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 assassin's creed interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Killing in the name. With his new game, Assassin’s Creed, Patrice Désilets, creative director of the acclaimed Prince Of Persia: The Sands of Time, returns to the Middle East, but this time the action takes place in a more historical setting. He explains: “Unlike Prince Of Persia, Assassin's Creed is not set in a fantasy world. Even though there's some fantasy element, it's based on our world, our history. It's set during the Third Crusade, the Crusade of Richard The Lionheart, and Saladin.”Although Désilets is clearly interested in the Middle East (“It's an important place for human history. The birthplace of civilisation is there.”), he says it was more the character of a master assassin than the location that was his original inspiration. And it is very much his, as creative director. “At the beginning I'm the one with the vision, I have to come up with the ideas,” he explains. Of course the game’s development involved a large team (notably the core team of Sands Of Time), but throughout it was Désilets selling the ideas, guiding and shaping. “The creative director has a big role in the design and the mechanics of the game.”  In the case of Assassin’s Creed, those mechanics are very much about the crowd and the lone player’s place in it. “One of the challenges we faced with Assassin’s Creed was to have a huge environment in which the player can interact with everything he sees,” explains Désilets. ”So around 120 different non-playable characters are on the screen at the same time. That was our big challenge, and that's pretty new in a videogame. The crowd is central to our experience. In fact that's basically what you are, you are a blade in the crowd.” That crowd is one that’s going about its business in the game’s three cities – Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem. “We found some old maps, and using our tools we recreated those cities. If you look at Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock is well placed – the landmarks are in the right places." Désilets then theorises, “I strongly believe with videogames, it's like a time machine. More and more we have the tools, and more and more we can create those worlds and we can go back in time and relive some human history. Assassin's Creed is trying to do it and in some ways I think we achieve it.”  The game really does seem to be pushing at what the medium can achieve, driven by the man who’s establishing his role as one of the games industry's most interesting young auteurs. As well as its historical cities and its crowds, Assassin’s Creed also seems to be interesting thematically. Although it’s not so much about the war and the political context (oh so salient in our troubled times), it does tell a fascinating moral story about a man who kills as a trade, but in doing so is trying to restore peace. “It's more like a personal struggle, about the life and death of an assassin. A guy who at first thinks he's the best because he can kill anyone he wants, then he realises his victims are not evil people, so who's the bad guy? Everybody's grey, depending on the point of view. This is our real subject, more than the political background,” explains Désilets. “We'll see. The character evolves and nothing is really like it seems at first,” he adds cryptically, as the game does have a big secret. “You'll have to play it to understand it all. I don’t want to spoil anything.”
Daniel Etherington
Assassin’s Creed is out now on Xbox 360, PC and PS3.
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 games columnthis week  prince of persia 2games interview  prince of persia: the two thronesbooks  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
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