Ubisoft believes there’s a common misconception regarding the Assassin’s Creed franchise as to how many believe the IP focuses on climbing just buildings.
Creative director Alex Hutchison and senior producer Francois Pelland told 1UP:
Everyone says, oh, Assassin’s Creed is about climbing buildings. What we believe is that Assassin’s Creed is about climbing. You know what I mean? It doesn’t have to be about buildings at all. It’s about the act of climbing, about parkour, and all that sort of stuff.
Lead developer of Assassin’s Creed 3, Ubisoft Montreal, said that changing the usual environment from urban to wilderness will successfully address the aforementioned consensus of Assassin’s Creed utilizing buildings for the umpteenth time:
Slopes are everywhere, in both the frontier and on the roofs, big slopes are everywhere. There’s a reason why 99% of games only do flat surfaces,. Organic terrain actually having shapes that don’t look gridded and unusual shapes were all big challenges. Usually games are based on metrics.
You say, the jump distance is one meter, whatever the metric is. But if you’re going to put it in an organic environment, you need to base it on ranges. In other words, a jump can be point-eight meters to one-point-two meters. So once you start dealing with ranges, you can get dynamic shapes. It’s a big engineering challenge and an animation challenge.
As such, the studio added that players will have to adapt to a new set of rules pertaining to navigation:
It’s important that what you see as climbable, and that you feel like is climbable, it is climbable. You don’t have those orange glowing trees. But naturally you look at things and say, alright, I can climb on that thing. I see that rock, I’m going to climb on that.
That feeling for the player of being in front and looking around and just looking at all the trees, I can climb this, I can climb that, I can climb that. That kind of puzzle element that you would do anyway, like if you had been in the forest, that’s the kind of thing we’re doing.
Assassin’s Creed 3 is currently scheduled for a release in the United States on October 30th 2012 and a day later throughout Europe.
