14 DAY TRIAL // Jade Raymond, one of the producers working on the first Assassin's Creed video game and now the leader of the Toronto-based studio for publisher Ubisoft, believes that the video game industry needs to embrace social gaming and find ways to integrate interactions in all the products it launches, with Assassin Creed one of the titles that might get more friendship-oriented features in the future.
She talked about the idea of social permissions, which is linked to creating enduring bonds between gamers through small interactions, like those seen in most MMOs.
Integrating such interactions in video game is a simple way of adding value beyond that derived from the actual gameplay, as long as two or more people can create a friendship over playing the game.
Raymond has not detailed exactly how social permissions might work in Assassin's Creed.
Raymond says that, “On Assassin’s Creed, we spent a year of pre-production thinking not just about how to make a great game” but also about backstory and fan-oriented fiction, because she “realized how rare it is to get the opportunity to create a new property from scratch.”
She cited The Sims as a franchise that listens to its fans, with Will Wright apparently reading a lot of gamer stories about how they played the game and even designing expansions based around those segments of the game they liked best.
Ubisoft has already confirmed that a new Assassin's Creed video game will be released during 2011, but the company has not said whether it plans to move the series to a new historical space or whether it will keep delivering adventures that are based around Ezio and Renaissance Italy.
There are also rumors that Brotherhood, the 2010 release, will be expanded for the PC version, with support for full three-dimensional gaming and for multiple monitors.