‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ creative director Jonathan Dumont has revealed the game didn’t initially feature Yasuke, but the team found bringing the samurai into the story would “allow you to have a dynamic between two characters for narrative [purposes]”.
‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ originally didn’t feature two protagonists.
The latest action-adventure title – which is helmed by Ubisoft – allows you to play as samurai Yasuke and shinobi Naoe, though creative director Jonathan Dumont has now revealed ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ was initially envisioned with only a single shinobi protagonist.
He explained to GamesRadar+: “When we started early on, we only had a shinobi – it’s ‘Assassin’s Creed Japan’, it’s probably going to be a shinobi.
“But the more we were playing with the character – we were in the conception phase – we were like, ‘Ok, we could do this with the character, there’s things on the samurai side.’ We were sort of making a stealth tank, but it didn’t quite work. It was diluting the fantasy of the shinobi.”
Dumont added the idea to bring Yasuke into the story came to the team after finding that the second protagonist “would also give [them] a different point of view for the game, a different voice, and allow you to have a dynamic between two characters for narrative [purposes]”.
He said: “It became clear, before going into production, that we’d probably do a story with two characters.
“The archetypes were coming out of the conception phase anyway – they were splitting, but it was happening naturally. So we decided to add a samurai.”
Assassin’s Creed Shadows initially didn’t include duel protagonists, creative director reveals
