Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Hideout Finally Lets Players Design Their Own Base of Operations

No Assassin’s Creed title is complete without a hideout for the protagonists to strategize, rest and recover. While the games have varied in what these locations look like, none of them have even come close to what Assassin’s Creed Shadows has in store.

From the hold of your ship in Black Flag to the Assassin’s Bureaus of Mirage, the Assassins always need some place to use as a home base. Shadows’ development team decided to go above and beyond, allowing players to dive in and fully design as much of their hideouts as they so desire.

“We knew that if we wanted to make anything new … we had to take a bold step forward. That meant giving players the option to build their homebase with complete freedom,” said Dany, the systems associate director for Shadows in the Hideout Deep Dive. “The building tools are simple enough for everyone to draw up a quick and easy layout, but there’s enough depth to sink hours into crafting your vision.”

This is a first for the Assassin’s Creed franchise. The hideouts have always been fitting for the theme, such as having the train car hideout in AC Syndicate, but there’s never been anything the player can do to really make the space their own. Everything is always in a preset location, and players have had to learn to accommodate the space rather than the space accommodating the player.

In Shadows, the hideout will be located in the Izumi Settsu province, with Miss Tomiko (an NPC that will be introduced early in your adventure) serving as the caretaker. The valley will occupy over an acre of space, which serves as an extensive sandbox for adding buildings, plants, animals, and other cosmetic features that you’ll come across as you explore the map.

Setting up new buildings or decorative items will cost resources, but you can use the hideout as a place to organize and collect the resources you need to further upgrade the hideout itself. Seasons will play a big part in Shadows, with smuggling resources taking place throughout the seasons as a form of passive income.

For me, setting up bases can feel like an extra step that I have to do, pulling me out of the more interesting aspects of a game. In Shadows, it looks like the hideout will serve as a bridge between different aspects of gameplay. It acts as a base for the items you’ll smuggle throughout the seasons, a gallery to collect wildlife and cosmetics that you’ve discovered while exploring, and a place to upgrade your equipment as you collect more resources.

There’s also plenty of incentive to continue building out your hideout, with different features adding bonuses and buffs just for having them in the layout. Mechanics like these are some of the most important for me, making the hideout feel like a connected part of the gameplay without feeling like an extra task that doesn’t make a difference overall.

This connectedness is welcome in a game as vast as Shadows looks set to be. Having to remember different locations for various features in-game can get overwhelming and make it feel like a chore to upgrade your gear. Having all of these important features in one place makes it feel like you’re establishing yourself in the world in a way that feels organic.

Even just having NPCs wander the hideout will likely bring me back there time and time again, with different dialog experiences for different buildings. The NPCs will naturally spend more time in the places that fit their personalities the best, so it should feel organic in a way that home bases scarcely do in games.

As a huge animal person, in-game base customization in games like Starfield can feel a bit stagnant, so seeing the option to add all sorts of animals that you’ve interacted with in the world is a welcome addition. The flexibility to put them wherever I choose means I’m more likely to be building myself a zoo rather than adventuring through Japan, and I’m just fine with that.

Building bases in games is something I tend to avoid because it often feels like a lot of work for little payoff. AC Shadows is making it look like the hideout will be a natural part of your story’s progression, but if you don’t want to spend that much time working on it, you don’t have to. You’ll have to include some of the basic buildings like Tomiko’s Hiroma, which will serve as the most important aspect of the hideout, but if you don’t want to, you don’t even need to customize it.

Whether the hideout lives up to expectations remains to be seen, but from the looks of it, it seems like it’s going to add value to the overall story and experience. Any excuse to spend more time surrounded by Japan’s natural beauty is one I plan on jumping at — as long as Assassin’s Creed Shadows still launches on time.