Ubisoft has been making the right moves with Assassin’s Creed: Unity and there’s been quite the support for its protagonist Arno. Scriptwriter Travis Stout, who wrote the story for the campaign, finally cleared the air the protagonist’s spelling (it’s not “Arnaud”) and offered more details about his personality on the Ubisoft Blog.
“His family is a very old one and they’ve been Assassins for a very long time so we wanted to give him a slightly more antiquated name. Also, the phonetic spelling makes it easier to pronounce”
“He is a very driven young man. He is haunted by mistakes in his past or perceived mistakes, that he feels he must atone for. He is very devoted to the Assassin Order as an ideal but, at the same time, he is not as impressed with the weight of the long mystical tradition and ancient rhetoric as some of the other Assassins. He likes to think for himself and make his own decisions. He isn’t the type of person who will believe something just because someone tells it to him.
Arno is fairly well educated and has grown up surrounded by books and tutors. “He has a habit of quoting the classics and tends to use humor to deflect when he is emotionally vulnerable, like a lot of people do I think. We very much wanted him to not be the sort of grizzled badass spouting one-liners that you see in a lot of action movies. We wanted him to feel like an actual person.”
So far it seems to be working but we’ll find out how cool Arno really is when Assassin’s Creed: Unity releases on October 28th for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.