Assassin’s Creed Shadows associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois has reiterated that the game’s rendition of Japan will be comparable in size to Egypt from Assassin’s Creed Origins. Speaking with VGC in an interview, Lemay-Comtois referred to the size of the two games’ settings as “roughly similar”. This, of course, also means that Japan in Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be smaller than the world of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. This reiterates similar statement made by the developer previously.
“It’s about roughly similar to Origins, so it’s smaller than Valhalla in terms of territory,” said Lemay-Comtois. “There is some body of water around Japan, but it’s not like [Odyssey’s] Greece was, [which was] half water. With Japan that’s not the case. We have the coastlines and lake Biwa is a very big lake, but [the map’s] roughly the size of Origins.”
Lemay-Comtois went on to talk about how the terrain of Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘ Japan will be different from Egypt in Assassin’s Creed Origins, which was largely quite flat in nature, owing to its setting. Japan, on the other hand, will have mountains and valleys all over the place.
“It’s much more mountainous in Japan, small mountains and valleys, and what we discovered with the team who went scouting in Japan is that most of the interesting stuff is in the valleys,” Lemay-Comtois said. “There are some cool temples on top of certain mountains, but for the most part it’s almost like a very steep, impregnable bush that there’s no reason to go through”.
The game is going to take place in the 16th century, with the primary focus being on central Japan. This allowed the studio to narrow its focus down and figure out how much of the landmass they would need for the game to begin with.
“The story that we focus on is mostly on central Japan, so we don’t expand all the way to the entirety of Japan, so therefore we knew we had a rough idea for the territory we wanted to cover,” Lemay-Comtois said.
The game will also feature Japanese castles quite extensively, since they tend to be some of the more striking buildings of the era. Being faithful to the design and placement was important to the studio, according to Lemay-Comtois.
“So something important happens in Kyoto, something important happens in Osaka, Azuchi – we need these places, so how faithful to these castles can we be, because they’re very interesting, so we build out those castles, they have a very big footprint,” he said.
“And then we think about how much of the world do we need between those castles so that it becomes credible and feels like an adventure as you move between them, and it doesn’t take a real four days of horseback riding to get from one to the other.
“So it’s kind of a tricky thing to develop, but eventually we find our footing with the types of cities and castles that we want to represent and that’s what justifies the size of our world map.”
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is slated for release on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on November 15. Make sure to also check out details on the collector’s edition for the game.