Assassin's Creed III

Assassin’s Creed III’s creative director Alex Hutchinson has explained how difficult it has been for the team to find historical figures to kill.

Hutchinson explained that famous figures have always been killed during in the same year and location as they died in real life. However after researching the period they discovered that no one famous actually died.

“It’s super difficult, this period, because no one famous dies,” Hutchinson said. “We have a rule: Everyone dies in the right year, at the right place. They have to be real people. We don’t get enough mileage out of it, I think it’s kind of magical, and yet no one knows. I don’t know how we make it more obvious.”

Apparently none of the founding fathers died, and all of the British Army generals all went back to England and died of old age. Ubisoft decided to start looking into people who “were in semi-shady stuff, whether it was slavery or they were running counterfeiting rings.”

It will be interesting to see exactly who your major targets are in ACIII. The realistic historical setting seems to be both a blessing and a curse for the development team, especially in a game all about bumping off high profile people.

Another issue the team faced was the possibility of killing off an ancestor of someone who was playing the game. This made things difficult when it came to naming the Templars. “For us they’re not villains, they’re misguided. Everyone is trying to save the world, they’re just doing it a different way. For this script we worked on it, and we really got [the Templer] perspective,” Hutchinson explained.

This shows that making a game isn’t as simple as throwing a bunch of people at the player for him/her to kill. In a setting such as the Assassin’s Creed universe the team has to put names to faces while being historically accurate. This obviously poses a lot of problems that the team will need to overcome.

Source: Penny Arcade