Feature: Q&A: Assassin's Creed developer talks trilogy, sci-fi twist
GamePro interviews Patrice Desilets, creative director on Assassin's Creed at Ubisoft's Montreal studio.
Q&A by Cameron Lewis
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The time period of the Third Crusade in the twelfth century A.D. What was it that drew you to that particular corner of time and space, and how did you go about fleshing out the world that Altair inhabits?
Well, I like the way you said "time and space," because it was a really good reference for me, right at the beginning, to have a place where I could jump easily from rooftop to rooftop, and to have a crowd. Also, it was really important to have places where there are narrow streets, and that is what you find in a medieval city-lower buildings, not skyscrapers, and not large avenues. Everything is narrower. When you're in an avenue of a medieval town, it's kind of a back-alley compared to today. If you put twenty to thirty-five guys into that, you have a crowd. It's harder to fill up Fifth Avenue in New York City than to fill up a back alley in a medieval town.
So the setting was really to have gameplay first. Then it appealed to me to tell the tale of a medieval man in a medieval world. To put it in the Middle East, I found it appealing to talk about that place, but from where it all started. What's going on today started 1,000 years ago, and those events prefigured what's going on today.
That's why I wanted to have cities in medieval times, because it's easier to fill up, and to jump from building to building. So there's really a game design element that attracted me to making those cities.
If I remember correctly, Altair is the child of a Muslim Father and a Christian Mother. What was the thinking behind that design decision?
To make sure that we have an international character, and that he's not on either side. He's Altair, and he has his own path. Even though the subject is controversial, we didn't want to play with that much. We're telling a story that's never been told, which is the back-story of the Crusades, something that wasn't written in the history books. The goal was to make a really good action game in an interesting setting. It wasn't to pick a side. That's not what this story is about. He's a political assassin, and his goal is to prevent war.
Creating a compelling character for players to inhabit seems like quite an undertaking. How did you come up with the basic idea for Altair, and how did you refine it to what we see in the game?
I started conceptualizing this a month after Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and after working for more than two years on a character whose main thing is being a prince, I wanted a character that in his title has some action attached. A prince doesn't do much, per se: he's basically waiting for the king to die so he can take his place. So you need to come up with a situations, outside of the character, to drive the action.
So this time around I wanted a character that even in his title, you see an action. I remember a book I read in college about secret societies, and the first chapter was about the Hashshashin, the myths surrounding those people. I remember at the time this scene where the chief, or mentor, asks his men to jump, to do a leap of faith, to die at his command, and that was a really powerful moment. I said "I want to do that moment in a game." I don't want to spoil it, but you can imagine that it's somewhere in the game.
I didn't have to do a big pitch. "You play an assassin." Okay, I see something. Then, if it's in a medieval city, then you can put people in it and it'll feel crowded. I don't have to ask for 300 people on-screen to feel like it's a crowd. I could have 35 and it'll be enough, and eventually, 35 became 120. And that's enough, you really feel like it's alive.
Then we said, okay, if there's people, we need gameplay attached to them, so instead of having this assassin constantly in shadow, let's have an assassin where his shadow is being part of the crowd. You're a blade in the crowd.
And then, since it's the same team that did Prince of Persia, we knew how to do the acrobatic part of our character. This time around let's have a character who can for real interact with his environment, with the architecture of the environment, not only the ingredients that you place, and the player has to find the puzzle, but give the character a playground.
The analogy I often give the team is that Altair is like a car in Grand Theft Auto: he can go anywhere. That's why you hold the right trigger -- that's your gas. And then you have your boost. And that's basically how you control the main character. If you think that Altair is a platform character, you'll have a little bit of a hard time controlling him. As soon as you understand that no, the goal of the game isn't just to jump around: you're in a bigger situation. You're being chased, or you're in a fight sequence, so everything must be a little bit easier, because there's so many things going on at the same time.
At the beginning we had tapping a lot, then we realized holding is the right way to go. You'll feel good enough, you don't have to be good with the buttons. You'll be Altair, an assassin during medieval times, a blade in the crowd, and that will be enough. Let the player think more about the situation than the video game part of "I need to press button A now, then I need to press B."
Right at the start we divided the low profile actions-everything that is socially accepted -- from the high-profile actions that are not socially accepted, but are more spectacular. That's why the trigger came in pretty soon in the development cycle, to make that division. I wanted for a while to have a game where walking was fun. It takes time to really say "I need to walk sometimes in Assassin's Creed." You need to. It takes a while, because we're used to going as fast as possible. I'm asking the player to make a conscious decision to restrain himself, to say "no, I need to be better than I was before, as a gamer, and I'll take the time to be a little bit slower, and get through my objective by walking, gently push people, and stealth-assassinate somebody."
And there are more than a few ways that Altair can screw himself up along the way. Can you talk a little bit about the various human obstacles he comes across?
I wanted a game where you don't just kill a room full of guards, and then the doors open. I wanted a character that is human, and human beings try to find other ways to solve problems than be simply eliminating it. Sometimes you go around the problem. So in a crowd, say, and you have civilians, and the only way of interacting with them is by killing, then you're a mass-murderer, not an assassin.
So we have the low profile actions that let you interact with people, like civilians, but in a socially accepted fashion. We worked on the gentle push, trying to move people around. It wasn't easy to do, actually, because how do we behave socially, and how would a crowd react to the presence of an assassin? We tried to be a little bit theatrical, and yet credible, like evading your pursuers by blending with a group of monks. It's all about small fantasies that we try to add together.
In the beginning, we had the crowd being much more like a simulation. So it was people walking around doing stuff, but it wasn't readable, it wasn't clear what a player would want to do with them. So I came in in the morning after spending almost the entire night trying to figure this out, and I remembered on Sands of Time-and even Donald Duck-that we had booby traps. Obstacles that a player could read, and say "okay, with this I can do action A, with that I can do action B," and have fun with it. So we need people in the crowd that are asking the player for actions, like small challenges, which makes the crowd more believable because people are interacting with you, instead of just reacting to you.
I remember at one time we had a rug carrier that you would have to roll underneath. We called them during production the "NPC traps," and they had special behaviors that asked you to do something specific.
And then we have the soldiers, too, but even the soldiers have different AI behaviors. You have guards that are only talking to each other, those that will form a wall in front of you and trying to stop you with their hands or weapons, you have the wandering guards, you have the patrols, you have the archers.
Then there are people who are listening to someone, stationary NPCs. If you're running, the danger is losing your balance, and it's harder to keep your balance the faster you run. If people are waiting in line to buy something from a merchant stand, it becomes an obstacle. People who are listening to a town crier become an obstacle. As a player, you understand those setups. If beggars want money from you, they'll do a really good job of harassing you.
Something else that I wanted, that I'm really proud that we achieved, is the fact that all of this, even with the fights and all the missions, there's no stopping between all those different moments. In general, in games, you go, you do your thing-you enter a room, kill everyone, the door opens up, you enter the next room. It was like that in Sands of Time, so I don't want to bash any games, because I did some like that. But this time you're living Altair's life in this environment, and everything is there. You go from a fight to a chase sequence to a hiding sequence to a stealth sequence and it's all in the same two minutes, and it's not even apparent that you're switching between modes.
Underneath that, the character goes through so many different behaviors. For instance, free-running is four or five different behaviors for us as developers: you're climbing, and then you're jumping from beam to beam, and then you climb down a ladder, those are different behaviors, and it's totally fluid. I'm really proud of that. You're really just in Altair's life; you kind of forget that you're in a game. And that's also our challenge: you're so much into it that as soon as the world doesn't respond like it's supposed to, it pulls you out of the game a little bit more than you might in a shooter with a linear path.
You never stop playing, also, and of that I'm really proud. As soon as you press start, you are Altair.
Read the second page of the Q&A.
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