The Artists Behind ASSASSIN'S CREED III Share All-New Details On Its Complex Development Process

While Ubisoft has managed to release some incredibly successful video games like Watch_Dogs, Tom Clancy's The Division 2, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege, and Prince of Persia, none of them came close to Assassin's Creed III, at least when it comes to sheer sales numbers. ACIII, which was first released back in 2012 as the biggest launch in Ubisoft's publishing history, has recently returned as Assassin's Creed III - Remastered, giving PS4, Xbox One, and PC users a chance to relive that revolutionary game.

Considering that the modern Assassin's Creed games are much more RPG-focused than their predecessors, it comes as a big surprise that the decision to make the series a bit more BioWare-like was approved during the development of ACIII, which officially started around mid-2010.

"I know [Creative Director] Alex [Hutchinson] really wanted to have something in the Americas, just to have something different than Europe," Senior Level Design Director at Ubisoft Montreal Philippe Bergeron said. Bergeron has worked on the franchise since the very beginning, when the first game was in development as a then-next-gen Prince of Persia title. "Up until Assassin's Creed III, all of the Assassin's Creeds were set in cities," Bergeron added. "We didn't really have any form of wilderness; we had some in AC1, like with the Kingdom map, which was mainly just traveling around on a horse. We had some in ACII, with Monteriggioni and the mountainside, but those were fairly light in exploration. When we were talking about ACIII, there's a huge component of it, the Frontier, which is just pure organic vegetation. The implication of having tree-running and whatnot – I was surprised our engine could even do that."

"I realized that – from that period of history in the United States – there are very few art pieces," Narrative and Realization Director at Ubisoft Montreal Alexandre Neszvecsko said. "The original idea of going through art pieces, or a drawing or something, felt unnatural to me. But when you go into a museum, what covers those moments is models. They do big reproductions, so I [pitched the idea of using] miniatures and models. I constructed the whole region, part of the port of Philadelphia and Boston, all in models, and I filmed it."

While the desire to make ACIII as close to the reality as possible is worth admiring, the only problem was that Ubisoft didn't have a department that created models, at least at the time. "I almost created my own trap," Neszvecsko continued. To pull it off, he began building a team "with very strange talents" outside of making games. One team member, for example, worked as a lighting artist on cinematics and trailers at Ubisoft Montreal; she joined Neszvecsko's team with the idea of using her skills as a pastry chef to build walls and brickwork the way she would her cakes.

"I built my team with all those crazy people that were doing a job at Ubisoft, but had side projects in their lives that were super different, but fit what we were trying to do," Neszvecsko continued. "And for, let's say, almost a week, we were struggling to find the right way to do our stuff. We had to find a way to do the thing right – how to do a wooden wall, how to do a brick wall – and we built the houses and everything."

"It was a huge success internally,"Neszvecsko said. "It was unique, and we had all the teams coming up to take a look at what we'd done. We had houses rebuilt, and part of a city rebuilt in models, and they could, for the first time, see something [concrete]." Be sure to read the full interview with other core designers behind the success of Assassin's Creed III on Ubisoft's website clicking RIGHT HERE.

Relive the American Revolution or experience it for the first time in Assassin's Creed® III Remastered, with enhanced graphics and improved gameplay mechanics. Plus, Assassin's Creed Liberation Remastered and all solo DLC content are included.