Assassin’s Creed Origins Facial Animations Are Still Being Worked On, Says Director

Assassin’s Creed Origins looks like a great game, a thorough re-imagining of the franchise and its mythos and gameplay in the form of an open world action RPG. Most of the feedback and reception to the game ever since it was officially unveiled at E3 earlier this year has been largely positive- but one of the things that people have been down on have been the facial animations, which have, admittedly, not looked the best in the game’s showings.

With the release date of the game so rapidly approaching – it releases on October 27 – can we expect Ubisoft to work on ironing out these issues? Or might they make it into the final game, where they could possibly achieve meme status like they did for Mass Effect Andromeda, and Ubisoft’s own Assassin’s Creed Unity?

“Yeah, so one thing- people don’t know what’s behind the curtain in terms of production and how that works,” Ashraf Ismail, the director of the game, said to Loomer in an interview at PAX, explaining how the playable builds are not necessarily 1:1 synchronized with the development work going on on the game. “But, you know, when we make these demos, at some point we branch them so we can stabilize them, polish them, make sure they can be ready to be played en masse. What that means is, while we have people playing here, and we are showing stuff off and doing interviews, we have an army of talented people that are – you know, the game is content complete, it’s been content complete for a very long time – that are, on a daily basis, iterating on this stuff, and pouring a lot of passion and work, daily- there are hundreds, if not thousands of changes going into the game.

“For me, that’s not much of a concern, I think we were much more excited to show off the game, from a marketing perspective, around the time we started showing it off. Because we knew that the kind of game we were making, with the intensely seamless combat system that we have, we needed to have people play it or feel it, as opposed to us just talking about it and showing videos. It was much more important for us to have the game living and playable, rather than just holding things back because something like the cinematics or the animations weren’t ready. And I think this is also clear from E3, and how we have responded to the feedback since, and how we iterated on it. And that’s the state of the project, all the tools and content is there, and iterating on it is very fast, very efficient, and we are constantly doing that, we are tuning and polishing the game.

“So I understand the concerns, I have seen the feedback myself, but I would say we have enough time till the release, and we will continue to polish and work on the game until it reaches a standard we are happy with,” he concluded.

I understand what he is saying, and it is fairly reasonable- if the game is at the state that he says it is at, then iteration of any kind should be fairly rapid. Moreover, Ismail was behind what is widely regarded the best game in the series, with Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag– so he has sort of earned the benefit of the doubt from us on that.

Hopefully, these minor issues are all ones that can be addressed before the game launches, next month, on October 27 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.