Why Assassin’s Creed III went wrong, according to someone who allegedly worked on the game

Reddit user PreludesAndNocturnes took to the popular site yesterday to explain why he thinks Assassin’s Creed III went so wrong.

PreludesAndNocturnes claims to have worked on the single-player component of the game. Here’s just a portion of what he had to say:

So why was AC3 a wreck? Without going into too much details, basically because of ridiculously unrealistic expectations and constantly tacked on features by producers / the creative team, it became literally impossible to get everything done with just Ubi Montreal. In order to get everything in the design doc completed in time for the annual release (ugh!), team size was constantly fluctuating. The game was worked on by large majority of the Montreal team, as well as Ubi Quebec, Ubi Annecy, Ubi Bucharest, and Ubi Singapore. Between 500-600 people touched the game before it’s release. Contrast that with teams like Naughty Dog or Sony Santa Monica, who operate with 80-100 (maybe 200 during crunch).

The coordination of resources between all of these teams separated by thousands of miles and differing time zones was a damn joke, and at the same time studio resources were constantly stolen for work on Watchdogs and Far Cry 3 (AC4, Splinter Cell and Rayman tended to be a little more isolated for the most part though).

Almost everybody on the bottom knew that the Desmond missions were a disgrace. Why? Because a B-team filled with new hires and the least talent handled all production of the Desmond content, and they were rarely in communication with the main gameplay teams. But we couldn’t really say anything, and the higher ups basically stuck their fingers in their ears and convinced themselves that they were amazing.

Dissemination of information between individual employees was also pretty bad. A disturbingly large portion of team members had no idea about the majority of the Homestead, Caravan, and assassin crew side missions. There was basically so much content that even approaching release, plenty of grunt workers like myself on the ground were finding new features they didn’t know existed that needed more attention. Upon completing the story, there’s an origami-crane node collecting mini game that unlocks that I’ve NEVER seen covered or mentioned in any gaming blogs, reviews, or fan vids. Most of us didn’t even know it existed. That’s how random and disjointed the design was. Everything was documented on the company wiki of course. The impenetrably deep, confused, several-thousand page wiki.

You can read the full post here.

The Escapist was able to track the Reddit user down and said “[PreludesAndNocturnes] did his best to verify employment at Ubisoft without accidentally disclosing his identity.” Still, best to take it all with a grain of salt.

“I feel I may have been in the wrong to go off on a rant,” he said to in retrospect of the original Reddit post. “I didn’t mean to knock Ubisoft either as a brand or as a team of human beings (who obviously deserve my respect). I have no doubt that every single man and woman at Ubi did their absolute best on that project, and will continue to do so on future projects. No one was actively trying to cause harm. And obviously the industry and the medium is just really tough, but we do it because we love it.”