It’s a cold late winter morning in Canada, but the Ubisoft Quebec offices are burning with excitement.
The Ubisoft team is preparing the launch of Assassin’s Creed Shadowsthe fourteenth main entry in the series and an evolution of the franchise in almost every detail. It is set in 16th century feudal Japan, a rich and elegant period that has long been sought after by fans and members of the Ubisoft team alike. It features a pair of fierce protagonists: Yasuke, a powerful warrior of African origin, and Naoe, an agile Shinobi assassin, both brought to life with attention to historical accuracy. Its world feels alive with an ever-changing dynamism that is evident in everything from the changing weather to the changing seasons and the magical interplay of light and shadow.
And what’s more, it will be released on Mac the same day it arrives on PC and consoles.
“It’s been a long-time dream to bring the game to the Mac,” says Ubisoft executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté, who premiered the game on Mac during the WWDC24 Keynote. “It’s amazing that you can now open up a MacBook Pro and get this level of immersion.” Darkness It will also come to the iPad later with M-series chips.
Naoe, one of the game’s two protagonists, is an agile assassin who is at her best when attacking from the shadows.
Today is one of the first times that the gaming community will get their hands on Darknessand to celebrate the occasion, Ubisoft’s offices (a combination of cozy, chalet-worthy reclaimed wood and open windows offering a view of Quebec City’s snowy rooftops) have been renovated with a assassin’s creed theme, including a display emphasizing the weight of Yasuke’s weapons, especially an imposing-looking 13-pound model of the character’s sword. (On that day, the exhibit is run by associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois, who seems quite capable of handling it.)
Download Assassin’s Creed Shadows from the Mac App Store
Côté calls Darkness the “most ambitious” game of his team. In creating the game’s expansive world, Ubisoft’s development team took advantage of a variety of advanced Mac technologies: Metal 3 (working in conjunction with Ubisoft’s next-generation Anvil engine), Apple Silicon, and a combination of HDR support and real-time ray tracing on Macs with the M3 and M4 that Côté said was “transformative” in creating the game’s immersion.
Bringing the game to Mac has been a dream for a long time.
Marc-Alexis Côté, executive producer at Ubisoft
“Seeing those millions of lines of code running natively on a Mac was a feeling that’s hard to describe,” says Côté. “When you look at gaming performance, the curve Apple is on with successive improvements to M-series chips year after year, and the way the game looks on an HDR display, you ask yourself, ‘Is this real?'”
Assassin’s Creed Shadows It is a balance between the technical and the creative. For the former, associate technical director Mathieu Belanger says the Mac’s capabilities laid the foundation for technical success. “The hardware architecture is very well done, thanks in part to the unified memory between the GPU and CPU. That made us think the future is bright for gaming on the platform. A lot of things about doing this on the Mac were great right out of the box.”
Naoe’s counterpart, Yasuke, prefers the use of brute force.
On the creative side, Ubisoft creative director Jonathan Dumont focused on a different opportunity. “The important thing was: Does this feel right? Is this what we want to send to the players? And the answer was yes.”
The creative team’s goal was nothing less than “to make this world feel alive,” says Martin Bedard, a 20-year Ubisoft veteran who served as the game’s chief technology officer (and is very good at playing as Naoe). “You immerse yourself in a moment that really existed,” he says. “This story is your playground.”
There are also furry kittens. We’ll get to that.
The ever-changing seasons bring incredible variety to the game’s environments.
And there is tremendous power behind beauty, because the game’s biomes, seasons, weather, and lighting are dynamic creations. The evening hour bathes the mountains in a soft violet light; The sun’s rays float in through the leaves and roofs of the temples. Almost every room has a candle, which means the light is always changing. “Look at the clouds here,” Bedard says, pointing to the screen. “That’s not a representation. They’re all fluid-based cloud simulations.”
“Japan feels like it’s 80 percent trees and mountains,” Dumont says. “If you’re building this world without the rain, the winds and the mountains, you don’t feel good.”
Wherever you are, wherever you go, everything is beautiful and alive.
Mathieu Belanger, associate technical director
And those winds? “We developed many features that were barely possible before, and one of them was a complete wind simulation, not just an animation,” says Belanger. “We even built a humidity simulation that gathers the clouds together.” For the game’s seasons, Ubisoft developed an engine that represented houses, markets and temples in constantly changing conditions. “This was all done along the way over the last four years,” he says.
To look for historical accuracy, Dumont and the creative team visited Japan to study every detail, from general details (like city maps) to very specific details (like the varnish that would have been applied to 16th-century wood). It wasn’t always a success, Côté says: On one visit, his Japanese hosts recommended a review of the light dotting the mountains. “We want all those little details to be right,” he says. (A “full immersion version” is available, completely in Japanese with English subtitles.)
To recreate the world of 16th century Japan, Ubisoft’s creative visited Japan to study every detail.
Ubisoft’s decision to split the protagonist into two distinct characters with different identities, abilities, origin stories, and class backgrounds came early in the process. (“That was a fun day,” Belanger laughs). Members of the Ubisoft team emphasize that choosing between Naoe and Yasuke is a matter of personal preference: lethal subtlety versus brute force. Players can switch characters at any time, and as you might suspect, the pair grows stronger as the story progresses. Much of Naoe’s advantage comes from her ability to stay in the shadows of the game, not just behind large buildings, but anywhere the scene creates a space for her to hide. “The master class is clearing a board without being seen once,” says Bedard.
(The hideout is) peaceful. You can say, “I feel like planting some trees, seeing what I’ve gathered, upgrading my buildings, and petting the cats.”
Jonathan Dumont, creative director of Ubisoft
Which brings us to the Hideout, Naoe and Yasuke’s base of operations and a bucolic rural village that acts as a Zen respite from the ferocity of battle. “It’s a place that welcomes you,” Dumont says. It is eminently customizable, both from the point of view of game progression and also in aesthetic terms. While the battle scenes are a frenzy of forceful combat or stealthy attacks, the Hideout is a haven for supplies, artwork, found objects, and even a furry menagerie of cats, dogs, deer, and other calming influences. “There are progressions, of course,” Dumont says, “but it’s calm. You can say, ‘I feel like planting some trees, seeing what I collected, improving my buildings and petting the cats.'”
“The kittens were a P1 feature,” laughs associate game director Dany St-Laurent.
Yasuke prepares to face an opponent in what will likely be a fruitful battle.
However, despite all those big numbers, Dumont says the game boils down to something much simpler. “I think the characters work very well together,” he says. “It’s an open-world game, yes. But at its core, it features two characters that you’ll like. And the game is really about following their journey, connecting with them, exploring their unique mysteries and seeing how they flow together. And I think the way they join forces is one of the best moments of the franchise.”
And if the Ubisoft team has its way, there will be many more moments to come. “I think the game will continue to scale in the coming years on the Mac platform,” says Côté. “Gaming can become more and more immersive with each new hardware release. We’re trying to create something here where more people can come with games from day one on the Mac, because I think it’s a beautiful platform.”
