Assassin’s Creed 3 DLC is almost an education in American history

By: Musa Afridi

  |   October 24th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

The scriptwriter for the game, Matt Turner, explains that the Benedict Arnold DLC is as accurate as “history books would allow” although there were a few creative liberties that were taken.

The Assassin’s Creed games have a reputation of being set in some of the most rich periods in human history, albeit rich with violence, war and struggle, but rich none the less. That theme was epitomized by Revelations which took place in Constantinople, which is now Istanbul.

The latest instalment in the series is set during the American Revolution and features a host of historical figures, locations, battles and events that shaped the conflict and Ubisoft plans on dropping the player right in the middle of them.

However, Matt Turner, the game’s script writer also highlighted some of the lengths the developers went through to make the game as historically accurate as they could keeping in mind the nature of the game.

“We have some scenes that have the actual words spoken by key players in the events at West Point, according to the records form the court proceedings following what happened. On the other side of things, we needed to inject it with some gameplay so there are some liberties in terms of the action.”

However, despite conceding the creative liberties taken because of the gameplay, Turner reassured history buffs that they would find plenty of accuracies littered throughout the game.

“But who was there, what they did, and what happened to them is as precise as the history books would allow.”

Turner did not however, go too deep into details about how Arnold would fit into the overall happenings of the game. He said, “Our interpretation of Arnold actually weaves into the overall fiction and to divulge that would be to spoil a portion of the story.”

The scriptwriter also pointed out that the series never really had “bad guys” per se, only people with strong motives and beliefs that had reason to do what they did despite the costs and that it was up to the player to stop them. Turner applied this to the Benedict Arnold story as well and explained, “He has his reasons, and from a certain perspective they make complete sense.”

It seems Ubisoft is trying an ambitious balancing act between historical accuracy and enjoyable gameplay, in what is set to be the biggest Assassin’s Creed experience to date. The game, built on the Anvil engine’s latest version, will be able to render huge battles, similar to the one seen in the E3 trailer.

So do the historical accuracies tempt you into buying the game or is it the action that you are after? Let us know what about Assassin’s Creed 3 excites you the most in the comments section below.