Assassin's Creed 2 Launch Day Dev Interview

 November 17th was a busy day for Partick Plourde, Lead Designer at Ubisoft Montreal for the blockbuster AAA project: Assassin’s Creed 2. Not only was it launch day for the (non-PC versions of the) game but Patrick was at the Montreal International Games Summit where he gave a lecture to fellow developers and students of game programming about what managing such a huge project is like.

He then used a banner to run up a wall behind the podium and disappeared into an air vent. I was worried I would have trouble tracking him down for our interview, but I found a hay cart in the hotel lobby and sure enough, he was hiding in there. Ok that was a lie. What really happened is that after his speech Patrick gave interviews all day. I was the last one, and he begged me and the PR people to let him use the bathroom first, so I was a little worried he’d had a long day and would be pretty run down. Had there actually been carts of hay to hide and nap in, he may have tried.

As soon as Assassin’s Creed 2 was mentioned though, he launched into descriptions with the fervor of a proud father telling you about their kid that hit three home runs’ little league game. But he wasn’t talking about a little league game; he was talking about AC2.

When I gave Patrick free reign to tell us what had him excited about the game, he immediately started to discuss plot points. With the marketing and tech budgets at Ubisoft and EA’s disposal for AC2, it is great that the first thing he wanted to talk about was story. I tried to avoid too many spoilers, but if some got through or the editing of quotes looks choppy, I apologize.

“The [new] game picks up right at the end of the first game… It starts with escaping Abstergo.” I was excited that they were finally letting us do what we’ve wanted to have Desmond do all through the first game. “It was important that it stay like that. The reason why is [that in] the first game the motivation of the character was: he was a victim. Desmond was a victim, and in the second one, he is free from Abstergo. He’s been offered to return to the Animus, a version of the Animus that the Assassins have, in order to complete his training as an Assassin…

“That’s Desmond’s side of the story. As you do that, he lives the life of Ezio Auditore. In terms of structure it’s really different than the first one. We start the game at his birth. There is a birth sequence where you see Ezio as a little baby, and we show the player the puppeteering concept where moving the arms with buttons, you know, buttons are associated with parts of the body.” Assassin’s Creed 2, like its predecessor, uses a control system dubbed puppeteering: buttons are mapped to the avatar’s limbs or head: push the right arm button to attack, climb, etc., depending on context and if you have another key pressed. The use of a baby finding their hands as a tutorial ties in really well with this button equals limb idea and seems much more interesting than the Animus fog training session from the first game.

Image from developer's media site.