Having played around six hours of Assassin’s Creed Shadows last week, Ubisoft’s latest stabathon is shaping up very nicely indeed. As part of my preview, I was able to get to grips with all sorts of new features and systems in the game, and chief among them was its customisable Hideout base. This is where dual protagonists Yasuke and Naoe will retreat to between missions, and on the surface it functions in a very similar way to Valhalla’s homestead of Ravensthorpe.
The key difference this time, however, is that you have much more control over the placement of your buildings and how they develop as Shadows progresses. This takes the form of a Sims-like building mode where holding down Y will present you with a top-down grid to begin your construction.
To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Watch on YouTube
“We all played Valhalla,” game director Charles Benoit tells me. “We saw the interest of having a place to go back [to] and meeting characters that you found. We wanted to push [that] a bit further in terms of customisation to make it more your own thing. So it was important that if we do that, let’s do it [in a] way to really embrace the customisation. It’s thematic of the story to have this group and these reunited people and make a family again. So it felt good with the Hideout as a place [to] reconstruct your own community.”