Surprisingly, one of the more popular non-Japanese developed games at this year’s Tokyo Game Show was Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed. Lines for the Xbox 360 version of game (which sat behind the veil of a small booth) were in excess of 90 minutes, just to get some hands-on time with the two-week old build of the game.
Set to ship in North America this holiday, we’re already head-over-heels for what has become one of our most anticipated games of 2007. I had a chance to sit down with the game’s producer, Jade Raymond, who narrated a live Xbox 360 demo of the title, and talked a bit more about the game’s structure, dead bodies, Matlock-ing in the Middle East, and more.
ON … WHAT THIS ASSASSIN’S CREED NONSENSE IS ALL ABOUT
“In Assassin’s Creed, you play as an assassin, as you may imagine. His name is Altair, and your objective is to end the Third Crusade, and win back your honor by taking out key guys who are basically profiting from the Third Crusade, and causing the population to suffer. So you go throughout the holy land — created in an epic, historically accurate way — tracking down these guys, finding out where they are, and then taking them out.
As you do so, you find out that there’s a little more at play, and that maybe your mission, and the reason you think you’re being sent on it isn’t exactly what you’ve been told.”
ON … NOT LISTENING TO THE MAN AND CHOOSING YOUR OWN PATH
“It’s a seamless world, and you can go wherever you like. At some points, you’ll have targets in every city open. So sometimes, you’re given a list of all the guys to kill, sometimes you’ll have one guy at a time, [like] at the beginning of the game. Sometimes there will be multiple guys, and you can even, for example — if you get all of your investigations out of the way — you can go to all three cities, investigate one target, investigate another, investigate another, go back to one city, kill this guy, do some free missions, [and then] go back to that city and kill the other guys. So really, it’s up to you to play based on how you want to play, and what you’re in the mood to do.”
ON … ALTAIR BEING MATLOCK
“For each guy that you have to take out, there are six investigation hints available, like certain people having conversations that you can [hear]. There are assassin’s around who also know some information, and if you do things for them, they’ll give you some of that info. There are guys that have information you can pick-pocket off of them. There’s guys you’ll have to rough up to get information.
And it’s up to you to do any two or three — or however many — investigations that you’ll want. For certain missions, you’re required to do a certain number, but if you want to get as many hints about how to best accomplish the assassination, you can do all of those.
How you find those people is by scoping out the land, so climbing up to the top of high buildings will tell you in that area around the building where the places you can get information are. The first thing you do when you get to a city maybe, is to climb all of the high buildings which frees up your map, and tells you where those investigation missions are. You can go to the bureau to see if the buerau leader will give you some hints. Or, you can just walk around in a crowd, because you begin to recognize the people who have the information … they’re lit up, and they have certain roles that you can start to recognize, and you can try to find them by exploring the city.”
ON … NPC AWARENESS
“Guards have three different states of awareness, one is unaware, one is suspicious, and one is informed. When you have a yellow eye, it’s not super critical; it means either a suspicious or unaware guard is looking at you. If you have a red eye, that means that a suspicious guard is looking at you and anything you do will get you – anything assassin-like other than walking or blending is going to get you discovered.”
ON … EFFECTIVE CORPSE USE
“Dead bodies can be your best weapon, or something that can work against you. If there’s an area that’s guarded — and we showed this during the E3 demo — you can climb [up above] and take out one of those archer dudes. [You] throw them down and create a dead body, and that will attract the attention of the surrounding guards; that frees an area, so you can go by. So a dead body can be a distraction that acts in your favor.
However, guards walk over and see a dead body, and they aftewards realize, ‘OK, an assassin’s here.’ They pull out their weapons and then they become informed and they start looking for you.” So if for example, you create a dead body in that area — and dead bodies don’t disappear very quickly — it starts creating a lot of informed guards, because as guards walk by they see the dead bodies and become more and more informed, and that means there’s more guards out looking for you.”
ON … HOW NPC BEHAVIOR CHANGES OVER TIME AND YOUR NEW HOBBY, HAND WATCHING
“Each city has three main targets. The first time you go into a city, the guards don’t really know there’s an assassin around. You can tell the awareness level of the guards based on what they’re doing with their hands. So if they’re just standing around, hands casual, they’re just unaware of anything. If they have their hands on their weapon they’re suspicious. If they’re walking around with their weapon out, that means they know that there’s an assassin, and they’re looking for you.
As you go through the game and you’ve killed more and more guys, there are more an more soldiers who are looking for the assassin. So that means what you’re able to do in the crowd changes as the game progresses.”
ON … HOW LONG YOU’RE GOING TO IGNORE YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY WHILE PLAYING ASSASSIN’S CREED
“In each [of the three cities] there’s three main guys to assassinate, plus about 30 investigation missions and several more side missions. There’s also the asssassin’s stronghold … and a huge huge countryside that connects all of this.”
“The game, if you’re just playing the minimum — like let’s say out of the six investigations, you only do the minimum two, you don’t do any free missions you really just do a straight path — it’s around 18 hours. If you do all of that stuff, it’s probably about 40 hours.”
ON … WHEN YOU’RE GOING TO BE IGNORING YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY WHILE PLAYING ASSASSIN’S CREED
“November 15.”
