But when testers started running around the game, something was missing. She even had historians help her figure out the exact paintings that were hanging on the walls. She pored over photos to get the architecture just right, and worked with texture artists to make sure that each brick was as it should be. Level artist Miousse spent literally years fussing over the details of the building. In the case of the Notre Dame, easily the biggest structure in the game, it meant recreating a version of the cathedral that didn’t actually exist at the time. “When people talk about Paris they have postcards in their mind,” he says, “even if this postcard isn’t accurate or truthful to the setting.” It’s just one of many changes made to make ACU’s Paris not only work better for a game, but also match the vision of Paris that players have in their mind. The solution was to lessen the number of pointy buildings, and make the slants a bit less harsh, so it still looks like Paris but still plays like Assassin’s Creed. Previous Assassin’s Creed games featured cities with primarily flat, or slightly slanted rooftops, that made bounding across the city a joy - throw in a bunch of high, pointy roofs and you break up that flow. The problem was that those roofs were a pain to move around on. “The skyline of the city was key to me,” says art director Mohamed Gambouz, who wanted to maintain the pointy medieval rooftops and plentiful chimneys that helped define Paris at the time. It’s just a matter of adjusting the scale.Īnd those rooftops provided their own set of challenges. Key landmarks are all in the right place so that it still looks and feels like Paris, but the added space means things won’t feel cramped while you run across the city’s rooftops. It’s a simple concept: in the center of the city it’s essentially a one-to-one recreation, but the further you move from Paris’ core, the more spread out things get. So in order to make Paris more of a playground, the team used a process called “radial scale” to change its layout. Paris is incredibly dense, with cramped streets and tightly-packed buildings, which conflicted somewhat with Assassin’s Creed’s free-roaming movement. Those maps also helped determine one of the key aspects of the city that needed to be changed. “Many of us are French or Quebecers, so it was easy to get the material right from the beginning.” Ubisoft also employs several staff historians to help dig up any extra details the development team might need. ”We were lucky with Paris because it’s quite a well documented city,” Guerin explains. "We have to build a game playground first, and on top of that make a cool city that's visually striking and historically accurate as well." "It's a better Paris than the actual Paris for gameplay," says world level design director Nicolas Guerin. Great pains were made to ensure the city in the game was true to the one that existed in 1789, but much was also changed. The streets are teeming with people - upwards of 10,000 Parisians can be featured on screen at a time. It's both huge and dense, and even features plentiful interior locations and underground tunnels to explore. It's also the first game in the franchise built for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 last year's Black Flag was a sort of bridge game, launching on both last and current-gen consoles.ĪCU is the most detailed city the team at Ubisoft Montreal has built to date. This time around the game takes place in just one city, Paris, during the French Revolution (and also, somehow, during World War II). Like previous games in the series, the star of the next Assassin's Creed is its setting. "I made some other stuff in the game," she says, "but 80 percent of my time was spent on the Notre Dame." For Caroline Miousse, a level artist on Assassin's Creed Unity, building a virtual likeness centuries later took considerably less time - she spent around two years modelling the landmark inside and out. It took 182 years to build the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, starting with the first bricks in 1163.
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Ubisoft’s also giving away free copies of the game on PC through April 25th. But in the wake of the tragic fire at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris earlier this week, we’ve decided to re-publish it, to provide a timely look at how the iconic building influenced various facets of our culture, including video games.
This story was originally published on October 31st, 2014.
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