There are plenty of ways of making games more immersive, if that’s what you’re into. You can head into the options menu and turn off the HUD. You can elect to play on ‘realistic’ modes that have you die from one bullet wound. You can toggle cinematic cameras when wandering around towns, or riding your horse into the sunset – maybe even playing some Ennio Morricone through your music streaming service of choice to really amp things up.
Typically, especially in the Assassin’s Creed series, these methods are player-directed. Things you can choose to do yourself to try and eke a bit more immersion out of the title, to try and offset the salad of icons, HUD elements, and game-y visual language that chokes out the screen. Sure, Assassin’s Creed has the excuse of your protagonist (and, therefore, you the player) interfacing with the world via the Animus, explaining away why there are so many overlays, graphs, stats and numbers.
But it’s a lot. Given that Ubisoft intentionally develops Assassin’s Creed games to be as historically accurate as it possibly can (see: the Discovery Tour mode you can access in Origins and Odyssey) it’s a real shame. Wandering along the banks of the Nile in 43 BC Egypt and watching the wading birds snatch fish out of the river would hit so much better if you weren’t keenly aware of a Level 23 bruiser watching you from a skiff on the open water. Wandering around the muddy fields of Britain in 872 AD having constant reminders about sub-quests, collectibles, and a powerful hallucination you’re waiting to have constantly interrupt your drunken game of knucklebones is a bit of a turn off.
I am not the only person that thinks so, either. It’s a fairly well-documented phenomena at this point: Assassin’s Creed games have a problem with immersion. What’s the point in sinking hundreds of hours into making the clouds look absolutely stunning if people are going to have their eyes on the bastard mini-map the entire time?
At least with the newest title in the series, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft is trying to do something a little different. The developer – as well as letting you fiddle around with all the usual guff like HUD settings, camera preferences, and so on – makes you choose something at the start of the game that I cannot believe it hasn’t thought to add before: Immersive Mode.
Essentially, Immersive Mode defaults to having characters speak in their native tongue. If you’ve watched any Shogun (or know much about the Sengoku period of Japan at all), you’ll know this includes mostly Japanese, with a generous helping of Portuguese, thanks to all those Catholic missionaries cutting about on the island. Given that the story of Shadows closely follows the actions of Oda Nobunaga and his attempts to unify the nation, the Portuguese crop up a lot; it was the Catholics of the nation that first introduced Japan to firearms and other goods, drastically altering the political and military trajectory of Japan throughout the late 1500s.
Now, I know a lot of people like their games to be in English, no matter where they’re set. Often with comical results. Remember when the Dynasty Warriors games pronounced the revered military leader Cao Cao as ‘Cow Cow’ rather than the correct ‘Tsao Tsao’? Heady days. But Ubisoft is trying to tell a serious, romantic tale of historical intrigue here – not have us kill 1000 dudes at the same time with a massive naginata before shredding a riff and delving into some anime-inspired nonsense.
The result, for such a seemingly small option, really is more immersive. In just a few hours of playing, Immersive Mode paid off massively in a couple of ways. First, the voice talent is good (we’ve come to expect that from Ubi). Second, I was really taken aback by how natural it was to hear the Japanese peasantry talking amongst themselves, and then a line of Portuguese would immediately grab my attention – and I’d end up walking towards a group of churchmen to see what the craic is.
As well as being a more authentic historical experience, using your ears as well as your eyes to explore feels like it adds to the gameplay flow in a really natural way. Three of the main pillars Ubisoft has been targeting for this game, when it comes to immersion, are: “scale, culture, and diversity”. In this mode alone, you can see how these three strands intersect and make something more complete – like a helix of DNA the Assassin’s Creed series loves to riff on so much.
Little touches like this make me excited for Shadows. By all accounts, this game really is make or break for Ubisfot, so enhancing the experience we’ve come to know over the past 17 years like this is a sure-fire way to keep people interested. Let’s hope it works as well in the main game as it did at preview, then.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows comes to Xbox Series, PS5 and PC on its new release date of March 20, 2025, after catching a last-minute delay earlier this year.