14 Oct, 2011
It feels almost as if the holidays wouldn’t be complete if an Assassin’s Creed game didn’t release alongside the turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Assassin’s Creed II released in November of 2009, and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood followed suit the next year. Revelations marks the third running year that an Assassin’s Creed title will release yet again in November. Will we ever see a change to that, or is it going to stay an annual occurrence? According to a recent interview with creative lead Alexandre Amancio, the development cycle with Assassin’s Creed is about to change too.
“We’re already structuring the way we do Assassin’s Creed, so it will no longer ever be like that,” said Amancio. “Our development approach is changing so our cycles aren’t structured the same way — so it gives us a little bit more development time.”
However, the lead missions design director of Revelations, Falco Poiker, says that it can be a rewarding experience. It’s challenging to conceive such a robust game in a space of a few years, but try that with just a few months. While one of the biggest challenges was historical accuracies, Poiker also noted that the simple amount of stuff that needed to be done was also daunting at times. “There’s so many main missions, there’s so many optional missions, the cities are huge, the distances that the player needs to cover are huge and we need to make sure that’s not boring,” said Poiker in an interview with Edge. “There’s just the mass of work that needs to be done. That’s a huge, huge challenge.”
Time is never on Poiker’s side either. With a production cycle that runs less than a year, Poiker noted that another challenge that arises is discovering what each person’s strengths and weaknesses are. Strengths dictate who gets to work on what, and it falls all upon Poiker’s shoulders to direct the traffic.
Fans aren’t the only ones worried about how the short development cycle might potentially hurt the game. Poiker explained that internally, there’s always going to be a complaint about time management. “…a lot of people complain about that, I mean I’m talking internally — people say there’s not enough time,” said Poiker. “But it gives an impetus to the team and we find a direction that we say we’re going to run in, and there’s very little of the indecision that comes with teams that spend two, three, four years developing games.
“Frequently those games will restart completely from the ground-up because they’re like, ‘We’re not satisfied where we are.’ We don’t have that luxury so the time actually kind of works in our favor. We go one direction and we go with it. If there’s problems, oh well, we’ll fix it along the way.”
Ready for yet another side of Ezio we haven’t seen yet? We know the man can speak French thanks to a couple of french ladies in Florence, he can swim, roll around in a medieval tank, and do other cool assassin stuff. Well, he’s going to play us some music too.
“I had an idea for a mission in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and it ended up being cut because it was too complicated to do,” said Poiker when asked about a moment of pride in Revelations. “I proposed it again for Revelations and hey, because I’m the director, I’ve got that much more say and it’s in the game. It’s where Ezio plays a lute [having knocked out a group of minstrels and stolen their clothes, Ezio plays the lute as a distraction to facilitate an assassination]. That was one of my pet ideas so it’s really cool to see that come together.”
Gamers may still complain about the annual releases for Assassin’s Creed, but it seems there will be many a change on the horizon.
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations launches November 15th for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
To read the full interview with Poiker, check it out here.
Via VG 24/7.
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