I recently watched a trailer for the upcoming Assassin’s Creed 3, and for a moment I thought it was teasing a major Hollywood movie.
Frankly, I was blown away by the quality of the graphics and action in the game. While movies and games are still separate entities, Assassin’s Creed does show how far game technology has come since the good old days, and how much movies and games have influenced each other.
At the same time, Alex Hutchinson, who is the creative director of Assassin’s Creed 3, told Forbes.com that modern games are actually more like TV than movies.
“We have a previous game we need to take into account,” Hutchinson told writer Dave Their. “We’re much more frequent, and we’re much more community driven. Movie always felt like short stories, whereas the modern TV season is like a novel.”
And indeed, TV has proven infinitely better than movies these days in terms of story telling, especially over a long arc.
Assassin’s Creed clearly has a deeper storyline than a lot of games, and if synergy happens with games and TV, it could also be a good place for a Creed mini-series, if anyone were so inclined.
As Cory May, the lead writer for Creed, told the Wall Street Journal, “There’s a nine-month period before any real writing starts where there’s just a sh*t-ton of research. A lot of it is first-person sources to get a sense of language from the time, customs of the time. We wanted to feel credible even if it’s not 100 percent accurate.”
And indeed, some dramatic license is usually required for movies, TV shows and games. We may not have been around over a hundred years ago and can recapture what happened with 100% accuracy, but does a movie, show or game capture the greater truth of a situation? If so, it’s good to go.
As May continued, “Whatever increases immersion is the most important thing. Fun always comes first; anything that makes the game less fun, we will compromise on to make sure the game is fun and fast-paced.”
Assassin’s Creed 3 is due for release October 30, and as we previously reported on TG, Creed is the third most anticipated game of the season with a 98% rating, right behind Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II, at least according to a Nielsen poll.
