Assassin’s Creed III “Going Back To Basics”

Assassin’s Creed is an award winning historical fiction action-adventure open world stealth video game series that as of 2012 consists of five main games and a number of supporting materials.

That being said, Ubisoft has tried to evolve the franchise with each game, unfortunately, to the point where the story and the mechanics of the game have become too complicated to grasp, especially for those new to the franchise.

But with Assassin’s Creed III comes a fresh start, and according to creative director Alex Hutchinson, an opportunity to go “back to basics.”

Hutchinson told an audience at the Game Developers Conference that the game aims to strip back the ballooning complexity of the series’ mechanics and story.

He also explained the thinking behind the more rural American Revolution setting, and noted that the story would take place “over 30 years, beginning before the Revolution and ending after the Revolution.”

“I think one of the joys of having a new character and a new universe is that we can strip it back and we can go back to basics,” he said.

Hutchinson acknowledged that the last three games had struggled with clarity and accessibility. “I think that there’s an element in the Ezio trilogy… I think it’s very hard when you have a story that’s going from game to game to game, that’s relatively consistent, to remove things. It doesn’t make sense to people logically that in the second game they would lose something that they had, fictionally, hours before, so we’ve had a problem with mechanics that weren’t as tight as perhaps they could have been.”

Hutchinson admitted that the lack of built-up cities was a departure for the series, but he was embracing it with the game’s new focus on attending historical events and surviving in the wilderness. (Possibly not coincidentally, he mentioned his love for both Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption elsewhere in the talk.)

“If you’re a fan, I’m sure you’ve read the boards where people are saying there’s not enough epic buildings to climb, and it’s true that we’ve moved from the stone structures of Europe to less epic buildings in America – although I promise there are plenty of churches to climb.

“But what we still have is this opportunity to lean into history, and what we want to deliver to players this time is not just climbing a historical landmark, but visiting a historical event – being in New York while the city burns, or ultimately being at Valley Forge while George Washington is camped there.”

He added, “it’s a hugely complicated game, it has many different features, it’s a long game, getting people up to speed as quickly as possible is a big challenge. We know we have a learning curve, we know we need to introduce a lot of new mechanics, so what we looked at was reducing the time to assassinate. In ACIII, we promise you that within 30 seconds of putting the disc in the tray, you will in fact be assassinating someone. That’s a promise.”

He also talked about the setting of the game (the late 1700′s during the American Revolution), the ice-cold winters during those years (1753 through 1783) and how a new snow technology will make players very aware of the freezing temperatures they’re in, the lack of historical landmarks over-shadowed by the inclusion of events that took place (such as the great fire of New York or George Washington’s encampment at Valley Forge), and the daunting task of bringing fans of the franchise up to speed while at the same time making this entry in the franchise accessible to new players of it.

The new hero will be “as comfortable in the wilderness, as capable as previous assassins were in the cities” and would have to deal with extreme cold weather. “This was a period in time where if you didn’t plan for winter, you were going to die. So we built an entirely new snow system that we think is pretty exciting.”

Hutchinson maintained that the American Revolution setting would be relevant and exciting to a contemporary audience. “This concept of helping a nation fight for freedom is a primal desire, we believe,” he said.

“It’s also a story that’s relevant to many different audiences. While the American Revolution is obviously very important to Americans, it’s also important to the British – the joke of the time was that this was a civil war fought on foreign soil – the French – the money they invest helping the Patriots win the war leads directly to the French Revolution – and for the rest of the world, this is the roots of the American century, which just finished.”

He also thought players would be as excited to meet Ben Franklin and George Washington in the game as they were Leonardo da Vinci in Assassin’s Creed 2. “[These] are people that are mythological characters in the history of the country and the history of Western civilisation. Most of you are walking around with Washington’s face in your pocket. Probably not too many with Franklin.

“The way we see the universe is that it’s basically two fantasies. One is the fantasy of being an assassin, and the other one is this fantasy of being a virtual time tourist, of someone visiting different places in time and different periods in time. We try to make sure that all of the mechanics we build fall into one, or both preferably, of those pockets.”

Hutchinson mentioned that his motivation for encouraging designers to think about the commerciality of the games they want to build came from a fear that design would increasingly be led by analytical tools rather than creative intent, and that “the cancerous growth” of the “arms race” in triple-A games would leave blockbusters “as nothing more than the last of the dinosaurs.” (And this from a guy who’s making one!)

Hutchison described two possible “dystopian” avenues for continued growth in games – designing games based on analytics to make money, and relying on increased scale and better graphics in a “massive arms race”.

“In my mind video games need to have the goal of educating people, entertaining people, or at least being artistic,” he said, adding a warning: “If you’re not pushing any of these things…then I think we’re in for a rough patch.”

“And as Ben Franklin said, a good game lubricates the body and the mind.”

Assassin’s Creed III will release release on October 30 for PC, PS3, Xbox360 and Wii U. Click here for ACIII covers

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