Assassin’s Creed Shadows Has A Base-Building Sim Inside Of It

Assassins’ Creed began as a game about sneaking up behind people and stabbing them. Decades later it’s much, much more, and the latest game in the franchise, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, appears to be building on its ever more complex open-world RPG architecture with a new base-building minigame that looks straight out of a management sim.

This latest discovery comes via a gameplay deep dive recently shared by IGN China, seemingly ahead of schedule (via Eurogamer). Despite being deleted, the footage was uploaded elsewhere and showed, among other things, that the first Assassin’s Creed set in Japan will have a grid-based city builder in which players can choose how their settlement looks, modifying buildings, laying down paths, and even choosing where to place statues and water features. Monty Don would be proud.

“In Shadows we give you an acre of land and we give you the possibility to build your hideout like you wanted so it’s a way again of putting the players’ adventure in full display to be able to see how they create life as they go on their adventure,” one of the game’s developers said in the video. Hopefully, it ends up being a fleshed-out system and nice distraction from the open-world exploration and killing, and not just another way for Ubisoft to insert more microtransactions into the game.

The foundation for something like this was in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, in which players completed quests and gathered materials to help NPCs expand their settlement. However, most of it was all done automatically as you completed certain objectives. The system in Shadows looks more robust, closer to what you might find in a standard city-builder on Steam. Dynamic weather and seasons should add to the feeling of it being lived in.

The base building doesn’t appear to be as modular or as intimate as the base building in games like Fallout 4 or Starfield, but if it provides bonuses that buff your character, generates cheap supplies, or otherwise greases the wheels of some of the game’s open-world RPG systems, I’ll be happy to play around with designing my ninja hideout in Shadows.

The game hits PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on November 12. While it took longer to make than any previous Assassin’s Creed, its map will also be a bit smaller, and probably more manageable, than those of the last few games in the series.