Ubisoft gave the teams responsible for
Assassin's Creed Origins an extra year compared to earlier games in the series. Over one thousand developers from Montreal, Singapore, Montpelier, Shanghai and Sofia took up the challenge to recreate the detailed and reach world of Cleopatra's Egypt.
In an interview with Venture Beat, Raphael Lacoste, art director on
Origins was responsible for supervising the work of hundreds of artists. Ubisoft sent a special team to modern Egypt to document the real-world look of things. It's a normal procedure, for example with
Black Flag the team went to Havana, but the developers also had to imagine things that weren't documented, things that are no longer around today. They worked so hard that Ubisoft asked them to create a tour mode.
One of the main challenges during the developing was the water in Egypt. The entire civilization was built around the Nile, all the cities and important locations were built along the river. "
We had to have very interesting water, all different types of water. You had muddy water and swampy water but also the ocean, the Mediterranean in the north, and the river to the south. We also had oases, some of them with salty waters. Faiyum Oasis is pretty big. We had quarries with pools and natron mines".
Another problem was the depiction of historical figures. Nobody knows how exactly Julius Caesar or Cleopatra looked like, so the developer had to make bold decisions. "
We tried to respect history as much as we could with the characters. We had an idea at the beginning around Julius Caesar. We thought he would be blond, and we gave him blue eyes, but it ended up that he looked too much like a typical bad guy. We did some more homework and did a lot of research into his background, and it turned out that he had black eyes. That led to our version of Caesar with the black eyes and brown hair or more gray hair. Cleopatra was Greek, not Egyptian, so we wanted her to have a lighter skin tone, not so much of the clichéd Egyptian princess. A different direction than if we had been creating Nefertiti for instance. She was Egyptian while Cleopatra was more Greco-Roman-Egyptian".
Ubisoft worked with historian and illustrator Jean-Claude Golvin, who helped the team in recreating the landmarks like Alexandria. They tried to embrace the contrasts between the magnificent Greco-Roman cities and places like Memphis, which was 3,000 years old even in the time of
Origins. A lot of gamers use the debuting in the series photo mode and they tag Lacoste on Twitter a lot. He's getting a ton of pictures every day, as players make portraits of different things in the environment. The server has troubles with loading the photos, because the developers have had a couple of million pictures!