Bossetting Assassin's Creed III "really fresh"

Door Assassin's Creed te verplaatsen van stedelijke naar beboste grond, krijgt de serie de frisse impuls die het nodig had, als het aan Ubisoft Montreal ligt.

"We wanted to offer something that’s really fresh. We wanted to get outside the cities", zegt creative director Alex Hutchinson. "Early on we thought okay, if we’re gonna provide not just a new context and a new hero, but a whole new playground, a whole new area to explore, than what better than the American north east?"

"In the period in which our game is set, the American Revolution, it’s like this half untouched wilderness where weather and winter is terrifying, where tress and forests are still ancient. There are populations who live out in the woods that haven’t seen western civilisation necessarily. We have all these great features to play with and I think that big chunk on its own is going to feel really fresh."

Daarnaast heeft de regisseur ook nog kritiek op digitale bomen in het algemeen. "I always thought it was funny that the one thing you couldn’t climb in AC was the one thing I have climbed in real life, which is a tree. There’re plenty of games with forests but the forests are just collections of assets, they’re just trees and you walk around them. The fact that it’s a tree doesn’t matter. It could be a lampost, it could be a box, it could be anything. Whereas if we can make trees and the wilderness as much a playground as Altaïr and Ezio made cities, then I think it’s huge."

Ook denkt Hutchinson niet de serie aan het aftakelen is en daarom deze nieuwe setting nodig heeft. "The brand is healthy; there’s a big audience that cares about it. We didn’t want to tear it down. We’re not in one of those franchise situations where you need to reset, hit the reset and go back to the core."

Assassin's Creed III komt 31 oktober uit op de PlayStation 3 en Xbox 360. De Wii U-versie komt later en de pc-versie zal ook nog wel eens verschijnen. Bekijk ook hier de eerste trailer en de 'gelekte' details.