Ubisoft creative director Alex Hutchinson has discussed Assassin’s Creed 3‘s New York setting.
How players would travel between the distance of New York and Boston has left fans wondering what exactly Ubisoft is planning for this. Hutchinson explained to Digital Trends:
We had a big discussion about that early on in development. What we realized was, we could make it contiguous and have you run from Boston through the Frontier to New York, but it made it feel like Disneyland. If you can run in five minutes from Boston to New York, it stops feeling real. In the end, we decided to keep them separate [with load screens]. There’s not a big, swampy chunk of New York, we just went with the densest part of [the city].
The city will be clearly differentiated when compared to the city of the game’s18th century Boston setting.
It is slightly different, in that there is a lot of Dutch influence in New York at that time. So we have those unusual buildings with fake fronts… and then sloped roofs behind them. That changes the free-running a little bit. It’s most of lower Manhattan, the tip that was there at the time. The population wasn’t anywhere near as big as it is now obviously, so we were able to get a lot of the city in that was actually there.
He added that the majority of gameplay in New York is centered towards the period of the Great Fire of 1776.
Assassin’s Creed 3 is currently scheduled for a release on October 30th in North America and a day later throughout European regions.
