Assassin's Creed Shadows compares its map size to Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, is it the largest?

Feudal Japan blossoms in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the installment that part of the community has been asking for for more than a decade. Ubisoft Quebec, the studio responsible for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, continues to explore the open-world RPG formula, but how big is it compared to previous chapters? With each installment, the maps get bigger and bigger, but size isn’t always the most important thing. In an interview with VGC, Associate Director Simon Lemay-Comtois answered this question and compared the map to those of Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla.

This is the map of Assassin’s Creed Shadows

“It’s about roughly similar to Origins, so it’s smaller than Valhalla in terms of territory. There is some body of water around Japan, but it’s not like [Odyssey’s] Greece was, [which was] half water. With Japan that’s not the case. We have the coastlines and lake Biwa is a very big lake, but [the map’s] roughly the size of Origins.” As Lemay-Comtois explained, it is a mountainous area full of valleys: “We discovered with the team who went scouting in Japan is that most of the interesting stuff is in the valleys,” he pointed out.

Unlike Odyssey, which covered the entire Hellenic world, the Land of the Rising Sun will not be shown in its entirety: “The story that we focus on is mostly on central Japan, so we don’t expand all the way to the entirety of Japan,” so they had “a rough idea” of the area they wanted to cover. “So something important happens in Kyoto, something important happens in Osaka, Azuchi – we need these places,” as well as the castles, which they recreated to be true to life. “And then we think about how much of the world do we need between those castles so that it becomes credible and feels like an adventure.” The developer clarified that they didn’t want the journey to be “a real four days of horseback riding to get from one to the other.”

Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be available on November 15th for PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and PC.