The new Assassin’s Creed episode that Ubisoft Quebec is working on will feature a world the size of the one we saw in Assassin’s Creed: Origins.

This episode goes against the principle of “the bigger the better” that has been applied to the worlds of several Assassin’s Creed episodes recently. Origins had a large world, Odyssey was even larger, and Valhalla may have had an even larger area to explore. But Assassin’s Creed Shadows won’t go beyond that, as Simon Lemay-Comtois of Ubisoft Quebec pointed out in an interview with VGC. According to him, we should expect the size of Assassin’s Creed:Origins (which also had a world of about 80 square kilometers), so the country is not very big, and it will be “compressed” in comparison, presumably to avoid the world being too lifeless and barren.

“The story we’re focusing on is mostly in central Japan, so we’re not expanding to the whole of Japan, so we knew we had a rough idea of the area we wanted to cover. So something important happens in Kyoto, something important happens in Osaka, Azuchi – we need these places, so how faithful can we be to these castles because they’re very interesting, so we expand these castles, they have a very large footprint.

And then we think about how much of the world do we need in between those castles so that it’s believable and feels like an adventure when you move between them and it doesn’t take a real four-day horse ride to get from one to the other. So it’s a tricky thing to develop, but eventually we find our footing with the types of cities and castles that we want to represent, and that’s what justifies the size of our world map,” Lemay-Comtois said.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which appeared at the Xbox Games Showcase as well as Ubisoft Forward, will be released on November 15th for current generation consoles (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series) and Amazon Luna in addition to PC; we rarely hear about this cloud platform outside of the French publisher.

Source: WCCFTech, VGC