14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft has shared even more details about Assassin's Creed Unity, the next step in the franchise, and emphasized that the power of the PC, PS4, and Xbox One was needed to ensure a great cooperative mode and a densely populated Paris.
Assassin's Creed Unity was properly revealed to the world at E3 2014 earlier this month and Ubisoft has so far shared plenty of details about the new open world action adventure game, its protagonist Arno, and the open world setting of Paris.
Now, Ubisoft's Senior Producer Vincent Pontbriand has emphasized just how long the studio has worked on the cooperative mode, which takes center stage in Unity, as Arno can team up with three other friends to do online missions.
"Assassin's Creed was always a single-player game to begin with. It took us three games to introduce PvP (player versus player). It was in the same universe but you were playing as a Templar avatar in a very separate game mode," he told CVG.
"In Unity, we set out to unify all these game modes into a single experience. That's when we decided that co-op should be the next main focus but in order to do that we had to rebuild all of our systems to allow them to be replicated over a network and working online. So it took years of development to reproduce and redraft all of our sandbox features for a shared online experience."
Pontbriand also highlighted that the open world of Paris requires a lot of power to ensure that it seems lifelike, as in the French Revolution period over 1 million people lived in the city, meaning its rendition on old consoles just wouldn't have done it justice.
"The thing is, Paris is a very, very populous city. Even in the eighteenth century there were more than a million people. So we needed to have the technology to allow us to have these dense crowds. This requires a lot of processing power which is available now with the new consoles."
In order to put things into perspective, the developer mentioned that Ubisoft's team worked one whole year on the Notre Dame cathedral to ensure it lived up to the original, real-life version.
"After that, it's building the city itself, which is huge and features a lot of huge, iconic landmarks. These take a long time to create. The Notre Dame cathedral in our game took a year to build. That's just a crazy amount of work. It's a huge investment for just one building."
Assassin's Creed Unity launches this October on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.