While Assassin’s Creed Shadows has seen quite a few delay, game director Charles Benoit has revealed that the latest one, which was announced earlier this month, was due to the studio wanting to further polish up the game’s parkour mechanics.
In an interview with IGN, Benoit revealed that, while there weren’t any changes to the game’s major systems, the delay was mostly due to the nature of the roofs of the game’s Feudal Japan setting and how these roofs interacted with the game’s parkour system.
“The Japanese architecture, the roofs [are] super complex,” said Benoit. “Probably the most complex thing that I ever worked with if we compared to Odyssey and Syndicate. We needed specific codes and specific animations to support something super fluid, changing the transition of the parkour to make it even more fluid. So that’s one of the specific feedback that we heard that we wanted to address, and it really improved since the last few months.”
Aside from this, Benoit mentioned that the studio was working on “a couple of things in progression to make it more engaging, also balancing a bit more.”
More recently, Ubisoft had revealed the hardware specs that would be required to play Assassin’s Creed Shadows on PC. Among the specifications, Ubisoft listed hardware options for a variety of settings, ranging from selective ray tracing, standard ray tracing, and extended ray tracing. Interestingly, no ray tracing was not an option.
Aside from that, players will will need, at minimum an Intel Core i7 8700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 8GB, an AMD Radeon RX 5700 8GB, or an Intel Arc A580 8GB GPU, and 16GB of RAM. Interestingly these lowest specs would not be capable of pushing too much on the ray tracing front, and will only help run the game at 1080p and 30 frames per second with visual settings on low.
Aside from the hardware specs, Ubisoft has also confirmed that Assassin’s Creed Shadows will feature plenty of extra options for PC players to tinker with, including support for Nvidia DLSS 3.7, AMD FSR 3.1 and Intel XeSS 2. The game will also support ultrawide displays, and will feature a benchmark mode to allow players to further tune in their settings.
While the title itself hasn’t been released yet, Ubisoft also confirmed its first DLC, dubbed Claws of Awaji, with a trailer. The DLC will be part of the pre-order bonuses for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and will feature more than 10 hours of content, including a host of new gear, as well as an entire new zone for players to explore. The DLC was confirmed earlier this week, shortly after being leaked thanks to an errant listing on the game’s Steam store page.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows will revolve around dual protagonist in Naoe and Yasuke, and takes place in Feudal Japan. The game got a story trailer earlier this week where we saw the dynamics for the two characters, as well as their relationship with Oda Nobunaga.
The game is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on March 20.
