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I turned my Assassin's Creed Shadows hideout into my personal cat and tanuki sanctuary, human allies be damned

De-based building.

Naoe pets a black and white cat in the Hideout of Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Image credit: Eurogamer/Ubisoft

Having played around six hours of Assassin's Creed Shadows last week, Ubisoft's latest stabathon is shaping up very nicely indeed. As part of my preview, I was able to get to grips with all sorts of new features and systems in the game, and chief among them was its customisable Hideout base. This is where dual protagonists Yasuke and Naoe will retreat to between missions, and on the surface it functions in a very similar way to Valhalla's homestead of Ravensthorpe.

The key difference this time, however, is that you have much more control over the placement of your buildings and how they develop as Shadows progresses. This takes the form of a Sims-like building mode where holding down Y will present you with a top-down grid to begin your construction.

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"We all played Valhalla," game director Charles Benoit tells me. "We saw the interest of having a place to go back [to] and meeting characters that you found. We wanted to push [that] a bit further in terms of customisation to make it more your own thing. So it was important that if we do that, let's do it [in a] way to really embrace the customisation. It's thematic of the story to have this group and these reunited people and make a family again. So it felt good with the Hideout as a place [to] reconstruct your own community."

Much like Valhalla, building certain key rooms will unlock extra bonuses and stat perks you can take advantage of, though there are plenty of less important thematic buildings to decorate your space with as well, plus numerous types of covered walkways, paving options, stones, foliage, trees and incidental objects to noodle about with for added flavour (many of which will change with the game's dynamic seasons, I might add, letting you really go to town with year-long gardening plans).

A top down view of the building mode in Assassin's Creed Shadows, where the player is placing a Tera building.
A study is being constructed in the building mode of Assassin's Creed Shadows.
An engawa corridor is being constructed between two buildings in the Hideout building mode of Assassin's Creed Shadows.
The flexible camera tools and intuitive interface make it reasonably easy to see where buildings can and can't go, and where they can potentially join up with each other. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Ubisoft

Or, you could simply turn it into your own personalised ark of pet-able animals, as I tried to do during my hour-long session with the Hideout's building mode.

Alas, you'll need to unlock these creatures as you go about exploring Shadows' large map before you can bring them back to your Hideout to pet at will. For the more domestic animals out there, you can do this by simply petting them while you're out and about - your cats and shiba inu pups, for example, which were in plentiful supply in the castle town of Himeji where I spent most of my playtime.

Cats are being placed on a cobblestone path in the building mode of Assassin's Creed Shadows.
A female shinobi pets a kitten's belly in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
A female shinobi pets a cat in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Adult cats have different pet animations to their smaller, kitten counterparts, I'll have you know. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Ubisoft

Other wildlife, though, such as fawns, tanuki and monkeys, will be a little harder to seek out. For those, you'll need to keep an eye out for special sumi-e moments, where Yasuke and Naoe will whip out an ink brush and paper scroll to capture these creatures as a painting - provided they can creep close enough to do so without disturbing the scene in front of them. These scrolls can also then be hung inside some of the buildings in your Hideout in designated decor stations, alongside weapons, clothing and other ornaments you accrue, giving you a little extra personal flourish to adorn your walls with.

A female shinobi pets a tanuki pup in long grass in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Adult tanuki will ignore you, sadly, but pups will give you a curious sniff and a nuzzle. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Ubisoft

Key rooms such as the Hiroma (the heart of your Hideout), stables, forge and dojo can be upgraded by collecting various materials you'll find in treasure boxes on your adventures - again, very like Valhalla - but if you decide you need to either move or destroy one of these buildings in the future, fear not - you'll recoup your costs if you tear it down, and there's no real penalty for fiddling or tweaking your setup.

You could, for example, place your buildings very spread out to begin with, but later decide that you actually want one, huge, interconnecting fortress - which is entirely possible thanks to each building's easily marked up entry points, and the way they've been designed to all interlock with sliding doors and accessible verandas. Buildings snap intuitively to the right grid spaces, too, and the camera can pan, pivot, rotate and zoom in and out to make sure everything's just right before you set it down.

Once you've placed your building, you're then given the option to choose a roof pattern for it - I could pick from a rustic farming roof made of straw, a middle-class samurai style with tiles, or a fancy daimyo roof, replete with gold trimmings and fancy ornaments - as well as an accompanying wall style. Finally, if you purchase premium cosmetics from the game's Store, they'll be here to decorate them with, too.

Wall options for a building in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
It's unclear right now how many wall and roof options will be available by default (everything was unlocked during my preview build), but the fancier daimyo options will be worth the wait if you're forced to start with the rustic straw options. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Ubisoft

I started by building a Tera - a Buddhist altar that boosts any experience gained by 10 percent - and then connected it to my pre-existing Hiroma with a series of engawa corridors. Again, it was very easy to see where I needed to put these corridors so they matched up with the small stairway entrances. With a small space left between, I thought, hey, that might make for a nice zen garden, so down went some raked white stone gravel that was available, as well as some stones and large rocks that also took my fancy.

There are set-piece items too - watchtowers, torii gates and large shinto shrines that come with their own accompanying sakura trees - though I was a bit sad to see the one bridge option available couldn't be used to connect the main part of my hideout space with the smaller, more secluded build space across the river near the fields (and I didn't spot any options to build man-made streams either, to make bridges feel more practical).

Still, it's pleasing to do all this work in the Hideout's building mode and then immediately be able to see the fruits of that labour down at ground level. All it takes is a couple of seconds to load back into the game's regular exploration mode, with all your construction ready and waiting for you to go and nose around up close.

A shinto shrine with sakura trees is being placed on a grassy village plain in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
A female shinobi walks up to a red torii gate and shinto shrine in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
It's very satisfying to place an object in the world, and then immediately be able to go and see it in the flesh. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Ubisoft

"It's all real-time," creative director Jonathan Dumont says. "Everything happens there and you just go back right into it." And as I walked around my newly-planted zen garden, an idea struck - what this place really needed was cats. Lots and lots of cats. So I held down Y again, stuck a load of cats inside it, and in less than a minute I was scratching their ears and bellies as Naoe again. You needn't worry about mixing different kinds of animals, either - if you put a fox and a rabbit down together, for example, "they're automatically friends," Dumont laughs.

Sure, it's reasonably simple stuff compared to fully-fledged building games out there, but Benoit seemed fully aware of the challenges this mode posed during development. "We're starting from scratch, so we needed to scope it in a way - because there are games just about constructing, let's say we have The Sims - so we needed to find [out] how much can we push it, and [have it] be reasonable with everything else we needed to do," he says. "I think we found a good compromise on everything you can do with it and give [players] enough creativity so your Hideout and my Hideout will look different."

A large scarecrow is placed in Assassin's Creed Shadows' hideout
A female shinobi walks up to a large scarecrow in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
The sense of scale is hard to appreciate in the building mode itself, but several objects are pleasingly large in person. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Ubisoft

Indeed, while you can't tweak things to the nth degree like The Sims or other building games, there are still tons of things to unlock for your Hideout, and I certainly didn't feel like it was lacking in options. I was also pleased to see there wasn't a limit on the number of objects you could place in your Hideout either, effectively sealing the deal on my plan to stuff the place with as many cats as possible once the game comes out in full.

As associate game director Dany St-Laurent puts it: "One of the things we really wanted to transpire in the Hideout is the feeling that you're basically bringing back your adventure." He cites Japan's regional craft and produce specialities as being a big inspiration for this, as "usually this makes a form of gift that you can bring back to your friends and family and share your travel and be reminded of what you did there," and it's this feeling they wanted to capture in Shadows.

A top down view of a building as the player decides what decoration sets to use in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Alas, you're limited to picking fixed "Station Sets" to determine what decorations will appear in your buildings, but it's great to see your sumi-e scrolls and other artefacts up close when you're walking through. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Ubisoft
Naoe enters a dojo in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
A sumi-e scroll of a heron from Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Fun fact: both Naoe and Yasuke's shoes will automatically be removed when they enter buildings. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Ubisoft

As well as paintings, collectibles and animals, the Hideout is also the place where your recruitable human allies will hang out, as well as your network of scouts that can be sent out to retrieve information about farther flung regions on the map you might need to investigate later. These allies can be managed in the Kakurega room - a kind of safehouse akin to those in Mirage, which you'll also find scattered in various towns and villages in the rest of the world. Each ally has their own abilities you can upgrade as well, and Naoe and Yasuke's relationship with them will advance the more you talk to them. Sometimes, allies will only speak to one of your main duo, and each character will have their own unique romance options to pursue along the way, associate narrative director Brookes Davies tells me.

"I think this is really a reflection of how different they are as people," Davies says. "We do also have different types of relationships, so you can go from platonic to committed romantic relationship, and it was important to the team to have some more developed relationships or to have that option if that's a thing players want to explore."

Yaya talks about her husband in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Yasuke talks to Tomiko about skewered heads in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
The Allies menu screen from Assassin's Creed Shadows
Allies must be recruited before they're available to chat to your Hideout, or taken out on missions. | Image credit: Eurogamer/Ubisoft

Alas, I didn't get to see any such romance scenes during my limited time with the game, but I do like the idea of having a wider variety of possible relationships to pursue so I'm not simply jumping everyone's bones like I did with Kassandra back in Odyssey. "It fits well with the other relationship building that we do in the game," Davies adds, "and having it as a spectrum, I think, gives players an opportunity to try some different things."

Overall, then, the Hideout seems to be making a lot of smart and considered additions to the foundations laid down in Valhalla, and the only thing that remains to be seen is just how arduous or streamlined it will be to unlock all its best building blocks. I, for one, will definitely be prioritising a place for my cat and tanuki menagerie, and I look forward to seeing exactly how far I can stretch my animal sanctuary on 20th March.


This article is based on a press event in Quebec, for which Ubisoft covered travel and accomodation.

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