Ubisoft Is Giving 'Assassin's Creed: Unity' Away For Free To Honor Notre Dame

On Monday, a stunned world watched in person and over social media as the Notre Dame Cathedral burned, doing massive damage to the 800-year old monument and iconic Paris Landmark. AS the conversation turned to rebuilding, there was speculation that people might be able to use the elaborate 3D model of the Cathedral from Assassin's Creed: Unity to assist with these efforts. The video game developer cautions that might not be such a great idea--the model of Notre Dame found in the video game is impressive, but a representative from the company makes clear that it is an artistic creation, not a scientific one. Still, as a French company headquartered outside of Paris, Ubisoft has just announced that it will be donating €500,000 to the rebuilding efforts, as well as giving anyone with a capable enough PC the chance to virtually visit Notre Dame. Ubisoft will be giving away Assassin's Creed Unity for free for one week, and all you need to do is go to Uplay and download it. 
Assassins Creed Unity dramatized the French Revolution, but the star of the show in that game was undoubtedly Paris itself, a sprawling recreation of desperate slums and lavish palaces on such a staggering scale that it was a little hard to fathom when the game first came out. Notre Dame, naturally featured heavily in the game both as the setting for a mission and one of the central architectural features of the game's Paris. and like with everything else in the game, it was built with painstaking detail.

 
Assassin's Creed: Unity
Credit: Joe Parlock

Senior level designer Caroline Miousse spent a full two years making Unity's version of Notre Dame, obsessing over every brick and working with a historian to make sure that the structure in the game was both as accurate a recreation as physically possible and something that modern players would be able to recognize. The end result was stunning: the giant cathedral sits in the centre of the city, replete with sculpture, stained glass, architectural detail and more. The goal was to make this as close to a perfect recreation as possible, and that took time and effort. As Destructoid reported at the time:

Seeing that the Notre Dame was prioritized in the development of Unity, a main goal was to recreate it 1:1 to stay as true as possible. That means that Miousse was almost literally putting the cathedral together brick by brick. The size seems to have been a welcomed challenge that she reveled in. "I want the player to feel tiny when scaling it," Miousse stated.