Assassin's Creed Shadows Director Explains Why You Can't Harm Animals

Summary

Assassin’s Creed Shadows director Jonathan Dumont has revealed exactly why there is no hunting in the game this time around.
According to Dumont, feudal Japan’s lack of large wild animals was a problem, while the devs also wanted activities to be more “zen-like” this time around.
Future Assassin’s Creed games may reintroduce hunting based on the setting and player fantasy, but it was omitted in Shadows as it “made sense”.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows has you slicing and dicing your way through countless bad guys, but there are certain things that Naoe and Yasuke won’t send a blade flying through. Unlike most Assassin’s Creed games in the past, especially the more modern RPG ones like Valhalla and Odyssey, you could kill all sorts of wildlife to upgrade your gear and weaponry.

That’s not the case in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and going one step further, you can’t actually harm wildlife at all. It’s a pretty massive change to the way the series works, and one that went by without much of an explanation from anyone at Ubisoft. Thankfully, the game’s director has cleared up the decision-making behind this change in a recent interview with Kotaku.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows Director Explains Why You Can’t Harm Animals

According to Dumont, one of the main reasons for like of hunting in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the setting. Dumont explains that when the team started looking into the wildlife in feudal Japan, they found that the country “didn’t have many large, aggressive animals to challenge players”, and that it would have been more appealing to simply observe the wildlife the country did have.

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Secondly, Dumont explains that the team behind the game also wanted to add more “zen-like” activities to the open world this time around, and running around killing wild animals is about as far from zen as you can possibly get.

“Additionally, we wanted to incorporate world activities that offer a zen-like experience, providing spiritual or contemplative moments in nature to balance Naoe and Yasuke’s journey.”

If you were a fan of the hunting in previous games and were kind of disappointed to see it missing in Shadows, you have no need to fear. When asked whether hunting will return to the series in the future, Dumont says that it depends on the “setting and player fantasy”, and for Shadows is simply “made sense” to not include the feature. So, hunting is on the cards for Assassin’s Creed Hexe, whenever that actually comes out.