Assassin's Creed Shadows started with a single Ghost of Tsushima-like protagonist, but 'it's not representing what the samurai and shinobi are if it's the same character'
I bet some of you had the same reaction I did when Ubisoft first told us that Assassin's Creed Shadows would have two protagonists: Why do you need sneaky shinobi Naoe and stalwart samurai Yasuke when you could just make one character who's super stealthy and a master swordsman? It worked well enough for Ezio back in the day and sounds like a lot less effort. Not to mention there's a very successful Japan-set open world game specifically about a samurai-shinobi called Ghost of Tsushima.
Turns out Shadows was once on a Tsushima-like trajectory, but Ubisoft made the decision early on to split its fantasies in two.
«When you say 'Let's make an Assassin's Creed in Japan,' the first reflex is 'We need a ninja,' right?» creative director Jonathan Dumont told PC Gamer at Ubisoft's Quebec studio last week. «The shinobi is such a one-for-one with an assassin. In early prototyping, as we were looking at other archetypes, we felt like we wanted to do a samurai as well because it's very iconic.»
In a vague description of this prototyping phase, Dumont and game director Charles Benoit said you'd play as a shinobi who could also put on armor to get stronger in combat.
«But it felt a bit weird. Like, why am I suddenly better and worse in combat?» said Benoit. «It's not really representing what the samurai and the shinobi are if it's the same character.»
"[The samurai] was sort of diluting the ninja a bit, but we wanted to do the samurai. So we said yeah, let's have two characters."
Benoit wasn't pointing fingers at Sony while he said this, but he inadvertently made a solid point about Ghost of Tsushima. I love that game, but the dissonance of roleplaying a samurai who's also a ninja did bother me. It felt goofy to wear heavy samurai armor while crouching through tall grass, so much so that I'd constantly swap between armor and Ronin robes to help with immersion. Jin Sakai was amazing at everything, which took some tension out of getting busted in a Mongol camp. Of course, it
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