Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Japan is ‘roughly similar’ in size to Egypt in Origins

Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ world map is “roughly similar” in size to Egypt in Assassin’s Creed Origins.

That’s according to Simon Lemay-Comtois, associate game director at Ubisoft Quebec, who discussed the scope of the game’s Japanese setting during an interview with VGC following the Ubisoft Forward showcase on Monday.

“It’s about roughly similar to Origins, so it’s smaller than Valhalla in terms of territory,” he said. “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.

“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,” he continued.

“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”.

Lemay-Comtois said the map’s size is dictated by the scope of the story Ubisoft wants to cover from a historical point of view. Shadows takes place in 16th century Japan, with the country heading towards a brutal path to unification.

“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.

“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.

“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.”

Further reading

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The team behind Assassin's Creed Odyssey attempts to deliver a dual protagonist epic across Japan

Ubisoft released a 13-minute Assassin’s Creed Shadows gameplay walkthrough video on Monday.

The Assassin’s Creed Shadows release date is November 15, 2024, for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Mac and Amazon Luna.