When Shadows of Assassin's Creed If it were released later this year, its development cycle would have been longer than any game in the series at four years, and Ubisoft believes that's the perfect amount of time to make a game.
Talking with Gaming Industry.bizLead producer Karl Onnée explained that Shadows took longer to make than Assassin's Creed Valhalla's three years, because the team wanted to create an accurate representation of feudal Japan and make the game “as authentic as possible.”
“It's great to be working on a game that comes after something on the level of Valhalla,” Onnée said. “But there are obviously high expectations. We always want to improve, which is what we're trying to do with Shadows. We're pushing the boundaries of what we can do.”
The developer went on to say that in order to deliver on this promise, the team had to take its time.
“It's always a balance between time and cost, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate,” he said. “Yes, you can put more people on a project and do it in less time, but that doesn't give you more time to iterate, because it takes time to get feedback from your players, from your team… and then see what works and what doesn't and how to improve it. Four years, I think, is the right balance to go from concept to production and get the feedback you need to adapt.”
About manufacturing Darkness “It was a real experience,” Onnée explained, “of which the team is proud” and which was a “very long” process.
“When we build a Japanese house in feudal Japan, it's very different from, say, a medieval French house or an English one,” the developer said. “So as artists, you have to learn where things go inside a feudal Japanese house… maybe food doesn't go there. You have to get everything you need to know and learn it. And that process is long.
Onnée added: “It's not feudal Japan, obviously, but it's nice to go there, because only then do we realise that it's very different from what we thought it was. It's very interesting, because when the team went there, one of the things that caught our attention was the forests and what they're like. We had done some forests based on the landscape of Greece. [for Odyssey]But when we went there, we realized that it was very different from what we had done and we had to change it. You don't always discover these things when you do historical research.
“These are some of the little things that are very important, because they give you a better idea of the dimensions of the building, the culture, the monuments and shrines that are still standing today… it is important to represent all of that correctly.”
Shadows of Assassin's Creed It is released on November 15th for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|I, Amazon Moonand PC.
