Assassin's Creed fans have waited years for a game set in Japan, but Ubisoft thinks Shadows is "great timing" and part of the developer's "natural evolution"

Assassin's Creed fans have been begging for a game set in Japan for years, and Ubisoft is finally set to deliver when Assassin's Creed Shadows launches in November. While some might say it's taken a long time for the concept to materialize, the action RPG's art director argues that it's actually "great timing" for it to arrive now. 

Speaking to Play in issue 45 of the magazine, art director Thierry Dansereau explains that taking this long for Ubisoft to get to Shadows has ultimately allowed the developers to work on its "new-gen features" first, which he reckons were "much needed" for the highly requested Japan setting. "I think it's great timing, though, because it allowed us to really develop the new-gen features, which I think were much needed for such a setting to fully exploit it," Dansereau says.

Dansereau points to Assassin's Creed's "rich history of making games" and notes that the team has built Shadows "with the Assassin's Creed pillar in mind." While it's fair to say that some fans might have hoped that the Japan setting might have arrived sooner than 2024 – 17 whole years after the release of the series' first game – Dansereau suggests that it was "part of our natural evolution to make that setting."

Play was also told that Shadows' art team has been focusing on dynamism, photorealism, and realization. The latter is reportedly described as "total attention to detail so as not to break immersion," which sounds very exciting. At this point, only time will tell if the game meets fans' lofty expectations of its setting. 

In the same magazine issue, Dansereau noted that fans can expect the upcoming RPG to be "about Origins big" – so smaller than Valhalla but larger than Mirage. No doubt this has been helped by the fact that Shadows doesn't attempt to recreate all of Japan in immense detail, but instead focus on Honshu, "where all the events related to Oda Nobunaga are taking place." Fingers crossed the final result will be a rich, detailed slice of Japan.

Assassin's Creed Shadows' gameplay will be affected by Ubisoft's fancy new weather tech, and the studio says its future games will incorporate it "in much more depth."