**Official** Assassin's Creed Thread

[cmd]

How difficult is it to get convincing crowd AI?

The crowd and the AI systems have always been a core component of the gameplay. To say that this had a huge impact on the team is an understatement: we've put a massive amount of engineering effort in realizing an AI system that makes a large medieval town come alive. We're aggressively using technologies and strategies that are truly pushing the limits of what next-gen consoles can deliver.

Most of the development effort has gone into making crowd gameplay. This means that the crowd is more then just window dressing that walks around in a believable simulation of everyday life, each civilian is a gameplay component that can either help or hinder the player's progress.

In order to create a crowd that the player can use as a strategic advantage we had to build a layered system. This crowd system has 4 layers in total. The lowest level handles the individual needs of the population and creates believable street life when the player does nothing, the highest overarching layer manages the crowd's global Alert State, dictating the amount of crowd panic and triggering specific military tactics. In between that there is a whole lot of code to handle crowd allegiance so that the townspeople's attitude towards you evolves based on the actions you have taken.

It is quite complicated when you dissect the system in technical terms but to a player the system will be very intuitive because the rules are based on everyday life. If you do things that are socially acceptable you are anonymous and therefore hidden, if however you start behaving in an abnormal way climbing walls in broad daylight or pushing people around you are likely to attract the attention of the crowd and they may then alert the guards or your target.

The controls are crucial in a game like this but my initial play suggested they take some getting used to. Is this a concern of yours?

Altair has over 1000 different contextual moves. Obviously finding a way to map that on to a controller is a challenge. We did not want to confuse people with a million combos to memorize so we had to take a different approach to controls. We were inspired by a pupeteering concept. A triangle is mapped to your character's head, square to your character's weapon hand, circle is mapped to your free hand and X is mapped to your feet. Each body part then reacts contextually to the situation you are in. If you are in a fight context and you press free hand it will allow you to grab and throw an opponent, if you are in a crowd situation free hand will allow you to push the people out of the way. It's a new concept so it takes a bit of time to get used to but once you get it the controls are intuitive.


How do balance the desires of players who want to run through hack and slashing and those who want to stealthily explore the rooftops?

We don't try and balance desires - you get to do it the way you want! There are some missions that will be easier to accomplish if you use the rules of social stealth and blend with the crowd while others favour an all out aggressive attack, but every missions has tons of possibilities available. We want players to experiment with the rules and their abilities and come up with their own Assassin style.

Is there online play? If not, what were the main reasons in avoiding it?

There is no online gameplay because our plate was already plenty full.
With Assassins we wanted to fully leverage all that the new consoles have to offer so we developed a brand new engine and tools. It's our own proprietary tech that allows us to have over 150 individual AIs running at a single time and huge cities where everything is interactive and climbable. Add that to the fact that our mandate was to come up with a new IP that redefines the action adventure genre and you can see that we had our work cut out for us. We chose to focus on delivering a truly fresh single player experience.

The Wii has blown the games market wide open. How much impact does the growth in casual gaming have on your creative process with AC?

The Wii is all about casual games. In terms of processing power and graphics capabilities the Wii is roughly equivalent to the PS2 and the first Xbox. On the team and at Ubisoft in general, we are big fans of the Nintendo approach. I like the controller and the fact that the Wii is bringing a new audience to games but Assassin's creed would never run on the Wii hardware. There's a big audience that's looking for immersive gameplay and a cinematic entertainment experience with graphics that rival the best CG. It would be sad for everyone to jump on the casual games band wagon now because I think that we are very close to delivering the best of both worlds. A game with the very best production values that's accessible enough for the mass market.

Assassin's Creed interview | Games | Guardian Unlimited

[kinyo]

this game is gonna be awesome, at least it better be for how long its been in the making and pushing back release dates and all

[toonces]

And it's sooooo close! Sooooo close!

[Angdvl089]

Nice find cmd.

[cmd]

New "tease" from Ubisoft.

Document sans nom

[NightFire]

Thats pretty cool.

[Angdvl089]

AHHHH! That teases me!

[HalfLife v2]

**OMG** This **thread** is **Official!!**

[csvt98]

This game looks pretty sick.I pre-ordered tihis one and army of two but that got delayed so im just going to play this one alot when i get it next month

[toonces]

That shouldn't be a problem. AC is supposed to have something like 40 hours of gameplay if you tackle side-missions (quests...assignments...whatever they are calling it for this game. If you're like me and you like to smell the roses, that probably means something like 50 hours, or if you breeze through I'm sure you could get at least 30 hours from it. That should keep you busy while waiting for the other games to come out