Assassin’s Creed Shadows details Hideout as “fully customizable sandbox” – TrueAchievements

Ubisoft details Hideout feature for Assassin’s Creed Shadows

• The Hideout marks the first time the series has given players a fully customizable area
• AC Shadows launches later this month on March 20
• It’ll be available for Xbox Series X|S

So, the key details: this Hideout gives us an acre of customizable land to work with. It unlocks after completing the prologue and is located in a valley in the Izumi Settsu province. We can place everything from buildings and ponds to animals and plants, as well as interior cosmetics. Rooves, paths, lights, and more are options for outside, while inside we can place armor sets and other decorations. We can earn decorations as rewards, buy them from merchants, or find them in enemy territories.

Gameplay-wise, we have key rooms to build and upgrade for important benefits. These include the Forge, to improve weapons and gear and the Dojo, to train our allies, as well as rooms with stat boosts, such as the Tera alter to boost the XP we can earn.

The allies we recruit will also hang about in the Hideout, making use of its facilities and chatting together. We’ll only be able to have a few at first, but this will change as we progress.

To place all these buildings, we need to collect wood, minerals, and crops, as well as gathering enough money. One way that the Hideout is linked to the rest of the game is that we can loot resource bundles while exploring, as well as tagging bigger stockpiles to flag them for our scouts to smuggle away.

This definitely sounds like a step up from the settlement we had in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (the last AC game comparable in scope to Shadows).

The settlement was key to Valhalla, and you could build and upgrade things, but there was nowhere near this level of freedom. The locations for where buildings could be placed were rigid, as were the options for where to put decorations, so while you could still add your favorite things to the area, there wasn’t much room for personalization.

This freestyle grid mechanic is much better, and I particularly like the option to connect rooms and make covered paths for more of an individualized layout. It’s very cool to see we can place armor as interior decorations (this was great in The Witcher 3 Blood & Wine DLC) but it sounds as though these might only be able to be placed in certain areas. I’m also hoping we’ll see a few more options for interior cosmetics alongside those paintings.

The option to have animals hanging about in the Hideout is very cool too. In our Assassin’s Creed preview, I did like the Sumi-e activity of quietly painting some of the animals scattered about, but I wasn’t sure what the rewards for this would be, besides a nice extra layer to the gameplay. Now we know we can have tanukis and baby deer chilling in the Hideout, I will definitely be more inclined to forget the main quest and paint everything in the game to try and collect them all.

All in all, the Hideout seems like the natural progression of what came before, and a much-needed aspect for these larger games. I like having the option to disappear into customization and so I’m looking forward to the Assassin’s Creed take on Animal-Crossing-style antics.

What do you think of the Hideout? Let us know in the comments, and for more Shadows info, we have our Assassin’s Creed Shadows preview.