While the first part was widely advertised, the story and realisation of Assassin’s Creed II already had a loyal following. In contrast to the first instalment, Ubisoft Montreal, the development studio behind Assassin’s Creed II, this time added HumanIK as middleware to give the characters more room for manoeuvre. The AI module has also been further improved. But what’s really new about “Assassin’s Creed II”?
The game
The first instalment of “Assassin’s Creed” did the same to the competing titles in 2007 as the title hero did to his victims: The time jump between the near future (2012) and the past (1191) was showered with awards by critics and gamers and sold more than eight million copies. As a result, the sequel is under a lot of pressure – because on the one hand there is the dichotomy between further development on the one hand and the mood of its predecessor on the other. But with the time jump story from 2012, both parts of Assassin’s Creed are firmly linked, at least in terms of content.
In the first part, the main character, a bartender named Desmond Miles, fell victim to the machinations of a pharmaceutical company that tested a “genetic memory” machine on him. With this, he steps into the shoes of his ancestors – and ends up in the role of Altaïr Ibn La-Ahad, an assassin in the year 1191. In the second part, Desmond escapes the pharmaceutical company, but ends up in the clutches of another machine and lives the life of another ancestor – this time Ezio Auditore da Firenze, also an assassin for hire, who is on a quest for revenge through Renaissance Venice.
The development
The developer Ubisoft has once again opted for products from Autodesk – and realised a large part of the development with 3ds Max and Motionbuilder, with Human IK as middleware.
“From the beginning, we just wanted to refine and develop Assassin’s Creed,” says James Therien, Head of Programming at Ubisoft Montreal. “Even with such a successful game, we have to keep refining – better characters, better interaction and a story that keeps the tension going. We also need to further develop the game controls, for example in terms of muscles and acrobatic skills in combat,” continues Therien.
“One of the most important aspects for Assassin’s Creed II, in our opinion, was a more realistic hero. The player gains experience in climbing, fighting and flying, but also in dealing with the environment. Autodesk HumanIK helped us with the development of the climbing. We were able to create new and better movements through a fast repetitive process without worrying about the quality of the inverse kinematics.
When it came to jittering, i.e. when the figures started to flutter, we used to waste a lot of time optimising the compression. But HumanIK didn’t generate any of this jittering,” says Therien.
Artificial intelligence
The non-player characters (NPC) are another new development. Therien comments: “In the first part, the other characters only followed you. In the second part, they also approach the player, which requires much more precise animations. HumanIK was incredibly helpful in that, for example, the feet are always on the ground, the arms don’t shake or flicker or anything like that. This also benefited our cutscenes. We were able to compress the same animations more without any loss of quality.” Therien explains that all characters and meshes were generated using Autodesk software packages. The motion capture data was filtered through the motion builder.
The first expansion for Assassin’s Creed II, “Purgatory of the Vanities”, has already been released and is available to download. In this expansion, the player joins an alliance to free Venice from the clutches of the monk Savonarola. Ten new missions or memories await the player here and they meet one of the most memorable characters of the time, Niccoló Machiavelli. Other parts – such as the continuation of the story in “Brotherhood”, a multiplayer mode and another extra story called “The Battle of Forli” – were also well received by the community. Over nine million copies of Assassin’s Creed II have been sold since its launch. So the team from Montreal seems to have done everything right this time too.
Digic Pictures: Opening credits for the review
After the success of the first instalment of Assassin’s Creed, expectations for Part 2 were high – and fans don’t want to be disappointed. The developer studio Digic Pictures has taken up this challenge and produced the game trailer for the game. Digic comes from the gamer corner, as a former division of the game developer Black Hole. The company was spun off from this developer following the success of its own projects. According to the managing director, there were some stumbling blocks in the “most challenging work to date” – including the cloth simulation for dancing people, an enormous amount of matte paintings and missing motion capture data. In terms of workflow, Digic focused on the earliest possible complete version of the film after the storyboard, which was then rendered again and again – after the characters, motion capturing and backgrounds, the first version was output. Other parts such as lighting and textures were added gradually. The main software environments used by Digic are Maya, ZBrush, Photoshop, Bodypaint, Nuke and mental ray.
