Assassin’s Creed Shadows will make canon dialog choices for you, if you wish

Developers say that the story length is comparable to Valhalla

Ubisoft

Ubisoft held a little AMA over on the Assassin’s Creed Subreddit, during which four developers working on Assassin’s Creed Shadows responded to questions from the community. This has yielded some very interesting points, such as the upcoming game’s “canon mode” – basically, Assassin’s Creed Shadow can be played without having to make any dialog choices. 

If you’re playing with “canon mode” being active, the game will automatically lock in the “true” options whenever you’re presented with a choice. The developers stated that the main story won’t feature a widely branching narrative like in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – things will be more focused in Shadows, with choices mattering more for romancing and recruiting allies.

“Choices come more into play when recruiting allies and romance some of the characters. Since the fan base is divided on branching dialogues, we have incorporated an option called Canon Mode which allows you to play the game with choices already made for you, to give you a choice free experience. Hope this makes it fun for everyone,” one developer wrote.

No matter which choices you make throughout the game, you will always arrive at the same canon ending – though there are several unique paths to get there. 

The overall length of the main story will be comparable to Odyssey, Origins, and Valhalla, the devs stated, while they estimate the explorable area of the map to be more in line with Origins.

Shadows will feature a faction system to simulate the ongoing civil strife in Japan at the time of the game – there will be large battles, camps of soldiers, and dynamic skirmishes. These will see some factions gain power and others lose it, influencing the quality of the loot you can get from them and how difficult it is to obtain it.

Quests related to the main story are embedded into this flowing world and can be tackled in a non-linear manner. “Most of the Main targets questlines can be tackled through exploration and are not in a predetermined order (although the gameflow does suggest an optimal path through exploration and progression),” one developer explained. “However, each target has a coherent story with a bottleneck section that can introduce more linear and cinematic narrative sections. The particularity is that we leave open many sections to be played with Naoe or Yasuke which can impact the way some of the questlines evolve.”

Ubisoft also revealed the Assassin’s Creed Shadows enemy and weapon types recently.