The Assassin’s Creed series is keeping up with their very little known tradition of named victims being based on actual people who lived and died during the period the game is taking place.
Creative Director Alex Hutchinson has claimed that each person killed during the course of the series has been a real person. On top of that, they are killed during the correct time and place in which their real deaths happened. Of course, some creative liberty is taken with how they die and for the newest addition to the series the task of finding and choosing assassination targets has proven to be more difficult than in the previous versions.
“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.”
The search for people for the game’s protagonist to kill one of the very first things the development teams takes on. Together they create and enormous list of people who have lived and died during the specific years the game is set. Then they have to locate people who died in certain locations, along with making sure they die in a specific order. This way, the linear story of the game is historically accurate.
Hutchinson went on further to explain. “In the American Revolution, no one of note dies. None of the founding fathers die, all the generals of the British Army pretty much die of old age back in England. Only poor people died.” Unfortunately the poor are heavily overshadowed by the many historical figures that survived.
While pickings may have been difficult to find however, they were hardly slim.
The setting for the story (a new country in development) gave way for several unsavory characters to pop up. There were a plethora of people who didn’t care much for legalities, and that is where Hutchinson and his team found some real gems.
“We had to find people who died, and then find out what they were doing,” Hutchinson said. “Many people were in semi-shady stuff, whether it was slavery or they were running counterfeiting rings. It’s a new country, so it’s the Wild West.”
Because the holds itself to such strict guidelines it brings up some rather important question: What if someone plays the game a recognizes the character as a distant relative or ancestor?
“We’re really close now. This is someone’s great-grandfather,” Hutchinson said.
This aspect made it particularly difficult when naming the game’s villains. With real people, a certain sensitivity had to be maintained about who was named.
“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.
Alright Nation! Question for you:
With this new perspective, would you be offended if you found your grandfather in the game as a Templar? or would you be proud he was included to begin with?
