At first stab, the idea sounds ridiculous. An everydude is kidnapped and strapped to a machine designed to relive the life of a distant ancestor - a 14th century assassin who, in the midst of fighting the Knights Templar, is intertwined in the plight of Earth's former occupants, their mind-controlling trinkets, and a quest to save the planet from an impending apocalypse. Ridiculous. Yet the big chair at Ubisoft gave it the green light, and in November 2007, Assassin's Creed was released. A lot has happened in the years since. Five games released, 40 million sales, two big departures - producer Jade Raymond to launch Ubisoft Toronto and creative director Patrice Désilets to launch THQ Montreal. But some have been with Desmond since the very start. And, through them, a look back reveals a game that contrasts an absurd multi-pronged premise with a remarkably simple beginning.
Philippe Bergeron currently serves as mission director on ACIII and, save for Revelations, has worked on every main title in the series in a similar capacity. He smiles as he recalls how the character of Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad spawned from the adventures of another other wall-running hero.
"We were working on Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones," he recalls. "And as we worked on it, it just became something bigger than Prince of Persia. We felt it wasn't the same thing, and that's when we started thinking about it as Assassin's Creed. At the same time, Désilets was super into the Third Crusade and that time period - making a Third Crusade game was a lifelong dream of his. Eventually, as we worked through it, we realised that we wanted to make it into a brand. We needed to have a sort of metaphoric glue that we could reuse, and that's when we developed the Desmond storyline, to create the wrapper that we could push the entire series out of."
The man next to him nods. Julien Laferrière, Assassin's Creed inductee since the sequel in 2009 and associate producer of ACIII, has seen closer than most the evolution of the series since game number one. "Looking back at the original Assassin's Creed, you can see the elements we introduced, drop by drop, into this meta plot.
First, Desmond was basically a rat in the Abstergo Lab, stuck in the Animus, and that was it. In Assassin's Creed II he broke free and went into the Assassins' hideout. In Brotherhood it was centred around the villa with a little bit of Desmond gameplay, and we started to see the bleeding effect in action. We've had this progression, but it all needed a proper introduction, and in the end I think it served us well. We have the main character - the ancestor - and we have Desmond. They're like this connecting glue, and because of Desmond and that backstory, the franchise itself is so coherent and strong. It's this thing that ties everything together."
Family tree
The notion of exploring one's family history - literally, in Desmond's case - spoke vividly to the team, and quickly found its way into the overall story, becoming arguably the central idea to the premise of Assassin's Creed. "My great-great-great-grandfather was a gunsmith," says Bergeron. "My aunt tells me stories about my great-great-great grandmother being a hooker coming in on the boat to Montreal. We've all got stories like these, wondering how life was for our ancestors." "It makes it very personal," notes Laferrière.
Yet without a convincing game world it would amount to little. "The first key phrases we were throwing around were 'living, breathing world," says Bergeron. "It was all about selling the environment, selling a believable city that felt like you were revisiting a Middle Eastern city during the Third Crusade. The work that we did on what the world's inhabitants got up to in their day to day lives, and the historical research we did on the architecture of the period, [all went towards that goal]. And besides, a sandbox game is nothing if it doesn't have a proper sandbox where navigation is fun, and it's just good to look at. You need to want to go into that environment."
Enter the animus
The unique aspect of the Assassin's Creed fiction, of course, is that it isn't a city. Not in the present sense. The areas we're invited to explore are but virtual recreations of Desmond's accessed memories, collated and assembled in a manner that he - and by association, we - can interact with in the Animus. None of it is real. And back in the game's early days, when the hype train was beginning to roll, Altair's true nature remained a mystery, which presented the team with a conundrum of identity.
"The Animus layer was something we held back on for the longest time," says Bergeron. "Assassin's Creed was a Third Crusade game. We wanted that as the experience. Initially, we had a version that had Animus glitches everywhere in the city, and an interface that was really in your face, but we took a direction that toned it all down, so those elements wouldn't rip you out of the experience. It was the thing we were really afraid of, right up to release. We're selling this as a historical game. Are people going to freak out about the sci-fi element? If we sell something that's unexpected, will that turn them off? In the end, we found that some people actually really enjoyed that presentation of the storyline. I think we struck a good balance."
With this in mind, it's interesting to examine the Animus layer in Assassin's Creed and compare its integration against that of the subsequent games in the series. Right from the start, when we're made aware of the virtual environment, it's clear that this is a game designed in a way that explains conventional game devices as plot ideas. Every moment presents us with constant reminders: the game's tutorial is literally presented as an Animus tutorial program to Desmond, death is rewound to an earlier checkpoint as Desmond falls out of sync with the real memory, traditional "invisible walls" of player boundary are inaccessible memory blocks, and even the Animus itself is presented as a selection interface; queued memories for Desmond, a level select screen for us.
Even a token triviality - the search for and collection of Templar flags - was explained as an Animus glitch. In Assassin's Creed, videogame elements become Desmond's Animus experience. Certainly, each game has expanded the lore of the Assassin's Creed story and widened the scope of its world, but with its incorporation and explanation of videogame tropes, it's the original game that arguably remains the most pure to its fiction.
It was perhaps because of this design that Assassin's Creed's shortcomings started to emerge. Following its release, players were quick to unravel its 'find target, kill target" structure. "The thing that was missing was the 'game'," acknowledges Bergeron. "In the very beginning you knew exactly where you were going to end up. The storyline was sort of predictable - you had one person to kill, you got information, and it was always the same thing. It was a grind to get to the end, so variety and gameplay was something that we worked on heavily at the beginning of development of ACII. We wanted to chime into that tick-the-boxes thing: solve these puzzles, collect these things."
By the time Revelations came around, the pendulum had swung back the other way. "They wanted to go back to the story, because Brotherhood sort of lost focus on that," says Bergeron. "And I know for us on ACIII, we took a step back on everything and re-analysed what worked, what didn't work, and tried to streamline things that needed to be streamlined and reinvent things that needed work - combat, for example."
Ah, yes. Combat. With the original Assassin's Creed came "Press X to Win," a phrase deployed to summarise its one-dimensional system, a process of mashing and bashing that one single button throughout the process of battle. As sequels emerged, clearly it was an aspect that needed attention, but by virtue of its virtual history conceit - one not bound by setting nor lead character alike - it was allowed to change organically. "The fights that we had in the previous games were much more melee oriented," says Bergeron. "And now, in the time period that we have, there's a lot more ranged combat."
"The presence of gunpowder in the time period, allows that," says Laferrière. And he's right: in ACII, with 15th century Italy receiving its first taste of gunpowder, Ezio could arm himself with a single-shot pistol; something that would drastically change the dynamics of combat. In 18th century America, it changed again in ACIII, as armies carried muskets and rifles across battlefields that were less about skulking rooftops and more about stopping the enemy from afar. "[History] forced our hand to change our combat system," says Bergeron, "but at the same time it let us make it more technical."
Killing blow
Some elements still work, others have tarnished, but despite it all, Assassin's Creed continues to stand as an important game today. But ultimately, perhaps the reason Assassin's Creed resonated the way it did was down to the one simple notion that was, and remains, at the heart of the series. "The assassin fantasy is a really clear gamer objective: 'Go kill this person'," says Bergeron. "We've been bred to do this as gamers!" "Like how Mario kills Bowser at the end," adds Laferrière.
"Every game we play, killing is a recurring objective," says Bergeron. "And I think it's a really good ploy to give you objectives within this living world, because with time periods like those in the Assassin's Creed series, whether it's the Third Crusade or the Renaissance, there's so much oppression there. A trope of game design is the generic enemy - Nazis, zombies, pirates. The faceless monster, something you can kill 50 of and be fine with. It makes sense of its own nature; the time periods that we choose provides them automatically. You're set among Templars who are raping and pillaging every city you go into, so it's clear that they're bad guys. A lot of things that actually happen in life are really good game things."
It's one of many reasons why Assassin's Creed has been so successful. Where other games flounder in the generic near-future, Ubisoft Montreal can keep looking back - Désilets himself considered a caveman assassin, and there are many easier alternatives to try before then. Appropriately for a game born out of the Prince's sands, it's a series that'll never run out of time.
Source[SUP][1][/SUP]
[h=3]References[/h]
Thanks to: Rheena.com
Philippe Bergeron currently serves as mission director on ACIII and, save for Revelations, has worked on every main title in the series in a similar capacity. He smiles as he recalls how the character of Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad spawned from the adventures of another other wall-running hero.
"We were working on Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones," he recalls. "And as we worked on it, it just became something bigger than Prince of Persia. We felt it wasn't the same thing, and that's when we started thinking about it as Assassin's Creed. At the same time, Désilets was super into the Third Crusade and that time period - making a Third Crusade game was a lifelong dream of his. Eventually, as we worked through it, we realised that we wanted to make it into a brand. We needed to have a sort of metaphoric glue that we could reuse, and that's when we developed the Desmond storyline, to create the wrapper that we could push the entire series out of."
The man next to him nods. Julien Laferrière, Assassin's Creed inductee since the sequel in 2009 and associate producer of ACIII, has seen closer than most the evolution of the series since game number one. "Looking back at the original Assassin's Creed, you can see the elements we introduced, drop by drop, into this meta plot.
First, Desmond was basically a rat in the Abstergo Lab, stuck in the Animus, and that was it. In Assassin's Creed II he broke free and went into the Assassins' hideout. In Brotherhood it was centred around the villa with a little bit of Desmond gameplay, and we started to see the bleeding effect in action. We've had this progression, but it all needed a proper introduction, and in the end I think it served us well. We have the main character - the ancestor - and we have Desmond. They're like this connecting glue, and because of Desmond and that backstory, the franchise itself is so coherent and strong. It's this thing that ties everything together."
Family tree
The notion of exploring one's family history - literally, in Desmond's case - spoke vividly to the team, and quickly found its way into the overall story, becoming arguably the central idea to the premise of Assassin's Creed. "My great-great-great-grandfather was a gunsmith," says Bergeron. "My aunt tells me stories about my great-great-great grandmother being a hooker coming in on the boat to Montreal. We've all got stories like these, wondering how life was for our ancestors." "It makes it very personal," notes Laferrière.
Yet without a convincing game world it would amount to little. "The first key phrases we were throwing around were 'living, breathing world," says Bergeron. "It was all about selling the environment, selling a believable city that felt like you were revisiting a Middle Eastern city during the Third Crusade. The work that we did on what the world's inhabitants got up to in their day to day lives, and the historical research we did on the architecture of the period, [all went towards that goal]. And besides, a sandbox game is nothing if it doesn't have a proper sandbox where navigation is fun, and it's just good to look at. You need to want to go into that environment."
Enter the animus
The unique aspect of the Assassin's Creed fiction, of course, is that it isn't a city. Not in the present sense. The areas we're invited to explore are but virtual recreations of Desmond's accessed memories, collated and assembled in a manner that he - and by association, we - can interact with in the Animus. None of it is real. And back in the game's early days, when the hype train was beginning to roll, Altair's true nature remained a mystery, which presented the team with a conundrum of identity.
"The Animus layer was something we held back on for the longest time," says Bergeron. "Assassin's Creed was a Third Crusade game. We wanted that as the experience. Initially, we had a version that had Animus glitches everywhere in the city, and an interface that was really in your face, but we took a direction that toned it all down, so those elements wouldn't rip you out of the experience. It was the thing we were really afraid of, right up to release. We're selling this as a historical game. Are people going to freak out about the sci-fi element? If we sell something that's unexpected, will that turn them off? In the end, we found that some people actually really enjoyed that presentation of the storyline. I think we struck a good balance."
With this in mind, it's interesting to examine the Animus layer in Assassin's Creed and compare its integration against that of the subsequent games in the series. Right from the start, when we're made aware of the virtual environment, it's clear that this is a game designed in a way that explains conventional game devices as plot ideas. Every moment presents us with constant reminders: the game's tutorial is literally presented as an Animus tutorial program to Desmond, death is rewound to an earlier checkpoint as Desmond falls out of sync with the real memory, traditional "invisible walls" of player boundary are inaccessible memory blocks, and even the Animus itself is presented as a selection interface; queued memories for Desmond, a level select screen for us.
Even a token triviality - the search for and collection of Templar flags - was explained as an Animus glitch. In Assassin's Creed, videogame elements become Desmond's Animus experience. Certainly, each game has expanded the lore of the Assassin's Creed story and widened the scope of its world, but with its incorporation and explanation of videogame tropes, it's the original game that arguably remains the most pure to its fiction.
It was perhaps because of this design that Assassin's Creed's shortcomings started to emerge. Following its release, players were quick to unravel its 'find target, kill target" structure. "The thing that was missing was the 'game'," acknowledges Bergeron. "In the very beginning you knew exactly where you were going to end up. The storyline was sort of predictable - you had one person to kill, you got information, and it was always the same thing. It was a grind to get to the end, so variety and gameplay was something that we worked on heavily at the beginning of development of ACII. We wanted to chime into that tick-the-boxes thing: solve these puzzles, collect these things."
By the time Revelations came around, the pendulum had swung back the other way. "They wanted to go back to the story, because Brotherhood sort of lost focus on that," says Bergeron. "And I know for us on ACIII, we took a step back on everything and re-analysed what worked, what didn't work, and tried to streamline things that needed to be streamlined and reinvent things that needed work - combat, for example."
Ah, yes. Combat. With the original Assassin's Creed came "Press X to Win," a phrase deployed to summarise its one-dimensional system, a process of mashing and bashing that one single button throughout the process of battle. As sequels emerged, clearly it was an aspect that needed attention, but by virtue of its virtual history conceit - one not bound by setting nor lead character alike - it was allowed to change organically. "The fights that we had in the previous games were much more melee oriented," says Bergeron. "And now, in the time period that we have, there's a lot more ranged combat."
"The presence of gunpowder in the time period, allows that," says Laferrière. And he's right: in ACII, with 15th century Italy receiving its first taste of gunpowder, Ezio could arm himself with a single-shot pistol; something that would drastically change the dynamics of combat. In 18th century America, it changed again in ACIII, as armies carried muskets and rifles across battlefields that were less about skulking rooftops and more about stopping the enemy from afar. "[History] forced our hand to change our combat system," says Bergeron, "but at the same time it let us make it more technical."
Killing blow
Some elements still work, others have tarnished, but despite it all, Assassin's Creed continues to stand as an important game today. But ultimately, perhaps the reason Assassin's Creed resonated the way it did was down to the one simple notion that was, and remains, at the heart of the series. "The assassin fantasy is a really clear gamer objective: 'Go kill this person'," says Bergeron. "We've been bred to do this as gamers!" "Like how Mario kills Bowser at the end," adds Laferrière.
"Every game we play, killing is a recurring objective," says Bergeron. "And I think it's a really good ploy to give you objectives within this living world, because with time periods like those in the Assassin's Creed series, whether it's the Third Crusade or the Renaissance, there's so much oppression there. A trope of game design is the generic enemy - Nazis, zombies, pirates. The faceless monster, something you can kill 50 of and be fine with. It makes sense of its own nature; the time periods that we choose provides them automatically. You're set among Templars who are raping and pillaging every city you go into, so it's clear that they're bad guys. A lot of things that actually happen in life are really good game things."
It's one of many reasons why Assassin's Creed has been so successful. Where other games flounder in the generic near-future, Ubisoft Montreal can keep looking back - Désilets himself considered a caveman assassin, and there are many easier alternatives to try before then. Appropriately for a game born out of the Prince's sands, it's a series that'll never run out of time.
Source[SUP][1][/SUP]
[h=3]References[/h]
- [SUP]^[/SUP] Source (www.oxm.co.uk)
Thanks to: Rheena.com