Q&As// Assassin's Creed Producer: Jade Raymond

Q: Why the Crusades?

JR: From a gameplay perspective purely, the Crusades provide a really cool environment for an action-adventure game. We have really narrow streets bustling with people, we have the gruesome setting of mediaeval war. Being an assassin is also cool, because you’re not part of the war. We could deliver things that you weren’t able to see on other consoles, like free-running around those narrow streets and interaction with the crowd, and there’s the expanse for the horse, too.

Q: So, what will the first hour of the gameplay be like?

JR: I have to tell you that the first hour is going to completely surprise you when you play it, because it contains a lot of the stuff that we haven’t talked about yet. But I will take you through a basic assassination mission. You get your orders – you may sometimes get a list of three names, or sometimes one. Let’s say there’s someone you have to take out who is a slave trader, thought to be located in Jerusalem. What you first have to do is get over to that city and find your local bureau there. Your first part is going to be really investigative, so you have to find out where this guy is, lots of information about him, why he’s your target. There’s some mini-gameplay in that information-gathering – you have to pick pockets sometimes, beat the information out of people or eavesdrop.

Once you’ve got enough information, you go back to see your bureau leader and he says: "OK, you’ve got all the information – you’re ready to go." Then he hands you a feather, which is your signature. So you try to infiltrate the area where the target is – obviously, some will be outside, some will be in their lairs and some will be in huge fortresses with hundreds of guards. Some will be super-adrenalin fights, while others will be more acrobatic challenges. But it’s always up to you how you choose to make your approach.

Then there’s the key moment of assassination, where a lot of the story unlocks. And then there’s another part that you don’t often see in games – we’ve placed a lot of emphasis on it and it’s super-fast-paced – the escape. Your mission doesn’t end when you’ve killed a guy – there’s the whole aspect of getting out alive, making sure that you’ve lost the guys who are pursuing you, then getting back to the bureau and giving the feather back as proof that you’ve completed your mission.

Q: Is this going to be an open universe – can I go where I want?

JR: Yes. It has a lot of the sandbox philosophy built in. These cities are huge and completely open; there’s no path through them. There’s no particular order – we talked about arriving in the city and going to the bureau but, if you want, you can just explore the city, eavesdrop on conversations and figure out your bearings. But, as our creative director says, it’s not a pure sandbox game – it’s really guided always by the story.

What creates the gameplay, whether you’re doing an assassination, trying to pick a pocket, or just doing side-missions and having fun in the city, is the concept of social stuff that we’ve been talking about since E3. It’s this idea that the crowd and the military are creating the gameplay all the time, and it’s your actions that trigger these sequences – all of a sudden, they realise you’re an assassin, and there’s a crazy chase scene until you calm everything down and hide.