How Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Weather Will Reshape the World
Art director Thierry Dansereau details how Ubisoft is looking to capture the spirit of Sengoku-era Japan through its seasons.
Posted 2 months ago
Put yourself in charge of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. It’s easy to see how there’d be no more daunting a task than taking on feudal Japan. The setting has continually been one of the most requested, pretty much since the series’ foundation. If you’re going to do it, you need to do it right, with the power, and the technology, to do justice to such an iconic time and environment. This one, would need to be something special.
At Gamescom 2024, Restart was invited to a presentation on Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ World Tech. A showcase of all the bespoke systems that have been built for Ubisoft’s upcoming action-adventure game. Dynamic seasons, wind simulations, rain, and even the ability to cut accurate lines through objects with your blade. After the address, we had the chance to chat with art director Thierry Dansereau about how seasons will play out in-game, the team’s work in crafting long-lost castles, and just how thrilled they were to finally face up to feudal Japan.
“We knew that the expectations were high, but we set the expectation ourselves,” Dansereau says. “There are a lot of people within Ubisoft that contacted us because they wanted to work on [Assassin’s Creed Shadows] so badly. So it's something that we're really proud of, and it's an honor to have been involved in the making of the game.”
Dynamism is a term that comes up often in our conversation, and nowhere is it more present than in Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ seasons. The team was eager to capture the marked changes to Japan’s landscape, buildings, and nature across the four stages of the year. A bold decision that required almost every single object in the world to adapt in tandem – the accumulation of snow and frost atop pots and lamps in winter, the shifting colors of foliage in summer and autumn. Crucially, the change in seasons won’t just be tied to the game’s story.
A beautiful but daunting prospect.
©Ubisoft
“It's both ways,” Dansereau explains. “The narrative story will have historical moments linked to specific seasons because we're trying to follow our narrative thread. But when you're in the open world, the more systemic seasons will spawn over time. There's tons of things involved, the AI, the crowd life that are linked to the season.
“Seasons are split into steps. Then, if you fast travel, as soon as you load, if you're at that moment in the step, you will be loaded in the new season. So you could go from spring, summer, autumn, and that will cycle the whole way through.”
A single environment will alter dramatically with the seasons.
©Ubisoft
With shifting seasons come changing weather patterns. This led Ubisoft to craft new and far more detailed effects for the elements. Heavy rain causes water to run off between the ridges of the traditional Japanese roofs. Trees no longer shake in set animations, responding instead to a complex wind simulation which rustles branches and lifts leaves and debris from the floor.
Beyond just visual touches, the weather also promises to influence behaviors. Rain, for example, will cause NPCs to spend more time under cover, and it could also douse open-topped lamps at night. These changes have the potential to alter guards’ vision and patrol paths, perhaps making infiltrating a complex easier – or even more difficult. How likely each weather pattern is to occur will depend on when and where you are in the world.
“It’s the whole weather system that I love, because it transitions seamlessly,” says Dansereau. “What we did was create probabilities for provinces. So there are some provinces that have more clear sky or more rainstorms. It's living in the world and seeing these systems being triggered that, for me, creates a very good experience, because it changes the mood completely. The whole package is something to live and play in, because it's quite cool what we've managed to create in terms of weather.”
Assassin's Creed Shadows
Release Date: February 14, 2025
To ensure they were treading the correct path to artistic authenticity, a few members of the development team – the “lucky ones” according to Dansereau – were sent on field trips to Japan. Partnering with experts and Ubisoft’s existing teams in Osaka and Tokyo, they were able to dissect the natural landscape, and understand its place in the closing stages of the period of widespread civil war.
“History is the backbone of Assassin's Creed, and we're studying,” Dansereau says. “So it's like going back to school, because we have to learn about the country, the culture, to make sure that we have a good understanding before actually producing it. … It's been a four-year master class about the Japanese culture for us.”
Part of that research focused on what it’s no longer possible to see. Following earthquakes, the Meiji Restoration, and World War Two, few of Japan’s Sengoku-era castles remain. As such, Dansereau and his team relied on academic expertise and the limited surviving examples in order to recreate several pivotal bastions from the bygone era. Fortresses that, while not longer a feature of modern Japan, will be available for Assassin’s Creed Shadows players to admire, and almost certainly sneak through.
“There are also some castles that still exist, [for example] Himeji Castle which is almost in the exact actual state as it was before,” Dansereau says. “It didn't go to war because it finished construction at the beginning of the Edo period [after the end the Sengoku period]. So that was a good reference for us in terms of how they were built inside, the type of rocks that they used. We gathered information among many sources.”
Resisting the urge to chop everything we see could prove a problem.
©Ubisoft
For a video game, a world is equalled in value by the means through which players can interact with it. And with Assassin’s Creed Shadows taking place in such an evocative time of katana-wielding samurai, much of that interplay comes at the keen edge of a blade. Ubisoft has therefore developed new dynamic weapon interactions with destructible objects. Swing a sword or kusarigama – one of joint protagonist Naoe’s weapons of choice – through some materials and they’ll split in a manner aligned to the precise cut. Ideal for a land of screen doors, and the potential for an assassin to strike through them.
“When you're in a game and you tap on something, if nothing happens, it feels like it's a 3D mesh that you cannot interact with,” Dansereau says. “We wanted to really fulfill that fantasy of blades that are super sharp. It brings up the level of immersion. Being able to cut things makes you have an impact on the world.”
This confluence of environmental upgrades and additions means that, putting the core gameplay and narrative to the side, we’re excited just to explore the scenery of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Taking in the sites – and snapping more than a few photos – will hopefully be a game in and of itself. And with the opportunity to speak to one of the digital world’s chief curators, we couldn’t help but ask if he had any recommendations for where to stage a photo shoot.
Assassin's Creed Shadows will offer the chance to visit iconic castles now lost to time.
©Ubisoft
“I would say visit everything!” Dansereau says. “We centered our game around the center of Japan because there are so many iconic landmarks, but also because it was related to our story and main historical character – which is in this case Oda Nobunaga – so this is where most of his actions were taking place. And also for scale ratios, it was important for us to have something that's more credible in terms of size.
“But I have to say, if I had one location to pick, we're in the Azuchi–Momoyama time period and there's one specific castle which is called the Azuchi castle, which was the Oda Nobunaga castle that was destroyed soon after his death. So it no longer exists, and now, in the game, the castle is there and we have built it in an incredible way, following plans. I think that's part of the strong fantasy [Assassin’s Creed] has, to make players able to visit locations that no longer exist. So I think that would be the location.”
Our thanks to Ubisoft and Thierry Dansereau for taking the time to speak with us about Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Assassin's Creed Shadows: Gold Edition
Release Date: February 14, 2025