Assassin’s Creed III: Taking a Big Step Forward

Assassin's Creed III is definitely one of the most exciting games of 2012, and for AC fans it represents a big step forward: new setting, new lead, new mechanics and improved visuals. To find out a little more about the development process we caught up with Assassin's Creed III's creative director, Alex Hutchinson.


IGN: It’s really clear from the demos we’ve seen that this is a big step forward for the series technically. Even the animations are significantly improved. Why is it so noticeable?

Alex Hutchinson: We basically decided in January of 2010 that we were going to rebuild the franchise from the ground up. We thought, if we really believe this can be perennial – an annual franchise that goes on and on, then we need these moments where we get a big lift. And to do that we need a lot of time. We need more than a year. So almost all the animations – not all of them, we kept some that were signature animations that we thought were cool – but almost all the animations, all the combat, all the navigation, we decided – screw it – we’ll go back to roots and rebuild it. So you saw in the navigation this notion of natural surfaces, of trees, of cliffs, all that sort of stuff. In the fight system it’s all dual handed now, and again, we rebuilt all the enemy reactions as well.

The nature of Connor was... irrepressible!

IGN: How much crossover was there on the technical side? How different is the engine, for instance, to the engine from Revelations?

Alex Hutchinson: We branched at AC2, so the things that we kept, we kept from AC2, so ACB and ACR are sort of their own continuations of that stuff, and AC3 is really – on the gameplay side – a very new engine.

IGN: How much do people need to know about the history you’re dealing with in this game? Personally, my knowledge of American history is sketchy at best.

Alex Hutchinson: I think the beauty is that there’s always this assumption that if you do the American Revolution or whatever, that the game is about winning the revolution, but for us, the revolution is the backdrop. All the stuff you need to know, to move the story forward, is all the new stuff. What is your relationship with George Washington? Why are you even talking to him? So that is hopefully interesting to anyone, and for people who like history they’ll be like – oh my god that’s George Washington. We kind of hope that people who are fans of it will know that he’s in the right spot at the right time. He’s dealing with the right issues at the right time. But you don’t need to. That’s sort of a bonus.

Also, we try not to show the history that people expect. We don’t want to just re-tread textbooks. We want to show that George Washington was worried about the war, that he didn’t know if they were going to win, that there were lots of people who didn’t think that they should even be seceding. One of the fun questions we get all the time is – are you only killing British people? And the actual answer to that is - yes, because before the end of the game there are no American people, so it’s a ridiculous question! Everyone is British, even the patriots… weren’t even sure if they wanted to secede, they just didn’t want to deal with the problems they had at the time. It’s a funny question. So yeah, we dig into it as much as possible, and obviously we have the huge Animus database and all that stuff for people that want to read more, but you should be fine with no knowledge.

IGN: In terms of gameplay, how many systems are too many? While I liked the idea of, say, the Brotherhood, I also felt that that mechanic made the game too easy. How do you strike the balance between features and finesse?

“ There’s probably a dozen or so mechanics that we just took out.

Alex Hutchinson: I think it’s true and there’s this urge in video game development - when I was speaking to the team about it early on, I was calling it cancerous growth – the idea that you always need to add more to what you already had and the next time you need to add even more and more and it’s kind of ridiculous. With Ezio it was a problem because it’s not like he’s going to forget to pack his smoke bombs between games, you know what I mean? Or lose an ability. But with a new character I’m hoping we set the precedent that each one can be unique and have his own stuff, and we can boil it down. Obviously there’s a lot of stuff that just doesn’t exist, so we didn’t want to do the Brotherhood again, even though we have little elements like you saw [in the Boston demo] that touch on it. We didn’t want to have these thousands of people that you recruit to the new world. We don’t want to re-tread in terms of mechanics or story, so we’ve added the rope dart, the tomahawk, the new fighting system, the bow, bits and pieces like that, but we took out a lot of stuff so there’s no bomb crafting, there’s no den defence, there’s probably a dozen or so mechanics that we just took out.

IGN: How about the new combat system? Are you boiling it down to a system where rhythm is king? Is that the philosophy behind it?

Alex Hutchinson: We wanted two [things]. One was a little bit rhythm, in the sense that we wanted you to be more offensive and we wanted it to be rhythmic, to have that satisfaction of timing all of your moves. We wanted you to be countering interruptions, as opposed to ordered enemies. We wanted multiple enemies to attack, but we also wanted base archetypes. So this is something we’re still tuning a bit at the moment, this notion that when I hit a bigger guy, I should be able to kill him quite easily, but to do it in a kill chain, to be that bad-ass assassin who kills everyone without ever taking a hit, I need to be continually surfing the pad and using all the buttons. And so the way we were describing it was – little brother should be able to win the game, but look like a doofus, while big brother should be able to make him embarrassed. So we weren’t going to make it harder, but we want to make it harder to be perfect.

Now who's the doofus?

IGN: I love the look of the naval battles. How integral are they to the game, and how do you avoid making them feel tacked on, like den defence did?

Alex Hutchinson: It was tricky because, as you say, you don’t want it to feel tacked on, but luckily it just kept coming up in history. If you arrived in America you came on a boat. Everything you imported came on a boat. In the revolution, the French fleet blockaded the entrance to the harbour, and the English surrendered at Yorktown. Ships just kept coming up, and we thought – this is cool.

The way I pitched that one early on is, it’s kind of like X-Wing. Imagine a space combat game, but stuck on a carpet, so you have all the same ideas about where am I, where are the enemies, firing my different weapons, setting up your position, your speed, and all that sort of stuff, and you’re stuck on a carpet. But the cool thing is that the carpet is always in motion. We can raise the wave heights, we can play around with weather, we can do all that sort of stuff, and it becomes a natural obstacle. Like, something we didn’t expect, but that was really cool, was that when you have heaving swells, they become something that you can’t shoot through, so you actually have to pay attention to the size of the wave beside you, which is a lot of fun.

So we looked at it, and we thought – we need to do it, and then we realised that we don’t want it to be a strategy game or anything that’s not like the core game, so it still needed to be about navigation and combat, and it needed to be an action mechanic, not a strategy mechanic. And the reason we showed the demo the way that we did was to highlight to people – you are still Connor on the boat, you are not the boat. It’s not a strategy game... You’re the guy. You can let go of the wheel, the guy next to you will take it, you can walk around. And you saw a hint of the boarding mechanics [too]. We tried to ground it in the character, keep it in the same, sort of structural universe. In terms of how much you do it, there’s three or four moments in the main story that you have to deal with it, and then it has its own arc alongside, with a particular Templar target. There’s more to do with it if you want.

IGN: The Assassin’s Creed games always have a host of side missions. What can we expect here?

Alex Hutchinson: What was really important to me was this idea of layering the experience so that it’s re-living history. It’s a recorder, it’s a DVD player, so we can’t really do choice very well. You know, we can’t do – I choose to kill Washington and preserve the crown! This is not our game, so we need some level of player expressivity in there as well though, to make it fun. How do you express yourself as a player? So what I wanted was this notion that each district in the city has a problem that’s based around a historical problem that you can engage with and that connects back to the guys that can help you in the world. There are clubs that you can get involved in, whether it’s the hunting club or the New England Boy’s Athletic Club. All these things that have their own side-tasks and things you can do. And again, the goal being that while you’re on your main quest you have all these other things you can do at the same time. You’re expressing yourself by knitting together all these different features.

IGN: There’s no economic system?

Alex Hutchinson: There is one. We’ve managed to keep some secrets, so you saw one at the Sony show [- the naval battles], which given that was something we’ve been developing for two and a half years already is amazing. The games industry is terrible for secrets, and I’m kind of bored of working on things where everybody’s seen everything before we launch. So we wanted to keep a bunch of secrets, so there’s another couple that we want to keep. Three or four that we want to keep, even, up to ship. There’s some cool stuff. If you buy the game there’s two or three really big systems that we won’t talk about unless I’m defeated by marketing in a pitched battle.

IGN: Coming back to the idea of this being a yearly brand. Do you think there can be such a thing as too much Assassin’s Creed? I found myself getting tired of the Ezio games and longing for a more significant leap forward.

Alex Hutchinson: …We really think that it’s a question of quality, so if the games can be amazing, I think annual is fine. It only comes up as a problem if we miss the mark… We also assume that people will come and go. We know a lot of people played AC1 and AC2 then took a break. And we’re hearing a lot that people are interested in coming back for AC3, and that’s great. And then we have these people that go all the way through and they play everything, and I think that’s true of any big brand. You know, you could be a Star Trek fan that just sees the movies and you never watch the TV shows. Maybe you didn’t like Deep Space 9 but you loved Next Gen. I see it as that. As long as we keep the quality high then people can come and go, and as long as we set you up so that there’s not too much dependency between the games in terms of narrative, then I think we can do it. I hope we can do it, otherwise I’ll be looking for work!



Source : ign[dot]com