bingewatches

When the wind hits in Assassin’s Creed Shadows the world feels alive. Leaves whip up into the air, grass dances back and forth, and Naoe’s hair sways from side to side. It’s a stunning effect that enriches the game’s shifting seasonal and weather systems. According to a Digital Foundry interview with a few of the game’s rendering engineers, the wind isn’t actually wind at all — it’s invisible fluid.

That’s right: All the realistic wind physics are actually made from a fluid simulation moving through the world. It’s a common technique used in lots of games, and the math has given good effects in games as different as God of War and Dwarf Fortress. So why not here, too?

The Ubisoft developers call Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ dynamic weather system Atmos, and it was created to support its seasonal theme. As Naoe’s revenge story oscillates between two periods of her life, the seasons shift too. You might be trudging through thick blankets of winter snow covering the Japanese countryside for one moment, and then sprinting through verdant fields after it all melts away in the next. Eventually, you can even change the seasons on command.

Combined with its new ray-traced lighting effects, Assassin’s Creed Shadows might be one of the best looking games out there. For me, it’s certainly the first time ray tracing has ever felt essential for creating a mood and atmosphere that enriches the storytelling. Digital Foundry’s video has the nitty gritty details, but basically the game injects ray tracing into older technology to more accurately light scenes. Shoji glows while you’re standing inside buildings, and there are darker shadows on objects where the sunlight can’t reach in the open world. With ray tracing off, all the contrast disappears and dulls the world. The experts at Digital Foundry call the difference a “generational divide in lighting fidelity.”

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the kind of game that makes a convincing argument for investing in a PlayStation 5 Pro or a gaming PC with a 50-series Nvidia graphics card. On the Pro, it can run at a smooth 60 frames per second with ray tracing enabled, and it will fully support Sony’s PSSR upscaling technology in a future update. On PC, DLSS and Frame Generation can easily carry you to 60 fps on an RTX 4070 or newer.

And you’ll benefit from all that horsepower because it’s not just the lighting. It’s how dynamic features like the wind or being able to slice bamboo apart enhance the level of interactivity, or tactile feel of the world — similar to what it’s like playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Asssassin’s Creed Shadows has set a new bar by using all the power of modern computing not for pure hyper-realism, but for creating a living, breathing world to inhabit.