Ubisoft is using Assassin’s Creed Unity’s delay to balance the difficulty & in-game economy

Ubisoft Montreal is using Assassin’s Creed Unity’s two-week delay to balance the in-game economy, tweak the difficulty and fix bugs, senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has explained.

The publisher revealed that the next-gen Assassin’s Creed had been pushed back to November 14 earlier this summer. It had previously been due to go on sale on October 31.

“Internally, [the delay] just gave us a few more days to iron out the game,” Pontbriand told VideoGamer.com last week, “and we’re doing a lot of internal playtests with dozens of people per session to get a lot of feedback on things like… Well, one concrete example is the economy system where we could say, ‘Okay, this piece of gear is too expensive, no-one’s ever buying it, so let’s lower the price,’ and adjust the rewards of missions. Stuff like that.

“Also, difficulty plateaus. We want [Assassin’s Creed] to remain mainstream and accessible, so we want to feel the difficulty plateaus, but we need to make sure the player’s always a notch better than the average difficulty of each mission, if that makes sense, so the player always feels empowered and strong.”

But not too strong, Pontbriand says.

“We want them to hit a wall if the player is at one star,” he continues. “So, level one, if they try to go on a three-star mission we want them to feel that wall. But the minute they are at three stars we want them to feel like they are ready to do that.

“So we took the opportunity of an extra few days to work on these things, and of course iron out a few kinks and bugs.”

But will the publisher also use the added time to bump up the next-gen version’s resolution?

Despite Pontbriand initially confirming to VideoGamer.com that the game will run at 900p/30fps on PS4 and Xbox One, in a statement provided to Eurogamer yesterday, Ubisoft claimed that the “final specs for Assassin’s Creed Unity aren’t cemented yet, but we can say we showed Assassin’s Creed Unity at 900p during our hands-on preview event last week.”

“We’re confident that gamers will be thrilled with the gorgeous graphics and how Paris is brought to life in Assassin’s Creed Unity,” the publisher added.