Assassin's Creed Odyssey Dev Reveals One of the Series' Biggest Development Problems

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey world director Ben Hall has revealed one of the series’ biggest issues that often causes headaches for Ubisoft to solve during development. The revelation displays the kind of clever solutions the studio has to come up with when designing the playable world in games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

The stunning historical worlds are a big part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise’s appeal. Players are transported to a new land from another time, hand-crafted by Ubisoft with incredible accuracy. Even the worst-reviewed Assassin’s Creed games tend to still see praise from gamers and critics for their game worlds at a bare minimum. Everyone has their own favorite setting from the series so far, as well as their own dream time and location they’d love to see in the future. However, there is one element that Ubisoft must always consider during development.

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Speaking to Edge Magazine, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey world director Ben Hall described the difficulty of introducing verticality to a setting like Ancient Greece, which doesn’t really have all that much of it. Hall pointed out that “verticality is really important, especially in the Assassin’s Creed games,” describing the series as “a climbing-frame game… about moving the players through those spaces and going up and down things as much as anything else.” He compared Odyssey to 2015’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, which features Victorian London where developers could think about “creating those desire lines for players to take” due to the city’s large volume of massive buildings and structures. The challenge is different with each release and setting.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s World Director Explains Series’ Struggle With Verticality Across Settings

Compare this to the challenge Assassin’s Creed Odyssey faced, where “a lot of the buildings and the points of interest we were building were much smaller.” Hall and his colleagues had a great solution that stayed true to Assassin’s Creed‘s commitment to historical accuracy, claiming, “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. 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.”

…verticality is really important, especially in the Assassin’s Creed games.

From the roofs of Florence to the sandy dunes of Ancient Egypt, this is a challenge that every Assassin’s Creed game will face. Some (like Syndicate) will inevitably face an easier time than others, with certain settings lending themselves particularly well to the type of verticality that remains at the heart of Assassin’s Creed‘s DNA. It’s not clear what’s up next for the series, although rumors continue to grow about the possibility of an Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag remake. Ironically, it is one of the few games in the series where parkour and verticality largely take a backseat in favor of seafaring pirate gameplay.