Assassin's Creed Shadows has you slicing and dicing your way through countless bad guys, but there are certain things that Naoe and Yasuke won't send a blade flying through. Unlike most Assassin's Creed games in the past, especially the more modern RPG ones like Valhalla and Odyssey, you could kill all sorts of wildlife to upgrade your gear and weaponry.
That's not the case in Assassin's Creed Shadows, and going one step further, you can't actually harm wildlife at all. It's a pretty massive change to the way the series works, and one that went by without much of an explanation from anyone at Ubisoft. Thankfully, the game's director has cleared up the decision-making behind this change in a recent interview with Kotaku.
According to Dumont, one of the main reasons for like of hunting in Assassin's Creed Shadows is the setting. Dumont explains that when the team started looking into the wildlife in feudal Japan, they found that the country "didn’t have many large, aggressive animals to challenge players", and that it would have been more appealing to simply observe the wildlife the country did have.
Desmond bit the dust when I was a freshman in high school,...
