Assassin's Creed Shadows continues to evolve as Ubisoft implements both visible gameplay improvements and behind-the-scenes technical enhancements. The latest updates reveal fascinating insights into the game's development process and the company's future direction for rendering technology, while also addressing player feedback about movement mechanics.
Parkour System Receives Stealth Enhancement
Ubisoft has quietly implemented significant improvements to Assassin's Creed Shadows' parkour system in Title Update 4, without explicitly mentioning these changes in the patch notes. The enhancement focuses on maintaining vertical height consistency during free running, making the movement system more reliable and predictable. According to community parkour expert 'Ropotopolous', who discovered and documented the changes, object targeting now feels more consistent, with the system now prioritizing foot landings over hand grabs in many situations.
More Parkour Improvements Coming Soon
This stealth update appears to be just the beginning of Ubisoft's plans to refine the movement system. The developer commented that these changes lay the groundwork for our upcoming height-gaining side and back ejects update later this month. Ubisoft admitted they just couldn't wait to implement some improvements ahead of the more comprehensive parkour update scheduled for late May, showing their commitment to addressing player feedback about the game's movement mechanics.
Ray Tracing vs. Baked Lighting: Technical Revelations
During a presentation at the Game Developer Conference, Ubisoft's Nicolas Lopez shared remarkable technical insights about Assassin's Creed Shadows' lighting systems. The data revealed why the development team has been gradually moving away from traditional baked lighting toward ray tracing solutions. According to the presentation, if Assassin's Creed Shadows had used the same baked global illumination method as earlier titles in the series, it would have required an astonishing 2TB of lighting data and nearly two years to complete the baking process.
Ray Tracing Technical Data
- Baked lighting for AC Shadows would require: 2TB of data
- Baked lighting production time: Nearly 2 years
- AC Origins (for comparison): 450GB lighting data, 3 months baking time
Console RTGI Performance
- Xbox Series X: 4.30ms (at 1440p)
- PlayStation 5: 5.00ms (at 1440p)
- Xbox Series S: Faster than both (but running at 900p)
Ray-Traced Features Support
- Ray-traced global illumination: All platforms
- Ray-traced reflections: PlayStation 5 Pro exclusive (among consoles)
Console Performance Comparisons
The GDC presentation also provided interesting performance data for ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) across different platforms. With the game using quarter resolution for RTGI, the Xbox Series X demonstrated better performance than the base PlayStation 5, with processing times of 4.30ms versus 5.00ms respectively. The Xbox Series S showed even faster processing, though this is primarily because the game runs at a lower internal resolution of 900p on that system, compared to 1440p on both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
PlayStation 5 Pro's Exclusive Feature
The presentation highlighted that ray-traced reflections are exclusive to the PlayStation 5 Pro among console versions of Assassin's Creed Shadows. This feature couldn't be compared to other consoles since they don't support it, with the only available comparison being against PC performance using an RTX 4080 GPU, which predictably showed superior capabilities.
The Future of Lighting in Assassin's Creed
Ubisoft's technical deep dive suggests that ray tracing will play an increasingly important role in future game development. While Assassin's Creed Shadows currently supports both baked global illumination and ray-traced global illumination due to the diverse hardware landscape, the developers indicated a clear preference to rely more heavily on ray tracing technologies in future titles, as it significantly simplifies the development pipeline despite the performance costs.
Comprehensive Update Roadmap
Beyond the parkour improvements, Title Update 4 has already delivered a new quest chain and overhauled the Codex system while fixing numerous bugs. Ubisoft has promised more updates throughout the year as they continue to refine and expand upon Assassin's Creed Shadows, demonstrating their long-term commitment to supporting and improving the game experience.