Assassin’s Creed Shadows forced Ubisoft to “craft the crap” out of its new-style open world, ensuring you won’t have Points of Interest every 50 meters

It may have been recently pushed back, but Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘ release is close on the horizon, and players can expect its open-world Japanese setting to be quite different from what Ubisoft has created before when it comes to its detail and scale.

GamesRadar+ recently had the chance to go hands-on Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and in an interview with creative director Jonathan Dumont, we’re told that the devs “were surprised by a few things” when they visited Japan for the game. “When you go on location, there’s always something that even if you looked at all the books, the movies, everything, you say ‘oh man, that’s surprising,'” he explains. “It was the density of the trees and the forest and how much there was. You had a lot of little mountains that created overlapping views that typically we didn’t quite get.”