Ubisoft had a very on-brand problem with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: there weren’t many tall buildings in Ancient Greece even though it’s a “climbing-frame game”
For a series known for its parkour and rooftop stalking, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s developers ran into a pretty big problem: Ancient Greece didn’t have many tall buildings to scale, which is, as you might imagine, not ideal for a “climbing-frame” game.
Speaking to Edge Magazine in its 413 issue, world director Ban Hall emphasized that “verticality is really important, especially in the Assassin’s Creed games” and “it really is a climbing-frame game, and it’s about moving the players through those spaces and going up and down things as much as anything else.”
He goes on to explain that in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, for example, the developers were thinking about “creating those desire lines for players to take” up London’s massive buildings and towering cathedrals. “How do you attract the players who want to spend their time elsewhere to climb this particular monument you need them to climb?”
That challenge was flipped on its head with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, though, “because a lot of the buildings and the points of interest we were building were much smaller.” There were definitely large temples and such in Odyssey, but nothing rivalling the structures of London or Paris.
“And that’s kind of where some of the ideation came from when it came to building some of the big statues that we put around Greece,” Hall continued. “They were always based on mythological or historical fact, always based on working with the research team, working with a historian. But what we did is we took a fantastical approach to the giant statue that then gave us something epic to climb. It gave the player a distraction. So you could be on your main quest, going across to a different town, but like: ‘Oh, there’s that – I’m going to go check that out’. Then you get that climbing, you get that verticality.” Plus, you got to hang off the stone phalluses of those ancient statues, which was always fun.
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