Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity almost had a ‘character creator’ system that would have seen you choosing an ancestor from a database of millions of people, rather than being thrust into the riding boots of Scarlet Pimple-esque nobleman Arno Dorian. The idea was broadly to give each player a unique perspective on the complexities of the French Revolution. According to former creative director Alexandre Amancio, this character creation system dates back to a time when the developers were weighing up two versions of the game, one of them far more co-op focussed.
Ultimately, they rolled with a more familiar flavour of Assassin’s Creed, but Amancio – who was also creative director for Assassin’s Creed: Revelations – still wishes they’d committed to the riskier option for Unity. Our original reviewer Alec Meer might have agreed. Back in 2014, he criticised the game for “reverting to type despite its glitzy surface”, and knocked the four-player co-op specifically for simply duplicating Arno: “it is simply boring for everyone to be the same (not particularly interesting) character”.
All this comes from a recent interview with the chino-wearing, pipe-smoking sophisticates of GamesIndustry.biz. “When we began making Unity, two games started emerging,” Amancio told the site’s features editor Lewis Packwood following a talk at DevGAMM Lisbon… last November??? Fine, I guess we’ll file this under ‘news to me’.
“One game was a traditional Assassin’s Creed game, with the main protagonist carving his path through the French Revolution, but we also wanted to make a co-op game,” Amancio went on. “We found a clever way of hiding a character creation system within Assassin’s Creed. Instead of having just one blood ancestor in the Animus, it’s a database of millions of people, and you’re searching for an ancestor. So the more you describe that ancestor, the more it reduces the search until you find a match.
“The French Revolution is such a complex mishmash of different events and different perspectives that it would have been a more accurate portrayal if, instead of having a linear adventure through the lens of one character, you got your own perspective of the revolution,” he continued. “So everyone’s experience through the game is their own path through a complex event.
“At one point, we needed to choose to make one game or the other. Obviously these are huge investments with huge teams, so we made the decision to make the title that people would most recognize. But somewhere inside of me, I still wish we would’ve gone for that other one.”
To play both sides, I can well imagine the hypothetical database-searching feature panning out badly, though it’s hard to comment at length based on these crumbs of insight. Creating a repository of millions of potentially playable NPCs so that the player can refine the selection down to one protagonist sounds like a massive expense, needless to say, requiring steep compromises or supernatural forbearance from management on par with that shown to, say, Beyond Good and Evil 2.
It also would have required a different approach to narrative – something closer to an MMO or Dragon Age: Origins, with its selection of protagonist backstories. Hence the “hidden” character creation system being one component of a wholly different Unity concept. As Amancio notes, Unity was the first Assassin’s Creed to allow co-op multiplayer within the open world, so even the more conventional version they shipped was a bit of a gamble, despite the well-worn mechanics and framing.
Still, character creation as population database refinement is a cool idea in general, not least because it suggests a period portrayal in which your assassin could be a heroic latrine digger, rather than some lukewarm blueblood adventurer. It makes me think of the collective storytelling of Velvet 89.
Amancio attributes a little of the Unity database idea’s inception to his time working on Far Cry, a series he feels has more appetite for unscripted upheaval. “I started my career at Ubisoft on Far Cry, not on Assassin’s Creed, and I’m a huge fan of systemic games. I like simple, small systems that interact to create emergence. And Assassin’s Creed was always open world, but very much a directed game. I’ve always had this desire to inject a little bit more of that chaos into the game.
“For example, adding the bomb system to Revelations was a way of exposing systems to the audience, because you could attract and disperse the crowd. It was a way of giving tools to players. These are the kinds of decisions that I think would have made – and still could make – Assassin’s Creed into a more, in my opinion, modern game.”
It’s strange to compare Unity, let alone Revelations to the more recent Creed outings, post Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The series is now far more of an open world RPG and an exercise in pillaging the past. Brendy summarised the most recent Assassin’s Creed Shadows as “a marathon of distraction” and “a reliably Ubisoftian tourist trap that sequesters you in a hedge maze of history with a packed itinerary and a disregard for the time constraints of adult life”. I’d like to hear more from Amancio about how they could shake things up. Then again, given that Unity and Revelations are among the less-good Creeds, it’s perhaps better that he’s no longer part of the picture.
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