According to Assassin’s Creed III creative director Alex Hutchinson, he doesn’t mind if the “truth” told in the series is uncomfortable, as long as it’s backed up by facts.
At the Assassin’s Creed III launch party in Toronto last night, Hutchinson and Liberation scriptwriter Jill Murray talked with GamesIndustry International about the way they approached the thorny issues in their games.
Hutchinson said, it wasn’t so much about being inoffensive or trying to make a point as it was about having their facts straight.
“Usually we’re trying to be truthful, and we like it–I should say we don’t mind it–if the truth is uncomfortable, if we can back it up with facts. When we were dealing with the Borgia’s [in Assassin’s Creed II], we were saying the Pope is a really bad guy, but if you do any amount of research, it’s pretty clear we didn’t make this up and it’s pretty well documented.”
“And it’s the same with the Founding Fathers [in ACIII]. These are real people; they have their ups and downs, their opinions, and when we can find documented evidence of an opinion they had or something they asked for and it was just true, then we were happy to put that in the game. But we tried not to have our subjective layer come into it; we saved that for the fictional storyline and the fictional characters.”
Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation features Aveline, a former slave, which was a topic the development team didn’t explore deeply in in the core title. However, it was a topic in which Liberation scriptwriter Jill Murray was unable to avoid.
“We tried to present [slavery] objectively without crossing over into commenting on it,” Hutchinson said. “We didn’t want to take one step into that issue and then not deal with it, so really for us, it’s not a topic we try to tackle in this game.”
“For me the importance of talking about things outweighs the fear,” Murray said. “The fear you can deal with by doing your research, by talking to people, by really looking deeply into the character, understanding how they work, how they respond to their environment. To me, it’s so much more important to talk about things, I’m willing to set the fear aside long enough to do my research and make sure I get it right.”
Hutchinson also spoke about the differences between the US and European versions of trailers for the game. PR outlets in the US, reportedly, don’t want to show Connor killing “Americans”, something we all noticed in the previous trailers.
“On the team, it’s been funny because we know the story and what happens,” Hutchinson said. “You’re very much in between these two forces and you’re essentially killing Templars.”
“You’re not really killing Redcoats or Bluecoats. You’re killing the fictional bad guys, so it’s more on the marketing side that people have been debating. And we also know that as soon as the game is out and people play it, a lot of this will go away.”
Previously, Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed III’s Pre-release trailer, CGI trailer andDesmond trailer.
Assassin’s Creed III will release on October 30 for PS3, Xbox360 and on November 20 for PC.
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