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Assassin’s Creed III is such a large technical leap over the previous games that the development team had to redo every piece of animation used in the game – not a single bit of animation from earlier Assassin’s Creed games has been used.
Speaking to VideoGamer.com about the all new game engine, IP development director Tommy Francois said: “The new engine is ready for Assassin’s Creed! It was entirely developed just for Assassin’s Creed 3, this allowed us to do a lot more with our cutscenes for one, we have much higher detailed characters, we were also capable of doing motion capture, motion capture with facial capture and voice over at the same time, which allows us to have a level of synchronicity closer to what you may see in a Hollywood movie.
“This is important to delivering story because it allows characters to get truly emotional and the game to focus on their face, but on top of that what it’s allowed us to do is draw 2000 characters, and we were never capable of doing that. If you’re going to go visit Bunker Hill then you can’t portray the battle as it was fought in that day without that, but what it also allowed us to do was create the Frontier. Because the game wasn’t ready – we re-did every single animation in the game. Not one of the animations in AC3 is from a previous game. We had to re-do our whole tech tree from that perspective.”
He continued: “We also completely changed non-playable characters in relation to Connor but also in relation to how they interact with other non-player characters. Now the animations are much smoother, much faster, the game doesn’t bog down. It’s allowed us to implement a weather system, we make it impossible for powder weapons in the rain.”
Regarding the next generation, Francois said the focus will remain on gameplay.
“To fully answer your question about Next Gen, whatever the engine may be it will only be to serve gameplay,” he concluded.
Assassin’s Creed III will be released October 31 on Xbox 360 and PS3. PC and Wii U versions are yet to be dated.
