The Assassin’s Creed series has suffered from an identity crisis over its past many entries, with the stealth franchise slowly but surely turning into an open world action-adventure RPG. Part of the series’ evolution has seen the release of AC titles with overwhelmingly, unnecessarily large maps. Fortunately, Ubisoft seems to have been listening.

In an interview conducted by the magazine ‘PLAY’ (and reported by GamesRadar), AC Shadows’ art director – Thierry Dansereau – spoke on the team’s approach for the open world, revealing that the map size will be smaller than Valhalla’s but bigger than the much more confined AC: Mirage. According to Dansereau “We're talking about Origins big” – which is still a pretty sizable map, especially compared to the early entries.

Up until 2015’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, the maps for the AC titles had been mostly kept in check, with the smallest being AC1’s Damascus at an estimated 0.13km squared and the largest being Syndicate at 3.7km squared.

From Origins onwards however, the map sizes continued to balloon massively, with AC Odyssey and Valhalla both being around 250km squared if you include the accessible sea areas.

The aforementioned AC Origins still took a massive jump over Syndicate size-wise, but remained ‘relatively’ tight at ‘just’ 80 km squared. As such, it’ll be interesting to see how Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ open world will be received when the game launches on the 15th of November.

KitGuru says: Are you excited for AC Shadows? Are you encouraged or concerned by the map size? Which AC game had a perfectly-sized open world? Let us know your thoughts down below.

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