All video games are, in one way or another, a giant Rube-Goldberg machine. But open world games feature some of the most complex behind-the-scenes mechanisms of them all. Games like Assassin's Creed Shadows are crafted not to let players observe the intricacy of interlocking technical systems, but to hide as many of those systems as possible so they can wander huge environments riddled with luscious detail.Details, of course, can only be so luscious, especially when you're talking about small assets or observing an object from thousands of miles away. Games draw on CPU and GPU memory to render these expansive scenes, and many game artists know the struggle of trying to preserve an immaculate aesthetic while working against how much memory is budgeted for gameplay and other environments.Ubisoft Montreal has cooked up a rather neat solution for this problem in Assassin's Creed Shadows, a game whose launch, for better or worse, has become a major inflection point for the company. But while industry analysts are closely scrutinizing its sales, players and developers checking out the game will no doubt be peering closely at the environments of feudal Japan. That's because the tech team behind Anvil has rolled out a new methodology that reworks how open-world games are rendered: "virtual geometry," or as Ubisoft calls it, the Micropolygon system.In an interview with Game Developer, Assassin's Creed Shadows technical director Pierre Fortin broke down the principles of the Micropolygon system, and explained how the method upends the way environment artists have been wrangling open-world art assets for ages.Virtual geometry uses dynamic meshes to preserve detail at a distance, and render more up closeHere's how the magic trick usually works. In an open-world game, a game engine like Ubisoft's Anvil Engine determines how to render graphics using a number of variables, a key one being draw distance. Objects like a sword, a chair, or a painting on a wall all require multiple versions to be created. Higher-fidelity versions will contain more polygons and will look good when the player is inside of a few meters of them, while other versions will have fewer polygons and will be used when the player is further away. When it works smoothly, the illusion of an object coming into focus is seamless.But it doesn't always go smoothly. When objects "pop in" to frame while players navigate an environment, they might close the distance too fast on an object, and the lower-poly version rendered at a distance is what they see first. Not the worst bug they'll encounter but something of an immersion breaker.Image via Ubisoft.Image via Ubisoft.And maybe even more frustrating for game artiststhis process sometimes limits how much detail can go into an object when viewed up close. If you wanted to render a painting like, say Sami's Landscape of the Four Seasons (Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers), you might have to compromise on showing the pencil work that makes such an image so breathtaking.Enter the Micropolygons system. In a tech demo sent to Game Developer by Ubisoft, the studio explained that this system allows the Assassin's Creed Shadows team to dynamically alter the number of polygons on display on an asset, rather than swapping different versions out. This is done by generating a dynamic mesh that filters throughout the game world, across designated objects. It's powered by the dedicated SSD of modern game consoles and high-end PCs, and represents a major technological advancement for the series (Shadows is the first Assassin's Creed game made entirely for Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5. Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the previous entry, launched on current-gen and last-gen consoles)."We had to produce the same asset multiple times, but we were not showcasing it always in the best light," Fortin said. By dynamically updating the number of polygons onscreen for each asset, players aren't treated to static assets that reflect to light and other objects the same way at all distances. The closer the player gets, the microadjustments made by the game show more and more detail, and when the player zooms in very tight, everything from nicks and dents, to reflections, to dirt smudges are all visible to the naked eye."In the past, to allow for budgets to be respected, we sometimes had to cut a bit, whereas now we're able to go a bit further," he added.Ubisoft has also explained elsewhere that the Micropolygons system expands the graphical range that can be displayed on PCs with varying specs. Before, weaker machines might have rendered assets in lower detail, now the system can check the computer's SSD and make adjustments accordingly.Image via Ubisoft.Image via Ubisoft.According to Fortin, targeting the Xbox Series S helped Ubisoft expand the number of PCs that could run Assassin's Creed Shadows. On the Series S, Ubisoft only needs to render Shadows at a max of 1080p, while the Series X can go as high as 4K UHD. "In terms of capabilities of the CPU and SSDs, this isn't where we have to adapt," Fortin explained. "What we will be adapting is more on the systems that are taxing on memory."For instance, a Series S might allocate less of a budget to preload assets and textures ahead of time. Fortin couldn't provide other accommodations (he said the difference can be "hard to quantify") but because the work was done to optimize the Series S and Series X, that's effectively work done to support PCs with similar capabilities.Graphical improvements have become subtle, but still powerfulDevelopers have regularly observed that the gap between visuals from the PS4/Xbox One generation to the PS5/Xbox Series S|X generation aren't as noticeable as even the jump from the PS3/Xbox 360 to PS4/Xbox One. It'd be fair to compare Assassin's Creed Shadows to Valhalla and ask "what precisely is the difference here?"Based on Fortin's description, the difference is no longer just about how many polygons can be used to render 3D objects, but the machinations by which those polygons are presented to the player. It's a fascinating challenge for the game industry's technical wizards. With graphical power so strong, how do you make environments look "better?" The answer, it now seems, isn't just about "what" is being shown to the player, but the presentation, and how players perceive objects from different positions. The experience of moving closer to an object and seeing more detail appear than what was visible from far away is a subtle, but potentially powerful advancement.In other words, the future of "better graphics" in games might not be processing powerbut psychology, and an eye for what, where, and how players are looking at objects. You know, like the rest of the art world.