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Interview: Ubisoft Montreal’s Jeffrey Spicer on Assassin’s Creed: Unity

At a recent Ubisoft preview event, Stevivor was fortunate enough to catch up with Jeffrey Spicer, Production Manager of Assassin’s Creed Unity at Ubisoft Montreal.

In our interview we discuss the possibility of guns becoming a more prominent feature in the franchise, the process behind Arno’s development and what new possibilities the new consoles have allowed Ubisoft Montreal to achieve with Unity.

Stevivor: What are some of the new gameplay features that we can expect to see in Assassin’s Creed Unity?

Jeffrey Spicer: The biggest I think, and which would be of interest with Unity, is the introduction of the shared experience – essentially online co-op with your friends. The ability to create missions that tie into the Assassin vs. Templar theme and the French Revolution that allows you to play online with friends. We’ve worked hard on two types of ‘black box’ missions that play into that, so similarly we give you an objective but how you accomplish that with your friends and with your shared skills is up to you. That gives us a lot of replayability and a lot of challenges to introduce into the game.

Stevivor: Was there any particular feedback that the developers took on-board when developing Unity, and what sort of changes has it resulted in that we can expect to notice?

Jeffrey Spicer: Exactly that. Online components of Assassin’s were always adversarial, and there was always this strong fan-feedback about how come it couldn’t be co-operative. So without having the right tools and gameplay elements to support it, the point of co-op wasn’t necessarily there – we couldn’t just do Capture the Flag. So the changes that we’re able to make with how we approach missions (the gameplay aspect of it) plus the capability to have the online experience was the biggest change for the fans.

Stevivor: So far, even with guns becoming increasingly present in gameplay, they’ve always been somewhat restrictive, in that they’re usually single-shot and you couldn’t get away with using it as your primary weapon. Are there any plans to make gun more integral mechanic in Assassin’s Creed?

Jeffrey Spicer: We have several weapons classes – one-handed, two-handed, long weapons and firearms (both pistols and muskets). So first of all, there are a lot more prevalent in the game world with your enemies, if you’re assuming you can just run away from trouble by climbing walls they will shoot you. If you’re in combat and all of the melee opportunities against you are taken up by NPCs attacking you, you will be attacked from range as opposed to them waiting. As for specific to Arno, we’ve got the biggest arsenal in this game – there are about 20 pistols and muskets in-game and a skill system progression that allows you to focus on ranged attacks, so we have made a big focus on that.

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In addition to that we have a variety of muskets and six-barrel shooters, so there is a lot more focus on a more sequential weapon type as opposed to just a musket where you have the long reload. There are a lot of different weapons that are available through progression.

Stevivor: You’ve mentioned about moving away from competitive multiplayer towards co-op modes for this game. Depending on the reception from gamers when Unity come out, is there a chance Ubisoft might continue to move along this path with multiplayer?

Jeffrey Spicer: Since it has been based off the extent to which it has been requested, it could definitely be an option. The reality with Assassin’s where history is our playground, there is so much out there and we can go back so far. So it could definitely be, but that’s more of a brand thing.

Stevivor: Assassin’s Creed Unity is the first title in the series being made exclusively for the current generation consoles. What options and advancements has developing a game for the Xbox One and the PS4 made possible for the franchise that simply wasn’t possible in previous games?

Jeffrey Spicer: All of the core pillars. You can’t make combat hard if you don’t have a robust stealth system to give you an alternative to just going in and fighting everyone. The stealth system had to be more than just crouching – it had to make sense within the game world and that comes into the fact that we needed a robust NPC system. There has to be consequences to the actions in the world – who’s going to react to that if the NPCs are just duds? They have to be alert to your actions and also to the three factions in the world. For it to feel living and breathing each action has to have a reaction and with every choice there is a consequence.

So the ability for us to really make robust systems like that which are very technically demanding is a straight-up outcome of the potential of next-gen consoles. So being able to re-work stealth and combat because of that living and breathing world, the ability to have all of Paris accessible by means of changes in attack, the ability to enter interiors without loading adds a whole new aspect of, if you do get into a fight you can’t handle, how do you get away? You go down a lane, go up a floor, out the other side, up onto a roof, down the other side and then into the catacombs.

The next-generation of consoles let us revisit what I would see as the core elements of the franchise from the beginning and see them out to their full fruition.

Stevivor: The E3 2014 world premier cinematic trailer showed gamers four assassins. What kind of factors go into the design and creation of a new main character(s) for an Assassin’s Creed game?

Jeffrey Spicer: A lot of it ties into ‘who is this character and what is the background of Arno?’ His father was assassinated, he was adopted, his adopted father was assassinated, so you’ve got to look into what the motivations of the character are to really get an idea of his persona then how do we create a visual that matches that. We also needed to take Arno’s customization (where we have 200 gear items) and make sure we have some sort of consistency within it and how they tie into progressing your skills.

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There’s a lot to it and it touches on all aspects, from artistic and creative direction to narrative and how they are writing this person – does the narrative story tie into the visual of him and does he represent how the story is progressing? You can’t have this badass character and then he’s a scrawny dude on screen. At the same time you can’t have this big overbuilt-up guy who’s running around and doing parkour. So we had to look at what personifies stealth, but at the same time he’s a strong character and the protagonist of the story, so we has to nimble, quick and relatable to you as a player. At the same time, he needs to be very strong and somewhat aggressive. It’s a very detailed pipeline, we did a lot of iterations of Arno and the Arno customization has been something that’s been in work for a long time and a key to that was iteration and getting him into the game and seeing how he felt in terms of the cinematic, the tone and the pacing of it.

Like I said, how does he perform in parkour? If you’re up against him a brute does he represent the difficulty in combat? It ties into all gameplay components. We went from having a single protagonist with now a single-character but with multiple visuals. So instead of having one very polished character we’ve made sure that if you take two-hundred items that you can match them with 20 hoods or 20 chest pieces. It’s now about making sure that no matter what combination you pick they’re still a solid character within that.

Stevivor: What’s your style of gameplay like when playing Assassin’s Creed? Are you a fan of stealth and patience or do you prefer to run into combat?

Jeffrey Spicer: I’m honestly a fan of causing chaos and seeing how it plays out and then taking my time to pick the right opportunity to complete it. You can very much use the game world to your advantage and that’s something we wanted to player to be able to do – the addition of the rooftop elements for example. One thing you’ll notice is that we don’t have guards on every roof because it wasn’t representative of the time, unless it makes sense in a mission because the area is heavily fortified for example.

I like to use rooftops to plan my attacks and ask how I can use the crowd and the environment to my advantage. Combat is hard and stealth is fun but I like the chaos, so I like to chuck a smoke bomb in and see how the crowd reacts – maybe it will start a fight between the local extremists and the local guards so it’ll distract the guard aspect and create an opportunity for me. That kind of controlled chaos is my favourite.

Assassins’ Creed Unity is available from 13 November 2014 on Xbox One, PS4 and PC. You can read our preview of the game here.


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About the author

Nicholas Simonovski

Events and Racing Editor at Stevivor.com. Proud RX8 owner, Strange Music fan and Joe Rogan follower. Living life one cheat meal at a time.