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Assassin’s Creed II. Image courtesy of Ubisoft.
Renaissance assassin.
In 2007, Ubisoft’s third person action-adventure game Assassin’s Creed vanquished its competition in a manner worthy of its titular hero. Set in both the not-too-distant future of 2012 and the distant past of 1191, the game was an instant success with players and reviewers alike, leaving gamers wanting more.
Ubisoft has used Autodesk® software products in their game pipeline for many years. The powerful combination of Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Autodesk® MotionBuilder® software, together with Autodesk® HumanIK® animation middleware, helped the company create yet another game for the ages.
The Challenge
The primary challenge to any sequel is to improve on the original while staying true to its spirit. Thanks to a clever backstory taking place in 2012, both Assassin’s Creed games are able to remain firmly in the future while telling an ancient story.
In the original version, 2012 bartender (and playercontrolled protagonist) Desmond Miles is kidnapped by a pharmaceutical company to test a new machine capable of reading his “genetic memories” and then placing Desmond himself to simulate the experiences of his ancestors. As a result, Desmond finds himself in the role of Altaïr ibn La-Ahad, an assassin in the year 1191.
For its part, Assassin’s Creed II sees Desmond (still in 2012) escaping the pharmaceutical company, only to enter a more powerful version of the original machine and reliving the genetic memories of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, another assassin, but this time wreaking his vengeance during the Renaissance.
“From the start, we were trying to redefine and improve on the first Assassin’s Creed,” says James Therien, lead programmer at Ubisoft Montreal. “We wanted better characters, better acting, and a better script, along with the muscular game play and acrobatic fights that players of the first version would be expecting.”
The Ubisoft team wanted everything to be better in the sequel. That is always a lofty goal, but Ubisoft was definitely up to it.
The Solution
“One of the most important aspects in our vision of Assassin’s Creed II was a more realistic hero,” says Therien. “There is a great deal of acrobatic climbing, together with fighting, flying, and interaction with crowds. For the climbing, HumanIK middleware was a huge help. It enabled us to create new and better moves through a faster iterative process. With HumanIK, we never had to worry about the quality of the inverse kinematics solving. When a problem with jittering occurred, we could have wasted a lot of time attempting to optimize our compression methods for our basic animation, but by trusting in a stable highquality package like HumanIK, we never even have to think about the quality of the results. We simply know that the quality and performance will be there.”
To develop an even richer, more believable experience, the Ubisoft team also significantly enhanced the role of nonplayer characters (NPCs) in Assassin’s Creed II.
“The NPCs were limited to chase scenarios in the first version,” says Therien. “In the new version, they are right there in your face, which requires more precise animation. HumanIK was invaluable to removing excess jiggle from the NPC arms, making sure the feet are planted correctly, and that kind of thing. The result was a huge improvement in our cutscenes. We were able to compress much more animation and still deliver great quality.”
The Game
Since the release of Assassin’s Creed II, it seems that the Ubisoft Montreal programming team has accomplished its formidable task. The sequel has been uniformly praised by reviewers while selling 1.6 million copies the first week it was released.
For Therien and Ubisoft Montreal, using Autodesk software has consistently helped them to raise their own expectations and the gaming experiences they create.
“3ds Max is at the core of all our content creation. All the characters, all the meshes were created with the software. We also filter all of our motion capture data used for cut and fighting scenes through MotionBuilder. That is a lot of data, and MotionBuilder handled it all.”
For more information about Autodesk games software and middleware, visit www.autodesk.com/games.
Assassin’s Creed II. Image courtesy of Ubisoft.
