Since the first video game came out back in the early fifties, video game makers have sought to create more and more realistic gaming experiences. The motivation can be simple as increasing sales and adding fun to our lives, or to come up with a way of immortalizing the human specie. A way to give us life, after life, after life, with no game overs, no deaths, no graves, and no one to excavate those graves after thousands of years, to ask how we lived, because we never died.
Developing environments, characters, lighting, sound, and sometimes even smell all play a part in the creation of these realistic experiences. Games, Consoles, Simulators, and Virtual Reality have all been developed with this purpose in mind by pulling a curtain of digital illusion over our eyes. These developments lead us from one technological leap to another, and now we are on the cusp of such a leap, one that some call the “The Next Generation of games” or the “NEXT-GEN GAMES”.
One of the games that signalled the dawn of the “NEXT-GEN GAMES” era is Assassin’s Creed. This is not just another video game for if you look closely, the huge amount of work that has gone into designing everything aspect of it, on both the visual level and the digital interactive level, becomes apparent. To achieve this, 300 designers, programmers and artists at games maker Ubisoft spent four years bringing the game to life.
Their biggest challenge lay in designing the game's landscape down to the smallest detail with every cart, pot, or building in the three cities available in the game made to be interactive, something that no other video game had previously achieved. Every object can be held, thrown, jumped and hung from, or simply moved which meant that thousands of Non-Playing Characters (NPCs) had to be created to fill such a vast environment.
One such interactive element is the architecture: the most distinctive and groundbreaking aspect in the whole project, due in part to the fact that the creators of the game had set themselves the daunting task of making any protrusion more than 5 centimetres in length, in any part, in any façade, of any building, interactive. Their task was made easier, however, as medieval architecture – the game is set in the year 1191 – consisted of enough details that could allow such a free environment, including sills, arches, stones, masonry, castle iron gates, draw bridges, ledges, wooden beams, flag poles, and cornices that the Character could use and hold on to as recognizable elements.
Gathering and placing the architectural elements in the game's digital cityscape was achieved by creating a bank of interactive and detailed objects and blocks, called the “LEGO SYSTEM”. When gathered they worked as templates that were much easier to handle and move than if the developers were managing every single surface detail of the building on its own. These templates were the first step in creating the whole environment, as by using them one creates the paths, areas, spaces and rooms where later other objects and characters were developed to fill. And to maintain the realism of it all, most of the architecture was modelled on blueprints, photos, historical descriptions, objects and decorations of the period found in museums. Although some scaling anomalies were observed – which were either for achieving their interactive goals, or for creating more dramatic and menacing settings – every building was still a complete interactive surface for the player, adding a great amount of flexibility to the game.
This added flexibility in turn lead to another challenge: controlling the new found completely free three-dimensional roaming approach, created by the diverse routes for the player to follow. This multi-layered format contrasts with the more linear gaming model of levels that the player has to pass in order to reach the end and win, and thus creating a complete environment to be submerged in. That pushed the developers to work more on the details and arranging their “LEGO BLOCKS” in order to control such sophisticated and articulated surroundings, and to maintain the main theme and plot of the game without compromising the new found freedom.
The technology in the gaming consoles themselves also play a part in lending the whole experience more depth and a greater sense of realism. Multi processing units make it possible for quick calculations to be made that give a more realistic edge to each movement as details such as the weight of every character and object are taken into account. Powerful rendering engines blend real time with any action the player chooses to do so that lights are able to throw detailed, life like shadows, enhancing the texture of buildings and their materials to ensure that the interactively designed architectural elements do not just react and move properly, but also look right.
The realism which Assasin's Creed captures through the intricate designs and interactive elements, as well as the flexibility woven into its fabric that adds one of the most essential aspects of human life, namely “choice”, makes it seem entirely possible that games like this are bringing us closer to a time where living inside the Digital Cyber Matrix Reality is the Reality.
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