Assassin’s Creed Shadows is celebrating its one-year anniversary today, March 20, 2025. Below, we look back at how its immersive and sometimes unfriendly open world makes it feel real.
We’re so awash in open-world video games that they can all start to feel very similar, like theme parks waiting for you to activate the ride. They’re often designed to be as frictionless as possible, promising that you won’t go more than 30 seconds without finding something to do; it can make a meticulously designed world feel more like a playset than a place. Some games pull off open worlds better than others, though, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows features my favorite open world in years. It feels like a place, not a theme park, and makes for an immersive play experience that feels like it actually fits the “open” in “open world.”
Photo-real visuals have always been a big part of the Assassin’s Creed series, which has featured realistic-feeling cities since the series’ first entry. It’s no different here, but the Ubisoft Quebec team took the visuals of in-game environments to a new level with Shadows, and it makes for maybe the most beautiful and natural-feeling world since Red Dead Redemption 2. Forests are dense and, even during the day, dark. Cities feel open and bright–a side effect of the shorter buildings when compared to most other Assassin’s Creed titles. Roads are alive with civilians, soldiers, and the occasional bandit. Every square foot of the world is teeming with wildlife, from dogs and cats and all manner of ungulates to an incredible density of insects that comes to a head during summer.
Shadows makes other great uses of seasons to ensure the world feels fresh every couple of hours. Instead of isolating something such as snow to a single biome (like in Rogue) or specific chapters in the timeline of the story (like in Assassin’s Creed III), this gives the whole world a new coat of paint whenever seasons change. Summer’s lush foliage makes the shift to reds and oranges in autumn a welcome change, replacing the dense green with warm fall colors, and the shift from winter to spring is a sort of relief (your mileage may vary depending on how much snow and sub-zero cold your real-life location sees in a given winter). Just as one season is about to start feeling stale, a new one starts.
Each season is as beautifully rendered as the ones before and after, and they also offer gameplay changes–bodies of water freeze in the winter, and you can’t depend as much on leaf cover in stealth situations. The heavy rain that comes with summer, meanwhile, can provide excellent cover for those leaning on stealth as Naoe, all while the blooming flowers of wisteria and sakura trees bring rich color.
The layout of the world, too, is a big contributor for why this game leaves such a strong impression. Shadows feels much bigger than it is, and that’s because a fair portion of the world is impassable. In the real world, it’s rare that you can get anywhere by going in a straight line. There’s something in the way, whether that’s a river, a mountain, or whatever. In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, you can’t just run straight to your destination–at least, not without having to slog your way through ultra-dense forest.
This goes a long way toward making the game world feel like a real place. If you’ve spent much time out in the woods–the real woods, not a hiking trail–you know that it’s not easy going. People stick to trails for a reason, and it always feels a little strange in video games when these supposedly wild areas are as easy to pass through as a well-used road. These heavily forested mountains are meant to be circumvented rather than charged through. Notably, the development team didn’t put much of anything to find in these areas. A willingness to let some areas just be empty feels like a step forward for Ubisoft, which usually makes its maps so dense with activities that it’s hard to find a quiet moment. These empty spaces, devoid of that blanket of icons, are a nice kind of friction that balances the need to give players too much to do without taking away freedom of exploration.
Ghost of Yotei
Let’s compare Shadows’ open world to 2025’s other triple-A Japan-set open-world game, Ghost of Yotei. While Yotei takes place in a different part of Japan, both games are set around the same time period–and yet, Yotei’s world feels quite different. Yotei’s Japan is stunningly beautiful and packed with far more color, but it feels quite flat in comparison to Shadows. When you climb in Yotei, it’s in a contained area, most often an instanced area at the edge of the map. Everything in Shadows feels like a part of the world, even the acrobatic obstacle courses scattered around the map. In the main world, you have the freedom to go everywhere, in any direction. Even the trees are spaced so that you can navigate a horse between them, as if someone had planted them for that express purpose. It feels almost as if the developers were afraid of getting in the way of you taking a perfectly straight line to your next destination. It’s an approach to world design that undercuts realism in favor of gameplay convenience.
Another difference can be seen in the placement of locations such as shrines. The way the landscape of Shadows is laid out, shrines feel like part of the world–they make sense where you find them, as if built by the people living nearby. The trails that lead to them are passable without extensive ninja training, even for many of the most remote shrines. In Yotei, things like shrines don’t feel like they belong in the world–they feel like distinctly video-gamey challenges created to be played through, and the game world feels like it’s built around them. Yotei is another favorite from 2025, but it illustrates a difference in creating a world meant to be played, as opposed to a world meant to seem realistic.
Shadows wants you to feel like you’re in a real place, and in real places, you’re going to take roads whenever you can. Roads can funnel the player into more random events–enemy encampments, someone begging for help at the roadside, a Jizo statue where you can leave an offering, and so on. That’s not to say that you can’t leave the road–there’s a massive amount of grassy and hilly areas to explore in Shadows, and most of it is quite easy to get to, but the natural impassable elements help make the world feel more believable by ensuring you can’t just aim at a waypoint and hold forward on your analog stick.
The commitment to balancing verisimilitude with fun shows up in the game’s activities, too. The aforementioned shrines have things to find, of course, but they’re also vast locations full of shrine-goers, attendants, and sometimes guards who help to make them feel like places that existed before you arrived–not simply places for you to check off of a to-do list. Even little things like Jizo statues feel appropriately placed, with the statues found at forks in roads, as they represent the guardian deity of children and travelers. When invading castles, you’ll find so-called nightingale floors meant to alert guards to silent invaders, and all those paper walls mean that a quick skirmish can turn into an overwhelming battle quickly as reinforcements easily close in on you. Paying attention to those little, realistic details and understanding how they affect how you play the game is rewarding.
I’ve put well over 150 hours into Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and have spent more than a few hours intentionally traveling the long way, either by horse or on foot, simply enjoying the world, rather than treating it as a checklist, as can be easy to do with Assassin’s Creed games. Even past the hundred-hour mark, I find myself stopping to take detours and capture scenes in photo mode.
I love open-world games; they make up an outsized portion of my all-time favorite games. I love exploring digital places, discovering their secrets and seeing how they’re made. But even as someone who loves these kinds of games, they often struggle with the same thing: it’s easy for them to end up looking like theme parks created just for me, rather than a world I find in media res and can explore. Assassin’s Creed Shadows balances this well in a way that few games do.
The game world’s layout gives you range to explore, and makes exploring fun for the sake of itself. It feeds you into the interesting places like villages and enemy encampments without forcing you to de-fog the whole map or explore in a grid pattern to make sure you find everything. Activities encourage close-up study of the game’s many shrines and castles, putting the depth of the team’s research on display without pushing it into our faces like a signed and directed exhibit.
I think there are better open-world games than Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Red Dead Redemption 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Ghost of Yotei, and Dragon’s Dogma 2 are all fabulous open-world games that I loved playing and have gone back to again after completing them. But Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the game world I want to keep hanging out in, not just because of the gameplay it offers, but because of the way its world feels like a realistic, natural place.
