Assassin's Creed Shadows will make you actually take in the nice views from its tower-top sync points for more than 30 seconds

Well, Assassin's Creed Shadows got its reveal trailer yesterday, and it looks pretty fun. There are two protagonists with different playstyles, plenty of history at play, and - shock horror - the game's made a change to the series' iconic rooftop sync points that sounds like it'll force you to actually take in the nice views they offer.

If you're out of the loop, Shadows is the game formerly known as Codename Red, and will be the first AC game set in Japan. It's set to come out on November 15 and tells the story of two fighters negotiating the trials and tribulations of the Sengoku period - Naoe and Yasuke.

As revealed by the game's developers in an interview with IGN, one of the changes Shadows is brining to the traditional AC formula of 'go somewhere with historical signficance, stab someone, profit' concerns the iconic sychronisation points you usually find atop towers or in other places people suffering from vertigo fear to tread.

Previously, visiting one of these points and pressing the sync button has, with a quick sweep of the camera revealing a bunch of nearby activities or points of interest on your map. Boom, if you're in a rush, take a quick photo mode selfie, and you can run or hop on your next destination, via a haystack, water or cart dive. In Shadows, however, it sounds like you'll want to stick around longer than that, with the sync points just acting like regular vantage points you can climb and spot locations worth checking out manually.

According to creative director Jonathan Dumont, this is one the features designed to help Shadows feel a bit more open-ended, with Dumont saying: “It's less of ‘follow a quest up to a point’, but it's much more, ‘I want to do this’ and then you'll find the way how to do it.”

Something else that looks to factor into this are the dynamic seasons shown off in the trailer, with the map changing to offer "different ways and routes of infiltration" depending on whether it's winter, spring, summer or autumn. For example, a lake can't be used as a hiding spot if it's frozen over, and the likes of howling winds or paths encusted with icicles can make you more or less likely to give yourself away.

While the developers say that certain main story missions and events have to take place at a certain time of year in order to make things historically accurate, it sounds like this feature'll make side quests offer a more unique experience, since they can take place in any season.

Twinned with Naoe's grappling hook and the low level environmental destruction Shadows' developers touch on in this trailer explainer video, all of this sounds in theory like it could be a nice recipie for some interesting adventures.