In Assassin’s Creed Shadows there are 4 seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. The seasons affect the environment’s visual appearance. In winter some bodies of water will freeze and can be walked on, but deep snow slows you down when traversing on foot. Certain Sumi-e are also exclusive to specific seasons.
How Seasons Work
On the world map in the top right corner you can see the current season, as well as the progress towards the next season. There is a circle that slowly fills up as time passes, with an icon in the middle. The middle icon represents the season. The white circle represents the season progress.
Each season consists of two half-seasons. You get a cutscene whenever the season advances, but it will always be the same season twice in a row. This happens when the circle is half-full. When it’s completely full it advances to the next main season.
It shows a “Change Seasons” prompt on the map, but this only works when the season progress is full/half-full. Otherwise it will show a red circle to indicate not enough time has passed. You can’t skip around seasons as you’d like (at least not at the time of the game’s launch, maybe it gets patched in later).
How to Change Seasons
To change seasons the only option is to wait it out. Each half-season lasts 90 minutes. For a full season that’s 180 minutes (3 hours). It doesn’t matter if you do active gameplay or stand idle, but time spent in menus won’t count. It’s okay to stay still somewhere on top of a viewpoint where you’re safe.
To actually trigger the cutscene every half-season you have to perform one of these actions: initiate fast travel, switch characters, complete a quest, or on the map hold D-Pad right to “Change Season”.
The season cutscene won’t trigger automatically when standing idle, you have to do one of the above actions to advance the season. So you’ll have to check every 90 minutes. At the time of the game’s launch there are no instant season changes, but maybe such a function will be added later.
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