You promised a lot more!
I’ve stopped in the middle of watching Gametrailers’ latest ‘Bonus Round’ episode featuring an interview with Jade Raymond, the Producer of Assassin’s Creed.
My interest in Assassin’s Creed is minor at the moment, since a PC version has yet to even show up on the horizon. What made me want to post is something that Jade said about the early stages in a game’s development. She described how, immediately following establishment of a mandate (a central objective), the team at Ubisoft began creating ‘fake game footage’. This footage is meant to be a depiction of what, in the developer’s wildest dreams, the game should be. As such, she said, the footage is of massive landscapes, a plethora of gameplay features and truly groundbreaking graphics.
This reminded me of some conversations I’ve been having recently about Crysis. I’ve been sent links to comparison shots, where an in-game screenshot of Crysis is set alongside a freeze-frame from one of its earliest promotion videos. There’s a startling difference between the two. The promos promised a graphical quality a generation or more ahead of what we see in the released game.
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/6115/comparisonshotxt0.jpg
Surely these promos are perfect examples of the fake game footage that Jade spoke of. Perhaps then, we shouldn’t hold it against Crytek that they teased us so. Perhaps they just wanted to show us what they were working on. How nice of them.
- Chris
