seen in 2015’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, and in the first trailer that was released recently by Ubisoft, it looks like a killer dynamic that’ll make for an interesting gameplay loop.
Are you bored of big-map Assassin’s Creed games?
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It’s refreshing to see that they’re no longer unnecessarily making the maps bigger and bigger just to flex. The larger map sizes were either filled with barren areas that didn’t need to be in the game or the devs felt they need to cram as much content in to justify the size. While it’s a shame we’re not truly going back to form with the likes of Mirage, it’s nice the map is going to be somewhat smaller, albeit the size of Origins.
As somebody who doesn’t buy a lot of games, the bigger, more packed maps were fun for me. Because I don’t have a large stack of games to play, I was able to take my time with Valhalla, so it didn’t feel like a chore. I thought Mirage just didn’t have enough to do, especially because there wasn’t any DLC.
A “middle way,” with a big but potentially less packed map I’m okay with because it’ll hopefully appeal to the most people.