Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been out for a week now, and while Ubisoft has been enjoying the success of the title, the company is also proud of the game from a technical standpoint. Speaking to GamesRadar, brand and pipeline technology director Pierre Fortin spoke about the ambitious technology used in Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
One of the key features of Assassin’s Creed Shadows that was pushed ahead because of new technology is how dynamic its open world can feel at times. Fortin spoke about how the title pushes the dynamism of its world beyond what we saw in previous titles like Mirage, Valhalla and Odyssey.
“When you start with a new generation, you always feel like you’re unshackled, in a way,” said Fortin. “But then you’re developing, and you introduce new systems, and you find new barriers at some point. But with Shadows, I think we’ve really tried to push the world dynamism to a new level.”
Fortin points to the fact that Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the first game in the title in the franchise to be developed only for current-gen consoles, and how the title was able to make use of the more powerful hardware the studio had at its disposal. For context, Mirage and Valhalla were both also released on PS4 and Xbox One alongside their PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions.
According to Fortin, one of the biggest indicators of Shadows being able to leverage the horsepower afforded by modern consoles is in its trees. Fortin spoke about how Ubisoft was able to make use of physics-based animations for the trees in the game, allowing the world to feel much more alive.
“Now in AC Shadows, we leverage the new power of those new consoles and this new hardware to implement a fully physically-based animation for our trees, so they react and move with the wind with a thread simulation that drives that nicely,” he said. “So we really went with that vision of having something much more dynamic, because that’s what we felt was new-gen – adding more movement on-screen, more dynamism.”
The overall complexity of the world in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, according to Fortin, was one of the most challenging parts of developing the game. This came down to the fact that the world in Shadows has quite a few elements to it, including weather patterns that change certain things in the game, and even a day and night cycle.
“The complexity of the world was something at some point,” Fortin said. “We have four seasons, we have two protagonists, we have a world that’s pretty big, we have dynamic time of day. And on top of that we have weather.”
The massive size of the game was also one of its more challenging aspects during development. Fortin spoke about how the developers behind Assassin’s Creed Shadows had to figure out smarter ways to compress the game’s data. This came about because the studio didn’t want to eat up a player’s entire storage drive with just a single game.
“I’m pretty happy with what we’ve been able to achieve there,” he continued. “No matter the circumstances, we have a good experience that is on par with the performance target we had. To me that’s been our biggest challenge. Technically speaking, also size. Just putting all of that data into the disc is a challenge by itself. We don’t want to force one terabyte of data on the players.”
“We put a lot of effort into having clever compression techniques to make sure that we’re ok, that we fit within our desired SSD space. As soon as we have new hardware, we’re pretty good at maximizing it, and reaching those new limits, but it’s through clever optimization techniques that I think we go beyond them.”
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Check out our review for more details.
