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Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the game that finally scratched the itch for fans looking for an AC title set in Japan, came out earlier this month, with gamers taking on the role of either the shinobi Naoe or the samurai Yasuke.
In our review, we called it “the most put together Assassin’s Creed in years,” with its “satisfying gameplay and its dazzling technical achievements.”
And helping put the game together is Ubisoft Philippines, the Philippine arm of the French gaming giant. Established in 2016, the country’s first “triple-A” development studio has worked on previous AC titles, Valhalla (2020) and Mirage (2023), with the team building upon that valuable experience to improve the level of their work in Shadows.
The Philippine studio is one of more than 17 Ubisoft teams globally behind the title, as listed on the Shadows website, with development headed by Ubisoft Quebec.
The Philippine team highlighted their work on a Facebook post on Facebook, March 20.
We also caught up with Katrina Banzali, project coordinator for Assassin’s Creed Shadows at Ubisoft Philippines. A geodetic engineering graduate from the UP Diliman, Banzali — an avid gamer and tabletop RPG fan — would find herself surveying digital landscapes instead when she pursued a career in project management at Ubisoft Philippines in 2022.
Along with Shadows, Banzali has also been project coordinator for 2024’s Skull and Bones. (Rappler’s questions in bold.)
AC SHADOWS. Project coordinator Katrina Banzali says she has been excited for an AC game set in Japan, like many other fans of the seriesFirst of all, congratulations on the work that you and the Philippine team did for AC Shadows. I know though that this isn’t the first time that the team has worked on an AC game, having previously worked on Valhalla as well.
Do you think the team’s time and experience working on Valhalla made it easier to work on Shadows? Or does Shadows have its own unique creative challenges that you had to find solutions for?
Thank you! The team has definitely learned a lot from both their work on Valhalla and Mirage, and that experience helped make working on Shadows easier in a way, since we know the fabric of the franchise, and previous workflows laid the foundation for new ones.
Being the first AC exclusively on the current generation of consoles, and the new Anvil Engine, there are a lot of new features under-the-hood for the game. Our teams had to learn how to work with global illumination and micropolygon technology, alongside the addition of destructibles, dynamic lighting, weather, and seasons.
Of course, there’s also the uniqueness of AC Shadows itself — the Feudal Japanese setting and having two different protagonists. This posed quite the creative challenge. For example, our Architecture team had to ensure the structures we create work for both Naoe and Yasuke, given their differences in height and movement. As par for the course on an AC title, we also had to do our research on the culture, architecture, construction techniques, weapons, materials, armor, and clothes of the era.
Tell us about the work you put into Shadows. What elements of the game did you work on? And what are the Philippine team’s contributions?
The Philippine studio worked on architecture, weapons and characters. On architecture, our team worked to produce a large amount of the destroyed structures for the game — from ruined castle complexes, abandoned mansions turned into bandit camps, destroyed temples, and war-torn villages.
Our weapons team handled the majority of weapon concepts in the game, alongside around half of the 3D models (including their variations and rigging). For characters, we created a significant variety of different assets — from armor, outfits, heads, hair, and accessories for different NPCs, and a couple for Yasuke as well.
The team worked extensively on assets for NPCs but it also marks the first time that they worked on armor sets for a main playable character in an AC gameHow big is the Philippine team that worked on the game? And what were the key roles? Could you mention some of the key members of your team and what they do?
A significant portion of the Philippine studio worked on the game. Some of our key roles were of course, our leads, who oversaw their own specific section of the game.
Firstly, our associate producer, Alfonse Angliongto, played a pivotal role in coordinating with our co-development studios and the lead studio in Quebec, to make sure every aspect of development was aligned.
On the Architecture team, we had associate lead artist, Nissi Gatan, who led our largest team on the project. Since the bulk of the destroyed structures in the game came from our team, we helped significantly in setting the tone for the war-torn areas of AC Shadows’ Japan.
For weapons, we had senior hard surface artist Dale Gacusan, whose extensive weapons art experience led our weapons team to continue to produce the high-quality weapons our studio has been known for since AC Valhalla.
Meanwhile, our lead character artist Kenneth Hitosis, led our Characters team to new heights, with AC Shadows being the studio’s first AC where our team was given the opportunity to produce player-character outfits.
We also can’t forget our tech artist, Charlene Altamirano, and the tech art team, whose expertise helped all three of our major topics work efficiently and shine. Several tools were developed specifically for AC Shadows that we’re continuing to use in future projects.
Lastly, our development testing team pioneered by James Quitoriano, whose collective hard work and dedication ensures every asset that we submit to the build works well, causes no issues, and contributes to the sense of immersion we’re targeting for the game.
NAOE. The ninja Naoe sneaks around in environments that the Manila team helped designWhat were the toughest challenges that you guys faced when working on the game?
As I mentioned previously, some of the challenges involved the game’s unique setting — feudal Japan has been such a highly-anticipated setting for the franchise for so long that we knew we had to give it our all when it came to research, while also allowing our teams to express their creativity while remaining grounded.
All the new tech also posed quite an exciting challenge for the team. Micropolygon tech, for example, allowed the team to model in so much more detail on each asset compared to previous AC titles, so they really had to strike the right balance — how much detail is just right before it becomes too visually noisy for the player?
The two protagonists also required a significant amount of testing and experimentation — Naoe and Yasuke have very different builds and move sets, and interact with the world in vastly different ways, so we had to take this into account as we created structures and weapons for them. On architecture for example, each structure had to be tested for each protagonist to ensure they’re able to climb (or not climb) according to the game’s direction.
Our weapons team also faced the challenge to go beyond what the team has already proven in AC Valhalla, and push for even greater quality given the new tech and the game’s extensive weapon variety.
For characters, it was all about ensuring our team was a swiss army knife — able to take on different kinds of assets thanks to their wide variety of skills and competencies. Each aspect of a character — heads, hair, outfits — has its own unique workflow, and our team had to be able to adapt to the assets that came our way.
How many designs overall — from weapons to armor — did you guys work on?
For weapons, our team worked on nearly all the weapon concepts in the game, and around half of the 3D weapon models — this includes Naoe’s signature kusarigama, which you see her wield extensively in the trailers.
The Philippine weapons team was also responsible for setting-up the pipeline for weapon variations, allowing our 3D artists to flex their creativity while coming up with interesting and diverse re-skins for the weapons they created without the need for additional concept art.
Meanwhile, the characters the team worked on a bulk of the game’s samurai NPC armor, and several heads, hair, and outfits for the Portuguese NPCs of the game — both generic and named. The team also worked on the outfit for one of the shinobi recruits, Katsuhime, and 2 armor sets for Yasuke (First Mate’s Gear and Samurai Daimyo Armor of Mastery), the studio’s first outfits for a main playable character in AC.
What was the workflow like? Did you have finalized designs coming in from the main Ubisoft studio, and then you create the 3D models? Or did you guys go to museums to look at real life pieces as inspiration for your designs? Tell us about what’s the usual workflow from concept to seeing the actual object in the game, and where Ubisoft PH comes in, in that process.
It depends — for the Weapons team, the team handled the full pipeline, so they received a brief from the lead studio, Quebec, for a weapon design.
Concept artists here in the Philippines send them several variations to choose from after extensive research for references and inspiration (museum artifacts and specifically-dated auction house listings are very useful for this step) and then come up with a final polished version.
This then gets sent to the 3D artists on our weapons team, where they create the 3D model, while our tech artists do the final rigging and integration of the weapon in the game. One of the unique things about weapons in AC Shadows is that each weapon is modular, with interchangeable parts, so we had to make sure every part of every weapon would work well with every other variant of the same part that was created.
For architecture, we also worked on these from the ground-up, collecting material references, researching period-accurate construction techniques, and the like — a specific challenge for our team was looking for weathering and destruction references — we had to answer questions like what would a burnt-down wall created in this era look like? How does that differ between a plaster wall and a wooden one? We had to keep the silhouette in mind as we made sure each structure remained grounded and realistic, while also readable for the player.
There are wonderful vistas in the game, contrasting with the destruction found in some war-torn villagesCharacters however, had a slightly different approach, the lead studio’s briefs were much more detailed and specific for these, and we worked closely together with the characters team in Quebec to adhere to the game’s art direction while also allowing our artists the freedom to put their own creativity into their assets.
A lot of Filipinos love Japanese culture — the swords, the samurai, the katana, ninjas, all that stuff. So what was it like for the team when they got to work on a game that features exactly these things?
A lot of the dev team here in the Philippine studio love Japanese culture as well — I’ve personally been wishing for an Assassin’s Creed game to be set in Feudal Japan since I played the very first AC years and years ago, so it’s been such an honor to do my own small part into bringing that to life.
I know the team feels the same way — there’s been a lot of enthusiasm from the team all throughout our production for AC Shadows, and it’s from both the exciting challenges of the work itself, and the team’s personal interest in the setting. We can’t wait to play the release version of the game ourselves as well alongside the rest of the world! – Rappler.com
