A new graphics comparison between gameplay footage from Ghost of Yotei and Assassin’s Creed Shadows highlights the technical and artistic choices made by the development teams behind both titles. The side-by-side analysis, shared through a detailed breakdown video, showcases just how far both franchises have come in harnessing the power of modern hardware.
When putting Ghost of Yotei and Assassin’s Creed Shadows side by side, several distinctions emerge across rendering techniques, artistic priorities, and engine‐level trade-offs. The footage compares both games across numerous categories, including Character Models, Day/Night Cycle, Clouds, Water, Snow, Destruction, Clothes, Physics, Textures, Blood Detail, Mud, Foliage, World, Physics, and Lighting.
Character Models
Yotei appears to push higher fidelity for overall character model detail, with more believable micro-detail on faces, clothing, small accessories. Shadows, however, places greater emphasis on realism, with lifelike hair rendering and skin shading.
Day/Night Cycle
Shadows supports smooth transitions and impressive lighting changes across dawn, dusk, and full night. The lighting interplay, especially with ray-traced Global Illumination (RTGI), tends to feel more physically grounded. Yotei’s time-of-day transitions are also smooth, but not quite as impressive due to the limitations of its RTGI implementation (more on this later).
Clouds
Shadows benefits from a volumetric cloud and sky rendering system that responds well to sun angles and atmospheric scattering. The integration with RTGI allow them to influence ambient lighting more realistically. While Yotei’s cloud and sky rendering system falls short on a technical level due to its limited RTGI implementation, it is artistically more pleasing to look at compared to that of Shadows.
Water
Yotei is competent in reflections and water surface detail but doesn’t do a standout job with respect to water physics or complexity. Shadows shows more advanced water shading and interactions, including ripples, reflections of surrounding environments and characters.
Snow
Snow is an important visual element in Yotei, and is rendered with decent layering, accumulation, and interactions like footprints and drifts. However, Shadows appears to integrate seasonal transitions and snow/sleet more convincingly in certain locales, with snow blending into slower melt cycles.
Destruction
Shadows has impressive physics-based destructible environments, where parts of the scene, such as wooden doors, fences, small structures, can break, collapse, or be affected by projectiles, with debris and fragments that respond to forces. Yotei, on the other hand, is very limited in destructible world elements.
Cloth Physics
Shadows uses more advanced cloth simulation, allowing clothing, capes, and folds to move naturally with character motion, inertia, and wind. Yotei also supports cloth physics, but tends to be more conservative, with slightly stiffer behavior.
Foliage
Yotei’s distant forests, undergrowth, fields of grass all look lush and detailed, and there’s a strong artistic palette. Meanwhile, Shadows excels in density and local foliage detail.
World
Yotei excels at delivering broad vistas that appear grand thanks in part to its strong art direction. It offers compelling distant terrain, mountain silhouettes, layered forests, and scale. In comparison, Shadows’ vistas are lacking in comparison.
Physics
Shadows leans heavier on interactive elements like world debris, destructible environments, and cloth physics. On the other hand, Yotei uses physics to leverage its art direction, such as having thousands of fallen leaves flying around in the wind to set the atmosphere.
Lighting
Shadows’ more capable implementation of RTGI produces realistic ambient bounce, contact shadows, and nuanced shading across open world scenes. Yotei’s RTGI is more limited in scope and effect, and many scenes rely more on baked or hybrid lighting rather than full dynamic GI.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows PC. Ghost of Yotei is set for release on October 2, 2025, exclusively for PlayStation 5.
