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The wind in Assassin's Creed: Shadows offers more than graphical bluster

An exploration of wind, triple-A games' new-found favourite metaphor, from Assassin's Creed: Shadows to Ghost of Tsushima and beyond.

Watch on YouTube Ubisoft has made a lot of noise about Shadows' wind, touting it, and other meteorological conditions (like the brilliantly capricious storms) as a suite of next-gen upgrades(dubbed the Atmos system) for its proprietary Anvil engine. In one blog post, technology director Pierre F talked about how all of the vegetation, from pine tree to cherry blossom, is physically animated on the GPU, pulling data from the wind system which is itself driven by a fluid simulation moving through the 3D space. Image credit: Ubisoft / Eurogamer In this ninth console generation of mostly incremental tech improvements (shorter load times, 4K textures, 60 frames per second), wind and glittering particle effects are perhaps the most conspicuous, whiz-bang graphical offerings.

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