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.”
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.”
As such, Shadows feels like a definitive technological step forward for video game wind, building on that of fellow Japan-set, open-world epic, 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima. Wind in Sucker Punch’s samurai epic was obscenely pretty (who can forget those pampas fields!) while also serving a practical function, guiding the player in elegantly diegetic style towards their next objective. It was ultimately a more “gamey” take on wind, matching the player’s gaze rather than redirecting it as Shadows’ dynamic, naturalistic swirls frequently do.
In this ninth console generation of mostly incremental tech improvements (shorter load times, 4K textures, 60 frames per second), wind and glittering particle effects are perhaps the most conspicuous, whiz-bang graphical offerings. Consider Horizon Forbidden West, whose majestic wind visually linked its varied ecosystems while speaking poetically to the fragility of its post-apocalyptic biosphere. Or the tornadoes of Battlefield 2042, which have the power to suck players up and spit them out across the near-future warzones of Shanghai and Doha.
These typhoon-like triple-A conditions were kickstarted in 2015 with The Witcher 3. A few years later, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild delivered more restrained wind via glinting, gently swaying grass. The painterly visuals of Nintendo’s landmark open-world adventure evokes perhaps an underappreciated influence on these video game worlds: the brilliant, billowing films of Hayao Miyazaki such as Kiki’s Delivery Service. In the opening shot of that 1989 film, we see Kiki lying down on rustling grass as wind whips around her. The cheerful announcer on the radio relays the weather forecast: “Mild winds” and a “beautiful full moon,” he says. “If you’ve been planning something special, tonight might be the night.” Lo, wind activates Kiki’s adventure, the background force that makes her journey possible, as it implicitly does in Shadows.
You can’t see the wind – only its swaying, gusting effects on shrubbery and particles. In Shadows, the latter presents a question: why, beyond pure open-world spectacle, does so much detritus float in the air? There are lots of trees in feudal Japan, towering conifers and shorter but no less beautiful deciduous varieties whose leaves oscillate between the vivid greens of spring and burned autumnal tones. But many trees lie felled on the ground, hacked to bits by rapacious warlords intent on demonstrating and protecting their power with gigantic fortifications and opulent palaces. Come across one of these sites, like Osaka Castle, and not far from it, you’ll find the vast natural resources that were used in its making.
This convincing 3D tapestry speaks to a few things: certainly the consummate skill with which Ubisoft imbued the world of Shadows with a geographic and socio-economic cohesiveness (on this note, what fun it is to see this world and then read an in-game codex on, say, land ownership in feudal Japan!) It also teases an answer about why exactly there is so much stuff hovering in the air. The leaves, dirt, disturbed pollen, flecks of bark, and splintered wood visually evoke the game’s turbulent political climate. Shadows’ wind surfaces this reality everywhere Naoe and Yasuke go, even ostensibly bucolic spots that should be sheltered from such turmoil yet bear traces of it in their air.
Shadows is, to date, the windiest of all triple-A’s blustery offerings. Its airborne currents seem to dip and dive with force and vivid motion in a manner that borders on oppressive. Yet this makes its moments of stillness all the more potent. Naoe is able to meditate, slipping into a trance as you press buttons to a languid rhythm, slowly dissolving into the landscape. Sometimes she is able to paint wildlife like a heron quietly grazing in shallow water. Or perhaps she spends a tranquil few minutes in the presence of the perfectly still lake you have just discovered.
Peaceful moments aside, Shadows is undoubtedly a game of gale-force drama, sweeping players along and blowing them away. Its size and scope is breathtaking, even if it is frequently overwhelming and disorientating, like one of its bludgeoning weather fronts.
But the wind is also the messenger for a metaphor of unadorned, haiku-esque elegance. Naoe’s relationship with her father is a crucial part of its story: often they are shown in flashbacks playing a wind instrument together, a clay pipe called a tsuchibue. “As long as we are breathing, there is always hope,” Naoe muses. It is their breath that causes the instrument to make a delicate air-borne sound, the memory of which, for Naoe, is caught on a breeze across both time and space.
