Assassin's Creed Shadows' Art Director Thierry Dansereau On Dynamic Weather, A New Scale, & The Freedom To Destroy

screenrant.com:

has a long legacy to live up to, both in terms of matching past heights and avoiding past pitfalls, but one area that should be set for success is the art direction. With a consistent breadth of historical detail on display, even the weakest games in the series are full of eye candy. Of course, every setting brings some new challenges, and is complicating affairs by trying out some major new tech on top of everything else.

Taking the franchise to the long-awaited setting of feudal Japan, deploys a new weather system called Atmos and new opportunities for both stealth and destruction that involve features of the surrounding world. While nothing is a major break from the standard franchise style, there's a lot that catches the eye. At a preview event in Ubisoft Quebec, sat down with art director Thierry Dansereau to discuss some of these opportunities and hurdles, from reconstructing landmarks that no longer exist to wrangling the transitions between weather states.

Screen Rant: One of the biggest leaps that Assassin's Creed Shadows makes is the attentiveness to weather and the ways in which the fauna reacts to that. Was the process of crafting a world where the visual element changes so much depending on, what was happening in it, what the season was, all of those elements?

Thierry Dansereau: Yes. Well, it all started when we started this project almost four years ago, when we learned that the game would be new gen only. And also the fact that it was set in feudal Japan, the long-awaited setting, it was for us an occasion that we could not miss, and we knew that we needed to do something special, and we asked ourselves how can we push it further.

Something that, you know, came with the level of immersion and we said, okay, how can we bring that up a few notches? And at some point, one of our guys did a test with the Sakura trees, where we could see the leaf growing and then getting to maturity falling down in autumn and then going dry up in winter. And then when we