assassin's creed shadows preview

We Chatted To The Assassin’s Creed Shadows Level Design Director About Creating The Most Requested Setting Yet

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It’s not everyday you get to work on one of the most requested games of all time. For Ubisoft Quebec’s Level Design Director Luc Plante, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is very much that game. Long rumoured and even longer sought after, Assassin’s Creed is finally hitting Japan, taking its approach to historical fiction and action RPGs to the feudal era with one of the denest entries in the series to date. We sat down with Luc during a recent preview event to unpack how his legacy with Ubisoft has changed and what goes into creating a fun, but believable, world for the newest Assassin’s Creed. 

So you’ve been designing various elements of Assassin’s Creed games for at least 10 years now! How has level design changed for you in that time and how does it compare to working on Shadows now?

PLANTE: It’s evolved quite a lot, especially when we switched to a fully open world RPG. It’s going from a really controlled environment to now anything can happen. So a lot of the mentality needs to switch to make sure that we can support that and make sure that every decision that the player is making, not only through dialog, but also while in gameplay, can have an impact or acknowledge it to some extent. It’s really to embrace chaos to some extent, but also to make sure that we have this opportunity to create a world that is more immersive and gives more autonomy to the player and more urgency. 

Assassin’s Creed Japan has been a fan-desired thing for the longest time. Has that also been felt internally? Is this the dream project for the team to finally move on to?

P: Definitely. We’re all fans of the franchise as well, we’re gamers, so we were hoping to work on that setting for a while, and now it’s the opportunity that comes knocking. We were humbled to have it and really want to make sure that the passion we have for the project can be transposed into the game and that the players, the fans, will recognize that we want to pay homage to the setting, but also for the fans and their expectations. 

assassin's creed shadows

Working within the new Japanese setting, from architecture to geography, did that allow the team to design new types of levels, with maybe more freedom or restrictions? 

P:Like any setting, it has its own constraints but also opportunities. For example, in most European towns, like in a city, we have big castles, we have a lot of verticality. While in Japan, most of the towns are maybe one-story buildings, a few of them will have two-stories. So of course, we have some pagodas…but it’s mostly a flat layout. But it created the opportunity with the Shoji door, we have some assassination that you can perform through those doors. Some constraints bring other opportunities, which is really great with all the Assassin’s Creeds. Each setting is really unique and adds not just a visual difference, but also a good play space to it. 

Something that comes up a lot with these games is the balance between historical accuracy and fun. Is that a conversation that happens between the art and level design teams to ensure you’re creating a space that achieves both? 

P:It’s always a key challenge, like in any AC game. We always start with actual footprints, but the scale of the game is never one to one. So we always have to do some compromising, like door frames to make sure the characters can go through it etc. It’s to make sure that starting from actual footprints, we keep the rules of that and make sure that if you look at this building and you look at it actually in the real world, you find it familiar. You’ll recognize yourself like, “okay, I am in this actual building!” 

For Shadows, with the dual protagonists, I imagine you’ve got to work a bit harder to create play spaces that allow both characters to work within them and still be enjoyable? Was that an extra challenge given how different Yasuke and Naoe move through the world? 

P:It was a challenge, but at the same time, from the beginning, we wanted to support the Samurai, so more combat-oriented the protagonist and the Shinobi approach. Each location, we look at them from a 360 approach, making sure that the player can have multiple entry points. So now, when you enter, you look at your surroundings and see which lights you can turn off, where you can throw a little bell to attract enemies and so on. So it’s to let the player come up with their own tactic based on each of the setups.  

assassin's creed shadows preview

Will those setups escalate over time as quests get more challenging for players? I know open world games can sometimes struggle to provide players with escalating quests as they progress. 

P:We always look first with a story blueprint where we know where the story starts and where we want a story to go. After that, it’s making sure that we have great pacing, not only in terms of game difficulty, but also because you don’t want to have a flat curve, you want to have some surprises, some low-down moments, but also in terms of themes, in terms of mood or the mindset we want to give to the player.   

How does that story blueprint interact with the Canon mode that Shadows has? Is it a challenge to balance maybe the “intended” story experience with player choice? 

P:I think it was after Odyssey, with Alexios and Cassandra, people were craving to see who was the “real one”? Who’s Damos? So we had to make a stand. But this time around, we wanted to make sure that like any AC game, any open world RPG, players could make choices, choices that would matter and would have an impact. But at the same time, for the fans that are just in there for a good story and don’t want to bother too much about making a decision, we have preselected choices for them so that they can just experience that cool story. 

assassin's creed shadows preview

You’ve obviously had the chance to tell a lot of cool stories across your time at Ubisoft, do you have a favourite thing you’ve gotten to work on? And what is it about Shadows you’re most excited about? 

P:It’s like asking me which of my children is my favourite one (laughs). I think, for a simple reason, each project I’ve worked on has been very rewarding, both personally and professionally. There’s always new challenges, either the setting, the IP, etc. But there are a lot of good things in each of the projects I’ve worked on. 

But with Shadows, I think we really push the open world formula a step ahead of what we have done before with all the dynamics in the distractable AI, the seasons changing, it’s not just a visual gimmick, it’s also impacting the AI. If it’s raining, some of the AI will try to get some cover. If it’s cold in the winter, they will come close to a source of fire. So to create a world that is more believable than ever before, I think that’s what I’m most proud of how we created that. And also our protagonists! The story is intertwined very nicely and they don’t always agree, but they are working together and we got to keep them distinct from the start to the end.


Assassin’s Creed Shadows releases on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on March 20th. The cheapest copy is $89 with free shipping from Amazon.