Assassin's Creed Shadows Size Revealed by Ubisoft

AC Shadows shouldn't be as large as Valhalla.

Ubisoft has revealed roughly how large Assassin's Creed Shadows will be. With the last few mainline Assassin's Creed entries, Ubisoft has greatly expanded the scope and scale of each game. Outside of 2023's Assasin's Creed Mirage, the franchise has continued to feature more sprawling environments in Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. Rather than try to outdo the size that was seen in these games, though, Ubisoft says it's trying to make Shadows roughly the same scale. 

Speaking to IGN, Assassin's Creed Shadows creative director Jonathan Dumont said that the game's size will roughly equal what has been seen with Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. Of these three, Dumont said that Assassin's Creed Origins is the game that Shadows resembles the most. More than anything, though, it was stressed that those at Ubisoft want the world of AC Shadows to feel true to the real world while still implementing many environmental landmarks and locales. 

"It's in-line with the latest Assassin's Creeds that we've done," Dumont said. "On a scale level, maybe we can compare it a little bit more to the size of Assassin's Creed Origins. [...] We did want to have a much closer to real life scale ratio. So because castles took a lot of space, and we really wanted the mountains to feel like mountains, [we've made] the environments feel wider in the game. But I would say around the same size as Origins."

If Assassin's Creed Shadows really is similar to what was seen in Origins, this would suggest that the game is going to be smaller in terms of runtime when compared to Odyssey and Valhalla. In the case of Valhalla, specifically, the Norse-themed entry in the franchise was the largest that Ubisoft had ever created. In fact, the game was so expansive that an average playthrough took roughly 60 hours, based on data from How Long to Beat. By comparison, Assassin's Creed Origins took about 30 hours to just complete its main story. If this holds true with Shadows, it would give fans a much shorter experience compared to Valhalla, which was one of the game's biggest criticisms. 

As for the release of Assassin's Creed Shadows, it's known that the game is set to launch this calendar year on November 14, 2024. When it does launch, it will be the first Assassin's Creed title made solely for current-gen platforms which includes PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.