Assassin’s Creed 3 and Assassin’s Creed: Liberation are trying to tell a story that will step on people’s toes, but that won’t stop the Ubisoft team from chickening out because these truths are factual, and they have nothing to be worried about.
For example, in Assassin’s Creed 2–Borgias missions–featured a corrupt pope, but it was actually factual and recorded in the history books.
Creative Director Alex Hutchinson has said that they won’t shy away from such truths, and in Assassin’s Creed: Liberation they are depicting slaves which scriptwriter Jill Murray tried to avoid considering it is a sensitive topic but couldn’t because they’re facts.
“For me the importance of talking about things outweighs the fear,” Murray said. “The fear you can deal with by doing your research, by talking to people, by really looking deeply into the character, understanding how they work, how they respond to their environment. To me, it’s so much more important to talk about things, I’m willing to set the fear aside long enough to do my research and make sure I get it right.”
Hutchinson added: “Usually we’re trying to be truthful. And we like it–I should say we don’t mind it–if the truth is uncomfortable, if we can back it up with facts. When we were dealing with the Borgias [in Assassin’s Creed 2], we were saying the Pope is a really bad guy. But if you do any amount of research, it’s pretty clear we didn’t make this up and it’s pretty well documented,” he said to GI International. Via GV.
It’s a bit interesting that they need to justify this, but as long as they’re getting this out there before the two games come out later this month, it’s all cool I guess.
“And it’s the same with the Founding Fathers [in AC3]. These are real people; they have their ups and downs, their opinions. And when we can find documented evidence of an opinion they had or something they asked for and it was just true, then we were happy to put that in the game. But we tried not to have our subjective layer come into it; we saved that for the fictional story line and the fictional characters.”
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