Interview: Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

There was a three year gap between Assassin’s Creeds 1 and 2, but there’s only a year between Assassin’s Creed 2 and Brotherhood. Ubisoft seems to be moving towards the Activision ‘one a year’ approach with Call of Duty in this regard… How far do you think you can push the timeframe without compromising the quality?

It’s not going to be one a year. It’s a hard question to answer because we’re not doing it one a year. This made sense to us because it’s the continuing story of Ezio, and it’s still very fresh in people’s minds. A lot of people are still playing Assassin’s Creed – we have the data, online and whatnot, of the people who sign in and they’re online – we know a lot of people are still playing the game, we know that people are still buying the game. The story’s still fresh, so it makes sense to us to release it that quickly. Another reason is that we can, and I can answer the question on how we’re able to do that later on, if you want.

A round of 'Wanted' in progress. Killing somebody is a good way to make yourself conspicuous.

I don’t think it’s a service to the license to release something every year, I think a license like anything in life needs to breathe and resource itself once in a while. You can’t force a tree to grow more rapidly than it should, if you’re ploughing a field year in and year out, one day your earth is going to have nothing, so you have to let it rest. The same thing is true for every living thing in the universe. So there’s definitely going to be a gap between this opus of Assassin’s Creed and the next.

Can you tell us anything about Assassin’s Creed 3 right now?

The only thing I can tell you about Assassin’s Creed 3 is that we know exactly what we’re going to do. We have a long-term vision for this license, obviously – if we didn’t, it’d be a huge sign of stupidity to wing it every time. We have a very, very solid knowledge of where our license is going t go, and what our story’s going to be and whatnot. That’s basically all I can tell you right now.

As a player, what do you like most about Brotherhood?

I enjoy the fighting a whole lot, because it’s much more dynamic, much more fast-paced. Especially towards the end of the game, it’s really hard – you really have to master your combo, aggressive versus defensive skills. And the Rome upgrade system for me is also something really, really interesting, in the sense that it’s very subtle in the influence it gives you on upgrade per upgrade time, but if you’re five, 10, 15 hours into the game, you’re like ‘Oh my God, I don’t have beggars around me any more – how did that happen?’ There’s a lot of finesse in our game, and that’s what I enjoy about Assassin’s Creed as a whole.

The prologue sees Ezio taking a beating from certain old foes, and smells a bit of Helm's Deep.

Regarding the dynamic or evolving world aspect – were you ever tempted to learn a little from the likes of Fable II or even Crackdown, and introduce drop-in co-op? Perhaps players could influence the development of each others’ cities?

You have to come back to the universe of Assassin’s Creed and what Assassin’s Creed is, because Assassin’s Creed is the story of Desmond Miles and a machine called the Animus in which he relives his ancestors’ genetic memories. So to justify something like co-op, you would have to have in our universe with Desmond, the assassin and the Templars… you’d have to find subjects that had ancestors in the same time period, as for example in this case Ezio, in the same area and have a separate Animus.