When they boot up the game for the first time, Assassin’s Creed Shadows players will be asked to choose from a number of different gameplay options, one of which concerns Guided Exploration. Guided Exploration is disabled by default, but some players may find that it’s better to turn it on.
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If they choose to leave it off, Assassin’s Creed Shadows players will be forced to engage with the new scouting system, which may not be to everybody’s liking. As such, it’s worth taking a few moments to understand how the scouting system works and whether or not Guided Exploration offers a better alternative.
Should You Enable Guided Exploration in Assassin’s Creed Shadows?
Although the idea behind Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘ scouting system may sound good on paper, the execution can be a little janky at times. Players will often be given clues that reference locations that don’t yet appear on their map, making it more or less impossible to correctly pinpoint the exact location of their objective or target. As such. it’s recommended that players enable Guided Exploration when they first start playing.
Enabling Guided Exploration will prevent players from unlocking the Scouting Mission Trophy / Achievement. As such, players may wish to start with Guided Exploration turned off and then enable it after they’ve unlocked Scouting Mission or when they start to receive objectives in unexplored regions of the map.
If players choose not to use Guided Exploration, the game will instead give them three clues to help guide them to their objective. One of these will usually be the prefecture, with the other two being points of interest that are near the objective. If these locations appear on the player’s map, they should have a pretty good idea of where they should be looking, at which point, they can dispatch a scout to that area to get an exact location.
However, as the main story of Assassin’s Creed Shadows progresses, players will start to travel to new prefectures. At this point, the points of interest in the clues won’t always appear on their map, forcing them to scout large sections of the map or fully explore them for themselves. As the number of scouts at their disposal is limited, the first option is far from ideal, while the sheer size of the map and the fact that the majority of it is made up of hills and forests makes the second somewhat impractical.
Perhaps the only saving grace is that Guided Exploration can be enabled and disabled at any point via the Gameplay menu, so if players do find themselves struggling to track down an objective, there’s nothing stopping them from temporarily enabling Guided Exploration to get its exact location. Some may see this as a cheap approach, but compared to blindly exploring an entire Japanese province for a small village that the current objective is to the south of, it’s definitely the faster and more practical of the two options.
- Released
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March 20, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language