Assassin's Creed Shadows Revealed With 4 Minutes Of Bloody Action
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the next big open-world RPG from Ubisoft. It sports dual protagonists, a shinobi and a samurai, and it looks incredible so far. The next game in the blockbuster stealth series arrives on November 15 and based on its first trailer, it seems like exactly what fans have been dreaming of ever since they first learned the latest sequel would be set in Japan.
A first look at the game via a cinematic trailer showed a mysterious woman named Naoe whose village is burnt down and a man in samurai armor named Yasuke who has seemingly been involved in the carnage. “We are the shadows that serve the light,” they say as they work together through stealth and head-on combat to bring down the forces responsible for fueling civil war and misery. Players will be able to swap between them as they play.
Here’s the trailer:
Previously known as Assassin’s Creed Red, the latest entry in the long-running franchise will build on the sprawling maps, mechanics, and systems of games like Odyssey and Valhalla after last year’s Mirage offered fans a more old-school approach to the stabbing simulator. While it was sometimes easy to feel overloaded between the series’ increasing bloat and semi-annualization, it’s now been four years since the last major Assassin’s Creed game, and I for one am hungry to dig in.
How big is Assassin’s Creed Shadows?
While mainline Assassin’s Creed games have been getting more and more massive with each new entry, creative director Jonathan Dumont told IGN that Shadows will be slight step back when it comes to the map size. “On a scale level, maybe we can compare it a little bit more to the size of Assassin’s Creed Origins,” he said, citing the smaller of the three modern open world Assassin’s Creed games.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows includes a number of new features for the series, IGN reports. Those include a light meter that shows how concealed you are, a new type of NPC called servants that won’t fight you but will alert enemies and call-in reinforcements, and seasonal updates from spring to winter that change along with a day-and-night cycle. As separate protagonists, Yasuke and Naoe will have their own skill trees, equipment, and resources. Eagle vision also returns, while birds to scout the map from an overhead point of view will not.
Some of the above details about the game began leaking earlier this week from various store listings. Other clues were teased in a mini-marketing ARG that had fans deciphering images for numerical clues that eventually led them to the number “1579,” the year Yasuke, the first Black samurai, is believed to have arrived in Japan. Here’s the developers talking about Yasuke and Naoe and how players will follow their stories in the game:
