Ubisoft took trips to Japan with expert guides for Assassin's Creed Shadows and spent 'a lot of time' researching on top of that — 'We're making video games, but for Assassin's Creed we try to be credible'

The team looked at "thousands of pictures and videos" for research

22 Mar 2026, 17:00 · TechRadar

News By Demi Williams Contributions from Dashiell Wood published 22 March 2026

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

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Assassin's Creed Shadows art director Thierry Dansereau says the team took guided trips around Japan as research for the game
He says the team visited most of the locations in the game
They also continued to conduct research "throughout the whole project"

Ubisoft has revealed that it did extensive research for the development of Assassin's Creed Shadows and even took guided trips around Japan for inspiration.

That's according to art director Thierry Dansereau, who discussed the process during an event held to celebrate the game's first anniversary.

"For pretty much all of the Assassin's Creed games, there are trips organized, so I was one of the lucky ones [on the team] that had a chance to go there," Dansereau said.

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"We did the tour and visited most of the locations that the game has. It was a quite intense tour, I have to be honest, we visited two to three sites per day, and we had experts with us, pretty much explaining everything we were asking for."

Alongside guided tours, the development team also visited museums, watched movies, read books about Japan and its culture, and looked at "thousands of pictures and videos" for even more research.

"Of course, we're making video games, but for Assassin's Creed we try to be credible as much as possible," he added, "and then it's a work of fiction as well, but we need to have a good understanding of the foundation of what we're doing, so that's why we spend a lot of time researching.

"Actually, we researched throughout the whole project to be honest," he said. "But at first it's tough..."

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