Yeah, working as a director on an AC game, an AC game that has seven studios.
The challenge is coming up with honestly a cohesive vision, like a design vision that
people will believe in.
I always say with designers, with anybody, having a good idea is not hard.
Everybody has good ideas.
Having an idea that the team is excited to build, that fits into the vision, that is
feasible, that you have the resources to do, this is hard.
This is where a true designer comes in.
We knew that AC3 would be the end of Desmond's story, that had always been the case, but
where to go from there, we didn't want to, we had so many other time periods we could
explore with this series, we didn't want to shut the door on it.
The way Ubisoft works on AC is that we have different teams, different core teams working
on different projects, so this is why we can sustain a rate of one AC per year.
We know how to make these big games in a short amount of time, we had two years, but for
such a big game, it's not that much.
We learned very early in the process, what were the next gen consoles all about, so very
early at the beginning of the game we knew what we had to do, so we knew the specs, we
knew what could be cool to do.
The biggest decision we had to take at the beginning of the project was how do we support
these consoles.
I was sitting next to Assassin's Creed 3 team when they were developing the game and when
they were receiving the first feedback from the playtest, and we had the opportunity to
understand early where we need to go for the next game, because we already knew that we
wanted to bring the naval experience to another level.
And so back in 2011 I was asked to pitch something about the Parade game, because during the
development of AC 3, we knew we had everything we needed basically to create this game.
We were developing the naval warfare, the nature, and obviously the cities.
And we had already kind of come up with some of the backstory of Edward.
So we put two and two together and we said okay, let's do a story with Edward, naval
battles, I think that puts us in the golden age of piracy, and so we did our research
and we checked and it fit perfectly.
In Assassin's Creed 4, we wanted to bring the naval gameplay to a new level.
Assassin's Creed 4 will be a game where the player can interact with a huge open world
and it will have a very long opportunity to be on sea and to sail on sea.
So because of that, we wanted to bring more depth to the naval experience, we wanted to
bring more depth in the naval fight, we also wanted to have more depth in the way you sail
yourself and to make the player feel that the ocean changing is for him a challenge
that he will have to master and want to give him this feeling that at the end of the game
he became a master of the ocean.
We told ourselves from the beginning, you know, this had to be the most unique and freshest
AC world we've ever built.
You know, AC, we pride ourselves on the world we build, we build very beautiful cities,
very incredible cities, but to build something that was natural and man-made and, you know,
nameful and have it all be in one cohesive world, incredibly challenging.
This time, it was clear also that we wanted to have one game, one unified game merging
the ground and the naval.
It's not a game, it's not two games in one, right?
It's not one ground game, it's just stitched to a naval game, it's a parade game.
And then, of course, the final thing was, it's an assassin game.
This was something we didn't want people to confuse this to say, is it a pirate game
with some assassin mechanics?
No, no, it's an assassin game.
The character who, you know, he is a pirate, but his abilities are assassin-based.
The mythology, the lore of the universe, it's there.
It's all integrated into the story, it's all part of the bigger story, the bigger arc
of what is Assassin's Creed.
Getting the Templar Assassin conflict in the midst of, you know, actual real historical
detail has always been a challenge and we try to do it in a fresh way every time.
And we knew right away that an assassin, as we conceive it, the Creed, stay your blade
from the flesh of an innocent, you can't really have a pirate who's following the Assassin's
Creed yet, you know, living a merry life as a pirate, robbing from innocent people.
So we decided to make our game about that fact.
Pirates have a pirate who comes into contact with the Assassins, but finds that Creed really
restrictive.
What kind of tension does that create in our story, and that's what our story is literally
about.
Obviously the goal when we started this project was we wanted to portray pirates in as realistic
a light as possible.
Pirates are one of those subjects that people, they already come to it with a lot of preconceived
notions, so it was a real challenge at the beginning.
We've been so formatted through the years by Hollywood and all this kiddie book about
what pirates should be, but actually if you look at history they are very different.
There are reasons why pirates exist, there are reasons why piracy flourishes at certain
times.
It so happens that this period, from, let's say, 1700 to 1713, there was this massive
war called the Spanish War for Succession.
Every major European power was involved.
England was at war with a certain, with half of Spain, France was on one side, they were
fighting constantly, so then in 1713 a treaty got signed and peace broke out everywhere.
As happens whenever a major power like disbands an army, you have all these sort of military
minded guys who want to put themselves to use, they want to do something, and so you
slowly fall into piracy.
From a gameplay perspective, we definitely have mechanics that we feel okay, these are
pirate mechanics and we have a bunch of mechanics that we feel this is assassin stuff.
So for example the free running, yes it's what people know from Assassin's Creed.
The nice thing about it is that sailors, they had to climb rigging, they had to climb masts,
they had to deal with sails, so it kind of was a nice blending between being a sailor
and being an assassin, so we felt that was a good place to start.
Of course combat is the same combat, sailors fought and pirates fought, especially when
they did boardings, so this kind of justified that he has these dual wielding swords and
his pistols, so this is a pirate touch within the combat system of AC.
And of course pirates were outlaws, so the stealth kind of made sense, but beyond this
then we have mechanics like boarding, which is really, it's a heavy pirate thing, just
sailing and naval combat is very pirate and very sailor.
We approach creating the ships the same way we approach creating characters.
We're based on what the character is, who the ship belongs to, and then we dive into
that character and we infuse his characteristics into what he would do for the ship.
So we'll have five different classes of ships in the world, going from the Manowar to the
very small gun boat, and on the way we have the schooner, the frigate and the brigantine.
All those different ships have different AI archetypes and they will behave differently
in the world, and they will also have each different level of difficulties, because we
can play with the level of cannon, we can play with the speed, we can play with the
strengths of the earth for all these different ships, so we can bring a lot of variety for
the player.
I mean of course we base the design on historical accuracy, but we have a lot of artistic liberty,
where we actually move things around a little bit to make sure that the player can navigate
on the decks, can navigate on the mast freely.
One thing I always say is Assassin's Creed, it's about credibility and authenticity, it's
not simulation, it's not realism, and that was one of the mistakes we made really early
on was making the sailing much more simulation based, and we tried different prototypes and
it was just way too complex, it made the controller really difficult to understand, it was not
intuitive at all, we had this concept of tacking with the wind, so this is how do you appropriately
take the wind to gain speed, it was really cool, but you were so focused on that you
couldn't fight.
The new combat was going to be one of the most interesting parts of the naval, so we
looked at how do we add more skill, but keep it accessible.
We had a new firing system, a targeting system, that makes you be able now to decide at what
angle you want to fire, so that's actually bringing a lot of deepness in the gameplay,
where you can not only hide behind the wave, but shoot above them, so that brought a really
cool new dynamic.
Because the scope of the game was really massive and we knew that you don't need tons of breadth
on a mechanics level to have a fun game, you need to have less systems with more depth.
It's a game that needs to make the franchise evolve towards something different, towards
something more connected, preparing the next generation, the next cycle, etc.
So we were clear that we wouldn't totally revamp the corpillars of it, so the free run,
the fight, the stealth, but we wanted to build upon, above that, adding some more that would
fit into it, that would give to the franchise some new elements to work with in the future.
It feels amazing when things start coming together and you see this thing that you helped
plant long ago, the seed grow.
For sure it's not going to grow exactly as you thought it would, but that's part of
the fun of making games, it's very organic, you let the people's talents also help build
this beautiful tree.
I'm gushing right now, but it's because I'm very proud of what we have, it took us a long
road to get here, but it's been one of the best adventures I've ever been on and this
team has been fantastic and I think people will see all of this positive stuff in the
game itself, I think people will feel that we had fun making this game.
We wanted to do a pirate game, setting the carabiners and we couldn't pretend the carabiners
to be just four locations, it would totally reduce this sense and this feeling of exploration
and adventure we wanted.
AC is traditionally much more narrative driven with a bunch of side missions and collectibles,
some systemic stuff, but it wasn't really a sandbox and so this for us was a new challenge
to really make AC for a sandbox.
