Assassin’s Creed Shadows will have a reasonably sized map, and hopefully, a reasonably sized game.
As reported by Insider Gaming, Ubisoft creative director Jonathan Dumont revealed in an interview that the game will be about as big as Assassin’s Creed Origins. Here’s what Dumont said:
“It’s in-line with the latest Assassin’s Creeds that we’ve done. On a scale level, maybe we can compare it a little bit more to the size of Assassin’s Creed Origins. We did want to have a much closer to real life scale ratio.
So because castles took a lot of space, and we really wanted the mountains to feel like mountains, we’ve made the environments feel wider in the game. But I would say around the same size as Origins.”
Well, let’s put this in some context, since Dumont invited the comparisons. Assassin’s Creed Origins has a map of roughly 80 km in size. If you’re more of a Nintendo fan, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild had a 72 km map.
Whether your point of reference is Assassin’s Creed Origins or The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, these are games with maps that are just wide enough that you can enjoy yourself moving away from the last spot you were in, and not getting bored for days or even weeks. Other open worlds may have bigger maps, and things to find.
But for maps at this scale, the developers work to instead make them dense. Every corner of this game will have something to find, in such a way that it won’t take more than a few minutes to find a point of interest.
Now, fans have frequently been unhappy with how way too big the recent Assassin’s Creed games are. As an example of that, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey had a 256 km map. Now, if you only stuck to land and didn’t explore its wide open seas, the game has a 130 km collective landmass.
If there was once an appetite for bigger being better for open world games, that appetite no longer exists. While live service gamers will spend hundreds more hours playing the same round of online shooting battle royale or team deathmatch in cycles, there is only so much content that fans will tolerate in open world games.
In a way, it is impressive that fans actually figured out what point open world games are too big. That means they had gotten so used to the format that they already knew what was the ‘perfect’ size.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is releasing on November 15, 2024, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Windows, on the Ubisoft Store and Epic Game Store. It will not be available on Steam.
