Assassin’s Creed: Unity, a game released in 2014, caused controversy at the time. I believe many players still remember it: the game has made almost amazing progress in image quality, but there were many problems when it was released. Recently, Jean Guesdon, the creative director of this game, talked about the "games and losses" of this game at the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2018).

Let us further understand why this "Assassin's Creed" work with such excellent picture quality has not achieved satisfactory results in gameplay and bug handling. The main content of the article is taken from the relevant reports made by foreign media Eurogamer after attending the "Ten Years of Evolution of the Assassin's Creed Brand" symposium at GDC 2018. The specific content is as follows:

Behind the numerous problems that arose when "Assassin's Creed" was released in 2014, Ubisoft explored in-depth "perfect conditions for the perfect storm"

As part of the 2018 GDC symposium on "10 Years of Evolution of Assassin's Creed Brand", game creative director Jean Guesdon explained how Ubisoft iterated on each game when shaping this series.

According to reports, the development of "Assassin's Creed: The Revolution" was originally started after the development of "Brothers" in 2011. Its design is to become the first Assassin's Creed game to be truly launched on the next generation consoles (PS4 and Xbox One) to be released.

Screenshot of "Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood"

Because Ubisoft puts technology more priority over content, "The Revolution" has many similarities with the original "Assassin's Creed".

"If you remember Assassin's Creed 1, it actually has similar problems, because there is a lot of work required when the technical level is very low," Guesdon said at the meeting. "(We have made a lot of corrections to) the game's engine... Instantly, "The Revolution" can still be called one of the best-quality games.

Comparison of the game scene of "Assassin's Creed: The Revolution" made by foreign netizens with real Paris:

Comparison of the game scenes and real scenes of "Assassin's Creed: The Revolution"

But at the same time, since we turned to one-to-one development scale construction, this had an impact on the development direction of the game and affected the development of gameplay. We did not even discuss the development of the cooperation model at that time. ”

"We fell into the trap of too much attention to technology again and failed to give the team enough time to create brand new content."A game creative director said at the meeting.

"Ultimately, that's what I think: we need to create perfect conditions for perfect storms. The game we used to make was extremely artistic, but not enough novelty in terms of gaming experience."

The Ubisoft creative director showed an in-game map at the meeting, which was full of problems with the above aspects of the game. There are also many other problems, such as there was an unsolvable startup system in the game, requiring a game app that players use to unlock the corresponding content, although this system has been removed in subsequent updates to the game.

"In addition, you also saw such a ridiculous bug," Guesdon said, showing the following famous bug picture from "The Great Revolution". "By the way, this is the problem with a graphics card!

Assassin's Creed: The Revolution "Classic" BUG

The whole game is affected by this problem," he added. "If you play this restored game again today, it's still a very beautiful and good game. But in short, we may have been conquered by flying too close to the sun. ”

"This is why the later "The Legend of the Heroes" focused on quality, and the development team also did a great job in this regard."

During the period Guesdon also talked about the challenges he faced when developing the latest Assassin's Creed: Origins. For Ubisoft, the game is an opportunity to make a major innovation based on respecting the core principles of the series.

The development team of "Origin" revolves around four important principles when making the game: to construct the open world well; to try to get a perfect balance between the plot and the players; to make the game an indispensable part of the entire game worldview; to make a connected game, even if the game does not have cooperative and competitive gameplay.

Ultimately, it is to let the game redefine the way players understand and interact with the entire world - just like the game introduces a drone-like flying eagle perspective - while also filling the game with meaningful plot within this system.

"It's the same as a technical change, and it's the cultural change of the development team: we should focus on the game experience rather than just scripts and code, players don't care about the game's code, they only care about the game's experience," Guesdon said.