For the longest time, I really did loveAssassin’s Creed Shadows. It delivered on the promise ofAssassin’s Creedin Feudal Japan in a way I feltGhost of Tsushimanever did, while also offering the series' best narrative in quite some time. There is a lot to love aboutAssassin’s Creed Shadows, and that’s largely why I spent a long time defending it and praising it to friends, family, and the internet. Of course, as with a lot of Ubisoft games, the fondness wears off over time, and I quickly began to realizeShadows’biggest flaws.
While I suspectAssassin’s Creed Shadows’positive reviewswill hold up for the most part, there is one crucial aspect that I suspect many, myself now included, will quickly sour on. It isn’t thatShadowshas suddenly become a terrible game in my eyes, as I have genuinely enjoyed a lot of my time with it. Rather, after spending a little over 100 hours venturing across its vast world, completing everything there is to do,I have come to terms with the fact that I was wrong aboutAssassin’s Creed Shadows’worst feature.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows' Exploration Becomes Boring
It Is Extremely Repetitive After A Handful Of Hours
Assassin’s Creed Shadows’exploration felt fresh and uniquethe first time I started playing it. One ofShadows’most controversial mechanics, level-gated sections of the map, proved to be an enormous help in acclimating me to a new enormous sandbox, while the game’s linear world design, aided by its impassable topography, ensured that you were constantly forced in the direction of something interesting.Shadows, at least for a short while, felt as if it had fixedAssassin’s Creed’sbiggest design flaw, and I was overjoyed about that.
However, while my interest in the game’s exploration was sustained for quite a while - long enough, at least, for me to defend it publicly - I eventually grew tired of it. That’s not because it falls into the same pitfalls as previousAssassin’s Creedgames, although that is somewhat true, but more becauseit does little to entice players to continue exploring its vast land after thirty or forty hours of playtime. I have played a lot ofAC Shadowsand tried to do everything, but I was bored by its exploration long before I found myself grinding every little feature.
It wasn’t evenYasuke’s awful traversal mechanicsthat brokeAssassin’s Creed Shadows’exploration for me. In fact, playing as Yasuke felt like a breath of fresh air at the time, as he was perfectly introduced just long enough after unlocking Naoe to ensure neither character got too boring early on. Rather,Shadows’exploration suffers because it both lacks interesting things to do while journeying from one point to another and enough visual variety to make entering a new location feel like a novel experience, rather than a continuation of what you’ve been looking at for hours upon hours.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows Needed More To Do While Traveling
There Aren’t Enough Activities On The Open Road
One ofAC Shadows’biggest missed opportunitiesis not making more of the time spent literally moving from one location to another. Video games as a whole tend to care too little about this process because they introduce fast travel to get around its tediousness, rather than do something inventive to make it an interesting part of the overall experience.Shadowscould have made the journey more exciting by having Naoe and Yasuke interact with one anotherduring it, but it didn’t, and, as a result, every several-thousand-mile trek feels like a lonely and arduous experience.
Worse still, the things you may actually interact with while exploring are extremely limited. I’m not talking about what you stumble across as you explore, as those are separate activities from actually exploring. Rather,there’s no meaningful way to interact with the world around you,like there are in exploration-focused experiences likeDeath StrandingorSeason: A Letter to the Future.Shadowsdoesn’t leverage its interesting movement abilities to make traversal more of a mechanic likeDeath Stranding, nor does it feature ways of incorporating the environment into your journey likeSeason.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows’disappointing exploration is mechanically leagues behind RPGs that were released years before it, and that’s a huge shame.
Instead, you are told to travel from one end of the map to the other, and watch as your horse rides endlessly through the same locations you’ve passed through a million times, and as the bandits and soldiers you’ve defeated a similarly inordinate number of times respawn and attempt to attack you. Sure,there is the occasional person you can save or interact with, but these quickly grow repetitiveand, eventually, I just skipped them. Simply put,Assassin’s Creed Shadows’disappointing explorationis mechanically leagues behind RPGs that were released years before it, and that’s a huge shame.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows' World Isn’t Varied Enough
It More Or Less Looks The Same No Matter Where You Go
The other significant issue withAssassin’s Creed Shadows’exploration is that it isn’t varied enough. The environment design lacks the fantastical and almost improbable landscapes ofGhost of Tsushima, and that’s for two key reasons. The first is thatShadowsrelies far too heavily on its exceptional dynamic season mechanicthat sees the game switch seasons every so often. This gives the illusion of visual variety when, in actuality, it is merely covering up the lack of diversity with a new coat of paint.
Assassin’s Creed Shadowsis also aiming for a more realistic tone thanGhost of Tsushima, and, as a result, doesn’t venture too far into surrealist or even vibrant territory. It can’t have forests of golden leaves right next to fields of pampas grass and blue flowers likeTsushimadoes. Of course, I’m not going to faultShadowsfor being too realistic, as that’s the whole point of theAssassin’s Creedseries. However, unfortunately,that dedication to realism means that there’s little variety between regions, making unlocking a new one and venturing into it a sorely disappointing experience.
There is, as a result, no satisfaction to be found in revisiting a location, as it looks more or less the same as the one you’ve just been in and the one you’ll enter next. That makes traveling incredibly mundane, even if the standard environment design is undeniably beautiful. It is a shame, asUbisoft’s most underrated game,Star Wars Outlaws, proved that with open areas rather than a singular open world, you can inject more variety into the world design and help keep things fresh.
I do believe that a lot ofAssassin’s Creed Shadows’issues with exploration could have been resolved had it adopted an open area format rather than sticking to a single open world. Unfortunately, I don’t see Ubisoft making that change anytime soon. I am, naturally, disappointed I’ve come to this realization, as I lovedShadowsso much before I did. I still do enjoyAssassin’s Creed Shadows, but this has made me realize that Ubisoft will likely never change, no matter how much it masks its design philosophy’s inherent flaws with a handful of interesting ideas.
