{"id":53030,"date":"2018-10-05T18:29:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-05T18:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/328059"},"modified":"2018-10-05T18:29:00","modified_gmt":"2018-10-05T18:29:00","slug":"leaving-the-comforts-of-linear-design-behind-to-create-the-first-assassina-%c2%99s-creed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/10\/05\/leaving-the-comforts-of-linear-design-behind-to-create-the-first-assassina-%c2%99s-creed\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaving the comforts of linear design behind to create the first Assassin\u00e2€ \u0099s Creed"},"content":{"rendered":"

“<\/em>When you give freedom to people, it\u2019s more about systems, and the system will take care of a bunch of narrative moments.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

– Creative\u00a0director\u00a0Patrice D\u00e9silets recalls the early development of <\/em>Assassin’s Creed.<\/p>\n

Polygon has published an extensive oral history<\/a> that speaks with developers across several disciplines to chronicle the origins of Ubisoft\u2019s flagship series Assassin\u2019s Creed. <\/em>The game itself was born from the Prince of Persia<\/em> series, but would eventually go on to become its own entity during development.<\/p>\n

Still, moments from Prince of Persia<\/em>, specifically the latest entry (at the time) Prince of Persia: Sands of Time<\/em>, inspired moments and elements that would eventually make their way into Assassin\u2019s Creed<\/em>. For example, creative director Patrice D\u00e9silets recalls how two concepts that were cut from Sands of Time <\/em>for technical reasons, a crowded palace and rooftop to rooftop traversal, became cornerstones of Assassin\u2019s Creed<\/em> thanks to the leaps in tech that came with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 console generation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But even with technology on their side, transitioning from the more linear gameplay and acrobatics of Prince of Persia<\/em> to an open-world game like Assassin\u2019s Creed <\/em>introduced a fair amount of challenges to the team.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe spent [a]\u00a0lot\u00a0of time building and designing the game on paper. We knew that we were good to build levels that required traversal, but we had no idea how to make [the game] open wide,\u201d recalls lead level designer David Chateauneuf. \u201cA linear level full of traversal is easy to do because we were controlling the path and the pacing. Creating an open world is much harder because we were not controlling every time where the player wanted to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chateauneuf notes, in the \u2018A Living World\u2019 section of the oral history, that this required the team to approach level design differently than it had with linear games in the past. The solution, he says, on paper was to highlight critical places and objectives and then focus on polishing the fluidity of movement in the paths players would take between each of those landmarks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were used to placing all the athletic ingredients at specific points to match the animation of the hero,\u201d says Chateauneuf later on in the conversation.\u00a0 \u201cAnd we were used to controlling the sequence of gameplay. With\u00a0Assassin\u2019s Creed<\/em>, we had to think in full 3D. Think as a 3D grid. We had to fill the streets [and] the fa\u00e7ades of buildings with lots of objects in order to give lots of option to the player, so he would never get stuck in his path. Also, we had to think about objects that would make him go up, objects to make him go across big gaps and objects that would allow the player to go down \u2014 like the famous haystacks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“When you give freedom to people, it\u2019s more about systems, and the system will take care of a bunch of narrative moments.\u201d – Creative\u00a0director\u00a0Patrice D\u00e9silets recalls the early development of Assassin’s Creed. Polygon has published an extensive oral history that speaks with developers across several disciplines to chronicle the origins of Ubisoft\u2019s flagship series Assassin\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}