Assassin's Creed Shadows: Discover 5 Amazing Secrets! 🎮

It seems like open-world games have been going through a bit of a prolonged existential crisis over the past few years 🎮🤔. There’s a sense that something within the classic formula of big maps, question marks, and icons that need to be colored, that has served us so well since The Witcher 3 and Skyrim until at least The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, it's not working at all anymore 🚩.

It's as if a change or evolution – if not a complete revolution – is necessary for the genre to thrive 🔄✨.

There's also a problem: games trying to explore these new frontiers of map-making don't really know what new, evolved form it should take 🗺️❓.

I'm going to blame it on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game so influential in its design that it already seems like a cliché to mention it. But I have to mention it! Because we all remember that Breath of the Wild It was the first big-budget, third-person, open-world action game in the post-Skyrim era to come out and do something truly different with its structure – and succeed in doing so. 🎮🔥

How did he do it? 🤔 It got rid of the ever-increasing team number system and integrated a self-destructing branching scale, and abandoned the number of icons on the map that most of its contemporaries relied on, for something that was less prescriptive and more topographical. 🗺️

A map that caught your eye with its contoured details and curious formations, rather than literal points of interest—an approach we decided on in a joyful union was far more artistic. 🎨✨

And from there it all got a little confusing 🤯. Open-world games tried to be inspired by Zelda, but often ended up adding a glider, of all things! 🪂 No game summed it up better than Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Ubisoft's latest full-length Assassin's Creed installment, which is undoubtedly one of the most original and surprising. 🚀

Valhalla’s approach to maps and discovery was both disconcerting and fascinating: starting as a misty English parchment canvas of the southeast, little by little this map reveals its alternative to the big question mark problem. ❓ We can’t put a bunch of Mystery Boxes anymore, I guess was discussed, because it’s a bit low-level – so what do we do? Well, we keep them, but we replace them with shiny spots: silver for, uh, something, and gold for when there’s rare loot. 💰✨

When searching for a reminder of the Valhalla map, I found this one from Map Genie at our sister site IGN, which seems spot on. | Image credit: IGN Mapgenie

The result was a slightly murky 🌫️, truly fascinating idea 🤩, combining two almost diametrically opposed approaches to discovery: the icon-and-question-mark maximalism ❓ of earlier Assassin's Creed titles like Odyssey, with the melancholic minimalism of Zelda 🎮, into something that, in the end, achieved neither the convenience of the former nor the beauty of the latter.

Many games in this post-Skyrim period have gotten themselves into a bit of a pickle over how to implement their open worlds 🌍, finding themselves in everything from Halo and Gears of War to God of War and Call of Duty. Many more have been further confused by Breath of the Wild 🍃, and this endless struggle between a desire to make things painless for the player and, I’ve always suspected, an insistent belief that actually making players actively think might be for the best 🧠✨.

Ubisoft, so brutally criticized for its commitment to a very specific and ubiquitous open-world structure of climbing towers and revealing icons, has suffered considerably, caught in this tangle of opposing ideas and lost identities as a result.

The problem was, and is, that the real problem is really only attached to the question marks. The criticism of this approach really encompassed the entire philosophy of the Assassin's Creed games, and beyond, many open worlds, both from Ubisoft and others, that preceded and followed. Namely: passivity. You play these games on autopilot, as the recent Assassin's Creed games perfectly exemplified by the fact that you could even have your horse automatically race to your selected destination, a convenient, hands-free experience that allowed you to get a couple of extra dopamine hits from your phone between smashing skulls, grabbing loot, and opening chests. 📱✨

Your mindset as a player here, in games that induce a passive mode, is not to discover, investigate, experiment, and inquire, but to be regularly presented with the game by the game in rhythmic and perfectly timed intervals. 🎮✨

For most, if not all, the signs of friction are lubricated into oblivion by all the comforting and soothing tools in the box. 🛠️😌

That means question marks as bait to guide you, yes, but also GTA-esque GPS-style directions to get you there; objective reminders as bullet points in the top left corner; instant fast travel; icons that appear above all interactable character heads; chests that make sounds; loot that teleports to your magical storages when you forget to pick it up; and, naturally, good old yellow paint on the scalable borders. 🗺️💡

Each one is a kind of silent homage to Bioshock's big, invisible arrow in the sky. 🌌🕹️ In other words: feed me; don't make me hunt – unless hunting feels like feeding, too. 🍽️🎯

Image credit: Ubisoft

Once again, this whole discussion is pretty worn out. We had it with a great sigh of relief from high-flying critics when it came out. Breath of the Wild and all the (somewhat misguided) hope it inspired for more inventive triple-A action-adventure designs (guilty). And the bubbling discontent with those yellow paint splatters every time they appear (also guilty). But it's even reflected in the comments of truly brilliant game directors.

Is traveling boring? That's not true. It's only a problem because your game is boring. 🎮✨ All you have to do is make traveling fun,

“That’s why you put things in the right places for players to discover, or invent enemy spawning methods that create different experiences every time, or force players into blind situations where they don’t know if it’s safe or not 10 meters in front of them,” Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno told IGN when asked about fast travel earlier last year, effectively condemning an entire modern discipline in a single sentence. “That’s why you put things in the right places for players to discover, or invent enemy spawning methods that create different experiences every time, or force players into blind situations where they don’t know if it’s safe or not 10 meters in front of them.” 🕵️‍♂️🎲

Over time, the discussion has distilled, as it always does, into a kind of analytical truism: the discovery of Breath of the Wild It's good; Ubisoft's handholding style is bad. 🚀🌍

Well, I don't agree. Or really I'm not totally Okay, but that doesn't sound all that interesting. The distanced approaches to modern Zelda games, from Dragon's Dogma 2, and the smaller-scale efforts influenced in that direction – think: Sable – are wonderful, yes. Almost bordering on genius, in fact. I think they're, in most ways, 'better,' requiring more sophistication and nuance in design, or at least more willing engagement on your part as a player – this isn't a relativistic argument about how it's all just your opinion, bro. But, also: it would be wrong to say there isn't some genius amidst the Ubisofts of this world. 💡🎮

It's a harder challenge to describe, by the way. Picture this: You're galloping through the tree-covered hills outside Osaka toward a distant landmark—the masterful, dazzling tenshu of Osaka Castle, perhaps—when you spot a villager in distress beside an overturned cart on the side of the road. You stop for a quick chat and, after a bit of guessing, manage to glean some information about rumors of a lost dog nearby in need of comfort. The dog is in the opposite direction from the castle, you can tell by eyeing the newly added marker on your increasingly cluttered map, but it's a bit closer; the castle can wait. 🐾❤️

So you go meet this dog, and a little quest happens as you might expect, and then you're climbing a hill near an eagle tower (we still have those!) that needs to be unlocked, so you rush to do it, and now more of your foggy map has cleared and more question marks appear, the last ones in the area, which annoys you. So you think: I better download those question marks since I'm close. And those question marks lead you to more quests, which are near more eagle towers...! 🔍🗺️

This kind of dynamic is the opposite of intentionality, the opposite of control, and possibly even the opposite of empowerment, or satisfaction. When games like Modern Assassin's Creed and other Ubisoft titles are described as "junk food," there's more accuracy there than people realize—though arguably the more apt term for it is "snack food." A good snack isn't satisfying, after all. Good snacks are irresistible! And they're irresistible by design, engineered with ultra-processed precision to keep those orange-covered fingers chasing more in the bowl.

I referenced a brilliant blog last week about the ways in which games have been designed for addiction, not just in the obvious methods related to gameplay, but in the many specific ones of video games 🎮, from the pleasurable feeling of leveling up 🆙 to the creaky opening of a chest 🗺️ and the way these sister industries don’t want you to spend, but to play, through the constant drip of mini-rewards 🎁.

You can include map icons 🗺️ and question marks ❓ in this too: the same urge to open a quest pack and see what task is inside – but this only leads to another question. Is all of this, in fact, a bad thing? 🤔

This is where it gets more interesting and more complicated. The argument against it is similar, but not identical, to the argument against those finger-staining snacks. It's an argument based on immediate harms, one, but also on a kind of systemic control exerted over you. To return to that analogy: by developing foods in such a way that they are perpetually irresistible, intentionally unsatisfying, you are being manipulated into eating and buying more and more of them. Bad for your health, yes, but also bad in a deeper way—bad because of the dulling effect of it all, the softening of any real, conscious choice, the images of a zombified herd it conjures; bad for your spirit. ❤️💔

So this argument would say that for games like Assassin's Creed and others like it, getting caught in this zen loop of discovering, following, discovering, and following again is like being stupidified That's why. 🎮😵‍💫 And so, there's immediate damage: Sitting for hours longer than intended is as lethal as anything in our diets, we're told, but hey, we're used to that by now. 🍔⏰

But perhaps most importantly, it's the spiritual damage. Here, in this temple of escapism, your senses dull, your conscience and righteous claim on the wider world and its endless injustices are extinguished, and your will to bring about truly meaningful change fades, trapped in the endless loop of discovery. 🌌🧠

All those residual minutes you'd normally use purposefully instead become another hour spent climbing large, beautifully rendered digital trees and jumping off them again. 🌳💫

Is this really bad, then? Well, it depends. We've been dulling our senses for centuries, after all. If I weren't busy stabbing nasty samurai in Assassin's Creed: Shadows this past week, I could be enjoying a hot bath, taking a walk, or opening the 4K Blu-ray of "The Lord of the Rings" for the 247th time. Or maybe eating some chips. We have a duty not to escape from our existences, absolutely, and the need to reject this is intensified by the sheer amount of devices, systems, and programs that drain all the attention of our free time. 🙅‍♂️

But we also have a duty to rest between fights, to give ourselves a piece of our minds, and to appreciate the craftsmanship of a great, juicy video game. This is all part of the cosmic mix. It's good that we're questioning this, good that we're drawing lines in the sand, good that we're waking up to the ways we're being conditioned or disconnected. And it's also good that developers like Ubisoft are growing increasingly comfortable with their place among all this, as purveyors of slightly more basic kinds of fun. 🎉🎈

In short, open-world games are at a creative crossroads 🎮✨ where the classic formula is already feeling worn out, and the quest for innovation clashes with old habits and expectations. While titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild pave the way for a more organic and artistic experience of discovery 🌿🗺️, others, like *Assassin's Creed: Valhalla*, show the difficulties of balancing freedom with constant guidance and information overload 📜⚔️.

This tension reflects a larger challenge: how to deliver worlds that invite active exploration and wonder 🤩🔍, without falling into passivity or the addictive cycle of superficial rewards. Recognizing this complexity is key to moving toward more sophisticated and thoughtful design that respects both player agency and the integrity of the game 🎯🕹️.

In the end, the balance between simple pleasure and meaningful depth, between immediate fun and genuine discovery, will be the key to keeping open worlds relevant and exciting in the future 🚀🌟. Because, like any great journey, the real magic is in choosing when to stop and take in the scenery 🏞️✨ and when to set out on an adventure—always on our own terms.