"You Want People To Be Looking At The World, Instead Of Just Following A Marker": Assassin's Creed Shadows' Creative Director On Its World, Characters & Sidequests

screenrant.com:

is arguably one of the most hotly-anticipated games of 2025, transporting players to an open world feudal Japan. Alongside the game’s setting — which has been a long-requested one from fans over the years — the game has many other interesting hooks that have grabbed players’ attention, particularly ’ dual protagonists Naoe and Yasuke. Players will have a lot of freedom in how they can complete the story with the two characters, each of which have separate roles to play in the conflict-filled period known as Azuchi-Momoyama.

The aforementioned era is the final part of the Sengoku period, which translates tothe “Warring States period,” a time of much political upheaval and war. The two are great foils for one another in both narrative and actual gameplay, with Yasuke presenting a hard-hitting, direct approach based on strength, but Naoe relies much more on stealth. While Naoe is an original character, a ninja who is an enemy of daimyo Oda Nobunaga, Yasuke is based on a real historical figure from the time period, a samurai who served under Nobunaga.

While Assassin's Creed Shadows was in line with some of my expectations, a number of things managed to surprise me at the preview event.

interviewed the creative director of, Jonathan Dumont, to discuss how his approach has changed since, finally tackling a Japanese setting, and the biggest challenges of dual protagonists.

ScreenRant: So first, I would love to talk about the setting of this game a little bit because, obviously, Japan has been such a hotly-requested location for an game. What sort of research went into developing such a rich environment, and did you feel any sort of special pressure when it came to, "."

Jonathan Dumont: For sure, the fans were requesting it, but we really wanted to make it as well. So we go through the normal, I would say, research process early. And so, very early in, the first couple of people that are on the team are part of our research. Quite a bit of a research went into this one