We talk about the dramatic end of an era for the Assassin's Creed series with creative director, Alexandre Amancio
From 12th century Jerusalem to Renaissance Rome, the Assassin's Creed adventures have led us on a rather spectacular journey through medieval history. This winter, the fourth title in the main series, Revelations, is heading out to Constantinople, bringing the first arc of the story to a close. Here, Ezio, the dashing hero of Assassin's Creed 2 and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is on the hunt for five ancient relics hidden by his ancestor Altair and capable of ending the war between the assassins and the Templar order.
The search has brought him to this complex and divided city, and as usual, Ubisoft's artists have beautifully captured the environment. The E3 demo of Revelations showed Ezio leaping from ship to ship in the harbour, using a flamethrower to set fire to the vessels, then scaling masts, leaping along fallen gang planks and indulging in crunching melee combat with numerous enemies. Now older and wiser, Ezio will have a new arsenal of weapons including an array of customisable bombs, trip wires and of course the hookblade which operates like Batman's batclaw, allowing him to scale buildings with speed and ease.
Multiplayer, too, has been reworked with added modes, locations and characters, as well as support for guilds, customisation and a narrative layer adding a greater sense of cogency. The intriguing cat and mouse mode from Brotherhood has been simplified, with a clear UI and more prompts, allowing assassins to more effectively scope out their victims.
But how will this scintillating title wrap up the stories of both Altair and Ezio, and what role will the city itself play in the narrative? To find out, I recently spoke with the game's creative director, Alexandre Amancio.
What drew you to Constantinople as a setting?
It's a lot of things. Constantinople was the crossroads of the world during that era – it was the New York City of the Renaissance. It is also the merger between Europe and Asia, which is a cool metaphor for the meeting of destinies between Ezio and Altair. But more than that, the city layout lends itself very well to an Assassin's Creed game. First, it is split in half so we can have a good sense of progression as we introduce the different areas to the player. Secondly, the city is actually 85 per cent slopes so we're introducing the hook blade, which allows us to add speed and fluidity to the climbing and navigation. We also have a lot of zip lines, which are a cool way of navigating the city – plus, you can slow down and actually assassinate targets from above.
Did you visit the city to gather primary source material?
We went twice. I mean, you can research from pictures on the web or from books, but you can't capture the ambience of a city if you don't go. I learned that on Far Cry 2 – we went to Africa and that made the game more real; same thing here. But not only did we send art people to get pictures, we also took samples of the sounds, the language, the market bustle, the prayers. We also pride ourselves on historical accuracy. We have a historical researcher who gives us a lot of data on how the city was in the past – the layout, the architecture… one of our cities, Venice, was actually used in a school in Europe to teach about the city back then – we're striving for the same with Constantinople.
What led you to the idea of crossing the Ezio and Altair stories?
Well, Assassin's Creed has been going since 2007 – the narrative is very rich and complex, so to avoid collapsing under the weight of our own mythology we needed to wrap up a few mysteries and set things up for what is to come. That's what this game is about: we're giving players some answers from Assassin's 2 and Brotherhood, we're completing the destiny of Altair, and we're tying it in to what's coming in 2012. And obviously, our over-arching storyline has to do with the end of the world in 2012 – we need to set up everything for the conclusion of that narrative. In this game, you'll get to understand why Ezio is so important and how his destiny his aligned to Altair's and to Desmond's.
So where is Desmond going? Presumably his story arches into the next?
Yeah. At the end of Brotherhood, Desmond is in a coma and he's plugged into the Animus to stop his consciousness from just falling into limbo. But inside the Animus drops through the white room, the loading interface, because he is too weak, and he ends up in the black room, the low-level DOS of Animus. It's much more powerful, but very hard to use, it's not meant to be for human interface. So the place gets populated with ghosts from Desmond's past, different unconscious elements – and we're using this to give more depth to what has been until now, a very two-dimensional character.
So you'll be telling us more about him – where he's come from, what his motivations are?
All of that stuff is going to be set up in this game – it's one of the main themes of Revelations. I think you get to understand their motivations of all the cast. Ezio goes on a really character-changing arc. You'll get a sense that this is really the end of the trilogy. Ezio is a character who's always been very reactive – he fell into the assassins because his father was killed, then his uncle is killed and it's all about revenge. But now he's grown, and he's going in to this inner quest – and that's with Altair. It's not Desmond playing as Altair, it's Ezio. We get to experience all the key points in Altair's life – everything from his youth to his ultimate destiny – and since Ezio is living through this, it puts some perspective on his own life and the decisions he's going to have to make at the end of the game.
So you have an Inception-style multi-layered reality… That must be a nightmare to stay on top of, in terms of continuing narrative. Do you have it all written out on a blackboard somewhere?
We have many! We actually have a small team whose soul purpose is to ensure that everything is coherent. One of the rules we have with AC is that anything that we state, anything that happens in the game, becomes part of the reality – part of the encyclopaedia. We really want to avoid revisionism, and it's extremely hard, especially with crossing destinies, different realities, different timelines…
Right, so how does your narrative team stay on top of it?
Well, wanted to avoid compiling a game bible that's 2000 pages of stuff nobody reads. So we use very visual schematics, we have all the timelines up on the walls – we always understand the relationships between characters and all the situations. It's very hard: sometimes we have a really good idea, but it just doesn't fit with the whole structure and we remove it – coherence is very important.
Do you have a complete story in mind for Assassin's or do you evolve it as you go along?
It's a little bit of both actually. I think that if we keep the end in sight, the path we take to reach that end can be left free because you need to be able to adjust things. It's an organic process – some gamers might not like this or that, so you always adapt the path. But if the destination is clear, you always remain true to it, because you're always heading toward it, no matter what path you take.
We do have narrative arcs that complete – and Revelations is the completion of one narrative arc: the arc of Ezio and Altair. We actually also have the completion of a Desmond arc. It's good for players to feel the completion of certain stories – we can always hint at and open others. This series is such a rich universe, it has all these underlying conspiracies that criss-cross with history, so it's not like we're missing ideas and initiatives for other narrative arcs…. So it works like a TV series in the sense that it will have a continuation over many seasons, but it does have a conclusion.
Can you tell us anything about the historical figures who crop up in Revelations?
Some are so deeply entwined in the story, we're not naming them yet. But we do have Suleiman the Magnificent in the game. He is probably the most famous Sultan of the Ottoman Empire – he is responsible for its renaissance and glory, he was the one who stabilised and expanded it. He was so successful that the Europeans had to find ways to go around Africa to reach the spice markets – he controlled everything. We also have his uncle, Sehzade Ahmet, the leading heir to the throne at the time. The others I don't want to go into but we link to many figures. Also, Ezio's love interest Sofia, an Italian living in Constantinople. It was a very cosmopolitan city – a lot of Venetians and Genoans were living there. We actually based her on a real painting of an unknown Venetian woman; so at any time we can add a little wink to history, we will do it.
How are you evolving the idea from Brotherhood of being able to recruit an army of assassin helpers?
That's something else we're not detailing yet! But every new feature of this game needed to consolidate at least two of the main Assassin's Creed pillars – this was to avoid the player drowning in systems. For instance, we're consolidating the Borgia Towers and the city improvements into one new system that we're calling the assassins' dens. So we do have a new possible interaction with your assassin's within the city other than just calling them for help in the middle of a fight. We also have another high-level feature: in Brotherhood you could send your assassins out on missions all over the Mediterranean – we're expanding on that and adding more gameplay…
How have you dealt with the fact that Ezio has aged? Video games rarely really get to grips with this aspect, apart from giving every male character over 40 a grey beard…
Well, in terms of narrative, the character is in a very different place in his life – it's more of a personal journey. For the first time he's motivated by a desire to clarify everything he's been doing. He's asking, 'why am I endangering my life for this order when I have so little information about it?' His attitude has changed, age has toughened him. And also, the hook blade is an important introduction: he's getting old, physically, but we didn't want to slow him down, so we needed a way to help his acrobatics. His eagle sense skill is also about him becoming wiser – if you get on a rooftop, you can see the faint trail of an enemy moving into a crowd; then you can pick that up, analyse the crowd and find the bad guy. It's all about him getting older and wiser.
It sounds like the hook blade is going to have quite a profound effect on the game world…
Yeah, it's funny because we've been playing the game with the hook blade for so long it has become an integral part of the experience. I recently picked up one of the older titles and you really notice – it feels like something is missing. I think that's the measure of a good feature. Not only does it add speed, it adds fluidity. You know how, when you play Tetris, your brain just gets in to this flow stage where you just forget time? This is what we were aiming for – reaching a point in which the navigation itself becomes a toy.
You're adding more of a narrative element to your multiplayer modes this time round. Do you think we're heading toward an era in which there's no such thing as single and multiplayer modes – where the experience caters for both aspects simultaneously?
Yes. Multiplayer shouldn't be something we say any more, it shouldn't be a term, it should just be a given. I mean, we've seen the explosion of Facebook – and now that it exists, how could we ever have not imagined it? Games are the same – when someone really gets the integration of single player and multiplayer right, we will wonder how games ever existed without it.
Assassin's Creed: Revelations is out on PC, PS3, Xbox 360 on 15 November
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/jul/22/games-ps3
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