Gaining more and more popularity, the series game Assassin’s Creed has united people from various background over the love of both game, history, design, style and storyline, especially the last few games being set in Ancient Egypt or during the time of Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Whatever the time period, the artists would conduct a careful and an informative research of the clothes, architecture, interior design, design of day-to-day objects and everything that would submerge the player back into the time period they are playing in.
For the Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, set during the 431-442 BCE in Ancient Greece, with the consultancy from of Dr. Stephanie-Anne Ruatta the Ubisoft team travelled to Greece to take notes, pictures and sketches of the buildings, to get to know topography, archaeological sites and to visit museums, in order to understand and collect the knowledge of the country during the period of Classical Era. Once all the information was obtained and the research conducted, the designers built the map onto which seven different biomes were successfully integrated. Examples of sub-biomes involve snow-capped mountains, marshlands, clay form and burned forests as they add visual diversity and give each region its own unique characteristic and the purpose it served at the time.
To add the details to everyday life of the people based in that time period more than 4,000 unique props were created, such as clay jars, baskets of fruit, ropes, furniture, tents, scrolls, chests. To get around the time-consuming task of placing the props around in the world, the team would build individual component that would already be populated by the props, such as table with jewellery or a basket full of fruit, which further could be mixed and matched to be placed in various sceneries. As the game is based during a war, each city state had to have its own army, which is allied with either Sparta or Athens, so attention to their uniform, weapons, philosophy and behaviour was important.
Details such as textures play a big part in design for families of assets. Each artist was in a charge of a different kit of materials using different software, making sure that their own materials were coherent with the needs of modellers. In the pipeline of the game the modellers created 3D assets, Level Artists placed those to build the world and Materials Artists who created the materials for those assets.
One of the game features that require more thought and careful attention in pre-production are the cinematic scenes which would portray interaction between the main character and historically important figure or show the dramatic event in their life that would lead to a specific outcome of their fate and where they are at right now. One of the most powerful scenes of such that I found was the flashback, when playing the role for Kassandra, of how she was thrown of a cliff by her father. As an audience we see the desperation of the mother as she is trying to stop her child getting killed, the impotence of Nicolaos, the father, as he believes in what has to be done by the placement of the camera angles and composition of the shot.
The sharp transition from him kneeling in front of the child and appearing heartbroken to taking her off the ground and holding over the cliff intensifies and highlights the change in his mood. From caring father, to the ruthless and harsh leader that he was, following the strict order of executing a punishment, the scene is only intensified by the storm that is happening on the background. All the details found in the scene remind us of the importance of gods’ presence in Greek culture: from clothes, priests, statues, to the lighting strike as Nicolaus releases his grip and lets Kassandra fall (maybe presence of Zeus, or resemblance to the god). Those are constantly present throughout the game, as they were intertwined with the societies beliefs and way of living the life at the time.
References: https://archaeogaming.com/2019/04/19/consulting-for-ubisoft-on-assassins-creed-odyssey/
https://80.lv/articles/001agt-material-production-for-assassins-creed-odyssey/