Assassin's Creed Shadows seems to be finally bringing back Unity's best feature a decade later

Assassin's Creed Shadows finally got its gameplay reveal during the recently held Ubisoft Forward. It showcased everything from the revamped combat system to stealth, and to the newly added destructible environments. While the game's initial reveal did garner some criticism due to lack of proper gameplay, the most recent trailer and the dedicated in-engine footage have fans extremely excited, and for good reasons.

The combat system and parkour in Assassin's Creed Shadows seem to be a complete overhaul of what we've seen in the past of the series. However, regarding stealth and the open world, the game seems to have taken heavy inspiration from the previous titles in the series, most notably, Assassin's Creed Unity.

And judging by the recently released gameplay demo, it seems one of the best features from Assassin's Creed Unity is finally returning to modern Assassin's Creed, i.e., crowd density.

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Assassin's Creed Shadows seems heavily inspired by Unity and its approach to stealth, parkour, and world design

Assassin's Creed Shadows seems to take a lot of inspiration from the series' past, especially from Unity. Crowd density appears to have been bumped significantly in the latest title, with NPCs being much more reactive to the player's actions. This makes the world of AC Shadows feel quite similar to that of Unity's, on a basic level.

Crowd density was one of the biggest focal points of Assassin's Creed Unity, and also one of the most talked about aspects in its marketing. There have been games before Unity that offered a staggering amount of NPC crowds, such as Hitman Absolution, Grand Theft Auto 5, and more.

However, for an open-world game that looks as good as Unity does, and even despite that, being able to render such a massive crowd, that, too, on consoles, was quite impressive. And even today, there are very few games that can match the sheer NPC density that Unity had to offer back in 2014.

However, Unity's crowd density did end up being one of the biggest bottlenecks of the game, at least during its launch. The crowd density and implementation of Ubisoft's new "AnvilNext 2.0" engine ended up making the game very unstable, especially on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles.

Judging from the recent gameplay reveal, Assassin's Creed Shadows doesn't seem to suffer from similar issues. Then again, we only got to take a look at a small vertical slice of the game, which might not be indicative of the final product. Apart from crowd density, AC Shadows also seems to have made some major improvements to its parkour and stealth.

It remains to be seen if parkour and stealth, in practice, feel similar, if not better, than what was present in Assassin's Creed Unity. However, judging by the gameplay showcase, it does seem to be the case. Parkour seems to once again be much more animation-driven, with Naoe (one of the two playable protagonists) being very acrobatic and fast.

Additionally, the cover system, which was first implemented in Assassin's Creed Unity, and then never made an appearance in future titles, is also making a return. Not only that, but Assassin's Creed Shadows' Naoe also has the ability to go prone, akin to Solid Snake, Sam Fisher, and Ellie, which adds a lot of depth to her stealth arsenal.