We find our Assassins in times of upheaval. Times when cultures are clashing, ideas are being tested and the course of history appears like a giant muddy question mark. During the Crusades, the nobility and peasantry of Europe abruptly crossed the known world and fought for places they had only ever read about. During the Renaissance, ideas from Middle Eastern cultures and the distant Mongolian Empire were on the verge of changing the basic notion of what it meant to be a European Christian.
The American Revolution, the setting for Assassin’s Creed 3, is one of those moments. I talked to Alex Hutchinson, Creative Director for the game at Ubisoft Montreal. He explained that, at first glance, this might seem like a story that’s only relevant to Americans and the British, but in the end, the American Revolution was an intensely European story. He hopes that they’ve made that backdrop interesting to people from all different countries.
“The British thought of it as a British civil war, the French Fleets blockaded the ports, and the
Americans are trained by a German guy named Von Steubben – there’s so many elements of this story that reverberate around the world.”
The discovery of America by Europeans quickly ushered in what we could consider the first global era, and the American Revolution became the capstone in a series of early global conflicts – wars fought in America by Europeans with native allies that affected policy as far away as India. For Hutchinson, a character with a native background was the perfect avatar for the player to view the war unfolding.
“We obviously didn’t want to tell a story about truth, justice and the American way. We also didn’t want to tell a story about King and Country,” he says. “You find this long history of the indigenous population allying with the French or the British, or the Spanish or the Dutch, and it just seemed like a very believable backdrop for the character.”
It’s a lot to deal with in a video game about secret societies and conspiracy, and luckily, Hutchinson says Assassin’s Creed 3 is not the story of the American Revolution.
It’s the story of Assassins and Templars set to the backdrop of the American Revolution. That conflict always sits somewhere on a balance beam between control and ideas of freedom – the perfect notion for the American Revolution, where enlightenment philosophy and military action found themselves inexorably intertwined. Reading the letters and declarations of the founding fathers at the time, it’s clear that they saw themselves as doing just about the most important thing anyone had ever done, and that sort of grandeur sits well with the scope of Assassin’s Creed.
The Assassin’s Creed series is fixated on history to a degree that few other franchises have ever really explored, and it’s that sort of obsession that kept me coming back even as the gameplay got a little stale over the last two installments. These aren’t “history games,” obviously, and they deal with the setting as they see fit in service of the fictional story. But they work hard on setting, and for me, setting is always the most interesting part of history — just the basic idea of imagining a different time in detail. Hopefully, this can be the game that hits both those places at once.
I also talked to Hutchinson about some other things, too, so stay tuned for why he thinks that video games are more like TV than movies.
The American Revolution, the setting for Assassin’s Creed 3, is one of those moments. I talked to Alex Hutchinson, Creative Director for the game at Ubisoft Montreal. He explained that, at first glance, this might seem like a story that’s only relevant to Americans and the British, but in the end, the American Revolution was an intensely European story. He hopes that they’ve made that backdrop interesting to people from all different countries.
“The British thought of it as a British civil war, the French Fleets blockaded the ports, and the
Americans are trained by a German guy named Von Steubben – there’s so many elements of this story that reverberate around the world.”
The discovery of America by Europeans quickly ushered in what we could consider the first global era, and the American Revolution became the capstone in a series of early global conflicts – wars fought in America by Europeans with native allies that affected policy as far away as India. For Hutchinson, a character with a native background was the perfect avatar for the player to view the war unfolding.
“We obviously didn’t want to tell a story about truth, justice and the American way. We also didn’t want to tell a story about King and Country,” he says. “You find this long history of the indigenous population allying with the French or the British, or the Spanish or the Dutch, and it just seemed like a very believable backdrop for the character.”
It’s a lot to deal with in a video game about secret societies and conspiracy, and luckily, Hutchinson says Assassin’s Creed 3 is not the story of the American Revolution.
It’s the story of Assassins and Templars set to the backdrop of the American Revolution. That conflict always sits somewhere on a balance beam between control and ideas of freedom – the perfect notion for the American Revolution, where enlightenment philosophy and military action found themselves inexorably intertwined. Reading the letters and declarations of the founding fathers at the time, it’s clear that they saw themselves as doing just about the most important thing anyone had ever done, and that sort of grandeur sits well with the scope of Assassin’s Creed.
The Assassin’s Creed series is fixated on history to a degree that few other franchises have ever really explored, and it’s that sort of obsession that kept me coming back even as the gameplay got a little stale over the last two installments. These aren’t “history games,” obviously, and they deal with the setting as they see fit in service of the fictional story. But they work hard on setting, and for me, setting is always the most interesting part of history — just the basic idea of imagining a different time in detail. Hopefully, this can be the game that hits both those places at once.
I also talked to Hutchinson about some other things, too, so stay tuned for why he thinks that video games are more like TV than movies.
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1 comments:
You really talked to Alex Hutchinson? That so COOL!!
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