Games, particularly those of a science-fiction bent, often use alternate histories to generate an atmosphere more evocative, and perhaps more human, than what gleaming metal corridors and space-age technology can allow. Perhaps they picture a 1960 underwater city ruined by gene splicing and steam-powered abominations. Or they insert jet packs and giant robots into one of the World Wars. The results usually fall somewhere between speculative fiction and camp, and leave a slew of cool ideas for guns and superpowers.
Fewer games take the very idea of history, and the alteration of history, as their subject. In Ubisoft’s most recent Assassin’s Creed games, players control Ezio Auditore, a Florentine noble who, finding himself in the middle of various conspiracies, becomes a shadowy figure running through the alleys and rooftops of Florence, Venice, and Rome in search of various arcane truths. The fictional twist is that players are controlling Ezio through his modern descendant, Desmond Miles, who “plays” through his ancestor’s memories through a virtual-reality device called the Animus. This is a game not only about re-imagining history, but about reliving and reenacting it. The coming Assassin’s Creed: Revelations will be the final game in the series of Ezio’s story, and takes place largely in a meticulously constructed 16th-century Constantinople. Speakeasy recently talked with lead writer Darby McDevitt about the themes and changes in the game.
Do you know what Ubisoft liked about the city of Constantinople?
I think as a metaphor for our first two assassins, Ezio and Altaïr. Altaïr was an Arab living in the holy land, and Ezio was an Italian born in Florence. Constantinople, apart from being incredibly beautiful and having an incredibly rich history, had this symbolic meaning of sitting on the border of Asia and Europe. The more research we did about the city, the incredible architecture, the almost seven-layered-dip quality of who had been there, how many people had lived there—Greeks, Romans, and Ottomans—it just became this city that we felt in love with. We ended up sending a huge number of our team, mainly our artistic director and mission and sound designers, there for two weeks to gather information.
In the previous games Ezio had a boyish, endearing quality and here he’s obviously aged and grizzled. The tenor of the action seems more serious; there’s a lot more gravitas to it. Would you say that that’s representative of a tonal shift in the game as a whole?
Definitely. Whether that’s me, or whether that’s the creative director, or a combination of everybody—games are, I think, the most collaborative medium around. For instance, a scriptwriter can write a movie and then hand it off and never touch it again. But that’s impossible in games; I’m always working on it, always tweaking.
We have actually worked pretty hard to make this a grittier, more morally gray universe. We like the morally gray aspect of the first Assassin’s Creed. Ezio is a fish out of water here; he can’t walk around being very cavalier about things. He can’t make too many assumptions about what he’s allowed to do. He can’t just kill people with impunity—not that he could in the last ones. At the same time, the boyishness; we just thought, this was a game where we would give him his love interest. There’s a woman named Sophia that plays a huge role in this game. She’s a Venetian living in Constantinople. I just thought, from a writing point of view, that you couldn’t have a 52-year-old guy still acting like a teenager and make it believable. Especially when he was trying to woo this incredibly intelligent woman who is almost immune to his sillier charms. It was just time to make Ezio grow up.
What do you mean by morally gray?
We’re in the middle of the Ottoman Empire, and it’s expanding and expanding at this period. Suleiman the Magnificent is really well-known for introducing an incredible legal system in the Ottoman Empire. At the same time he’s expanding its borders like crazy. [In our game] there are Templars who are remnants of the old Byzantine Empire, who we feel have a fairly legitimate reason for being angry at the Ottomans. A lot of our other Templars that you’ll meet in the game come from different areas around, at the borders of the Ottoman Empire. There’s Wallachia, where Romania is now; in 10 years they’ll be taken over by the Ottoman Empire. There are places in Egypt where Templars come from. So all the Templars in our game have these legitimate grievances against the Ottomans. They’re not just teeth-gnashing bad guys. They’re all people with a clear sense of how the Ottomans have wronged them.
While Ezio is doing certain favors for the Ottoman royalty, he’s careful to not get too involved, because it’s getting harder and harder to pick sides. He’s on a mission for himself; he just wants to get into this ancient library, and he finds himself wrapped up with all this political intrigue. By the end of the game I think it’ll be very, very difficult to say what he should have been doing, who he should have been siding with. It’s almost like an accident of circumstances that [he decides to] work with these people.
Are those ambivalences palpable in the mechanics of the gameplay?
That’s a good question. Probably not. Can you think of an example of how?
Through ambient dialogue, maybe, catching hints of the atmosphere that you’re describing, just in the process of walking through the city?
Yeah—we have this thing where Templars, because they’re Byzantine, descended from Greeks, can take over areas of the city. And when you’re in those areas, you will hear some of the Greek populations outright supporting—like, thanks for protecting us from the Ottomans. So hopefully you’ll get a sense of feeling like there’s a lot of tension in the city. There are definitely missions that you play where you might realize at the end that Ezio did the wrong thing. There’s an old political phrase that I tried to use in here: “There are terrible ways to do good things.” That’s maybe the theme of part of Ezio’s story
The Animus is an obvious metaphor for gaming, and you talk about how it causes multiple personalities, schizophrenia; and how Desmond is in a coma this time around. Can you speak to that decision, and the more surreal environment he’s playing through?
As for the Animus, it’s interesting because it is a metaphor for playing games, but when it was first invented, it was as a justification for doing certain game-y things—like locking a player off, like “you can’t go there yet.” Because that’s not how that character actually played through that life. And when you die in this game, it’s because you’ve de-synched. It’s taken on this great meta-commentary but it was actually invented for more practical reasons.
What we try to do is ask ourselves, what do we want to do, and then how can we justify it with our Animus—it’s hard to say. A lot of times, the decisions that are made are practical. And yet … the coma thing was just because of the way that [Assassin's Creed:] Brotherhood ended. And we also knew we had this Ezio story left to tell, and we thought, what’s the best way to deal with Desmond’s story? We don’t know a whole lot about Desmond; some people think he’s kind of a cardboard cutout right now. So let’s pause for a moment and see if we can find a way to tell more of his backstory. The coma idea became a way of saying, we can actually have him go through his own memories. We haven’t said much about it, but we’re planning a new type of experience for the coma. I think most people will think we’re being incredibly bold.
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is released Nov. 15, 2011 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
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