With the setting of Assassin’s Creed III put on full display in the game’s debut trailer, released less than 24 hours ago, Creative Director Alex Hutchinson decided to give gamers his reasoning and explanation for placing the game in the US Northeast during the American Revolution.
“In the period in which our game is set, the American Revolution, it’s like this half untouched wilderness where weather and winter is terrifying, where tress and forests are still ancient,” said Hutchinson in an interview with Game Informer. “There are populations who live out in the woods that haven’t seen Western civilization necessarily. We have all these great features to play with and I think that big chunk on its own is going to feel really fresh.”
He stated during the interview how the wilderness was going to become a whole new environment, utilized in ways that no other game has truly done before. Hutchinson wanted the forests of Assassin’s Creed III to be just as interactive and traversable as the numerous cities had been in all previous series titles.
“I always thought it was funny that the one thing you couldn’t climb in AC was the one thing I have climbed in real life, which is a tree…There [are] plenty of games with forests but the forests are just collections of assets, they’re just trees and you walk around them,” he said. “The fact that it’s a tree doesn’t matter.
“It could be a lamppost, it could be a box, it could be anything. Whereas if we can make trees and the wilderness as much a playground as Altaïr and Ezio made cities, then I think it’s huge.”
Although Hutchinson is big on these new ideas and directions in order to expand upon the series, he still believes that the Assassin’s Creed franchise is “healthy” and boasts a “big audience that cares about it.”
“We didn’t want to tear it down,” he explained. “We’re not in one of those franchise situations where you need to reset, hit the reset and go back to the core.”
Assassin’s Creed III is set for an October 30 release on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 with a Wii U version currently in the works.
