A portion of a Financial Post interview with Ubisoft's Alex Hutchinson...
PA: In the past, Ubisoft designers went to great lengths in their painstaking virtual recreations of cities like Rome and Florence, and even included lengthy text entries on landmarks, famous figures, and the culture of the time. How authentic are your depictions of the centuries-old New York and Boston that appear in this game? Could a social studies teacher boot up Assassin’s Creed III in a classroom and give her kids a good little history lesson?
AH: I would love that. Absolutely. Obviously our fictional story is woven through the game. But in terms of how people are dressed, what’s going on in the city, the buildings, the vibe of the streets, the music, the way people speak, the language they use — all of these things are as accurate as we could make them.
Even the layouts of Boston and New York are based on maps of the period, using one-to-three scale. We have the all the main avenues and thoroughfares, though we took a bit of creative liberty with the back alleys and other bits and pieces. All the buildings are super accurate. Kotaku ran a piece showing photos of buildings and comparing them to in-game buildings. They’re pretty one-to-one. Even I was impressed.
We actually had topological data for Boston. It’s fascinating stuff. The Boston of the period was connected to land by only a single land bridge. Landfill bulked out Boston in later times. In this period, there’s one thin strip of land. It’s essentially a big island leading up to Beacon Hill in the middle. They eventually cut ten metres of soil off the top of Beacon Hill and used it to fill in the marshes around it.
Plus, around 80 per cent of the speaking characters in the game are real people from the time. And we support them with a database of several hundred text entries.
Full interview here
PA: In the past, Ubisoft designers went to great lengths in their painstaking virtual recreations of cities like Rome and Florence, and even included lengthy text entries on landmarks, famous figures, and the culture of the time. How authentic are your depictions of the centuries-old New York and Boston that appear in this game? Could a social studies teacher boot up Assassin’s Creed III in a classroom and give her kids a good little history lesson?
AH: I would love that. Absolutely. Obviously our fictional story is woven through the game. But in terms of how people are dressed, what’s going on in the city, the buildings, the vibe of the streets, the music, the way people speak, the language they use — all of these things are as accurate as we could make them.
Even the layouts of Boston and New York are based on maps of the period, using one-to-three scale. We have the all the main avenues and thoroughfares, though we took a bit of creative liberty with the back alleys and other bits and pieces. All the buildings are super accurate. Kotaku ran a piece showing photos of buildings and comparing them to in-game buildings. They’re pretty one-to-one. Even I was impressed.
We actually had topological data for Boston. It’s fascinating stuff. The Boston of the period was connected to land by only a single land bridge. Landfill bulked out Boston in later times. In this period, there’s one thin strip of land. It’s essentially a big island leading up to Beacon Hill in the middle. They eventually cut ten metres of soil off the top of Beacon Hill and used it to fill in the marshes around it.
Plus, around 80 per cent of the speaking characters in the game are real people from the time. And we support them with a database of several hundred text entries.
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Whoa. Neat. I'm really looking forward to this game. I've never played an Assassain's Creed game, but my dad has played all four of the ones for the PS3. The Revolutionary War is my favorite war, so that makes this game even more appealing.
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