You can practically feel the wind on Naoe’s back as she whooshes through a winding valley. Great gusts funnel between the surrounding ridges, picking up orange-red leaves that tumble and swirl. On the plains, grass roils like waves; in the mountains, snow whirls and flurries before transforming into a blizzardy, diagonal sheet. The wind affects so much of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ world, even protagonist Naoe’s sharp, short bob which whips in the game’s notably blustery wilds.
There are good reasons why Ubisoft would make the latest entry in its tentpole franchise so windswept. Certainly, it breathes audio-visual drama into this open-world imagining of central Japan: the trees shake thunderously; the wind whistles pleasingly; you feel at the centre of a multidirectional symphony of movement. But the breezes of Shadows are more than mere environmental gimmick for the longstanding open-world franchise. They subtly speak to the tempestuous flux of sixteenth-century Japan, visually reminding players that the world itself must have felt up in the air with the arrival of the Portuguese traders and missionaries. The wind also imbues the game with an irrepressible sense of momentum, carrying Naoe and samurai Yasuke from shrine to dojo, tea house to fortified castle. “My whole life, I have been caught on a wind,” says former slave Yasuke. “Blown across the world. Clinging to whatever I could.”
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Ubisoft has made a lot of noise about Shadows’ wind, touting it, and other meteorological conditions (like the brilliantly capricious storms) as a suite of next-gen upgrades (dubbed the Atmos system) for its proprietary Anvil engine. In one blog post, technology director Pierre F talked about how all of the vegetation, from pine tree to cherry blossom, is physically animated on the GPU, pulling data from the wind system which is itself driven by a fluid simulation moving through the 3D space. Whew! Elsewhere, art director Thierry Dansereau relayed the moment he and his team stopped to gawp at particles being carried over a field. “Wow, this is real,” he said somewhat breathlessly. “This is what the [wind] system is giving us.”