Alexandre Pedneault, the lead designer of "Assassin's Creed Unity" for Ubisoft Montreal, opened up about how the parkour elements of the game franchise evolved, IGN reported.
According to the designer, the freerunning aspect of the series was first conceptualize by the original team that made the first "Assassin's Creed" game back in 2007.
The idea of using parkour in the game was the result of the team's desire to capitalize on their achievements with Ubisoft's "Prince of Persia: Sands of Time" from 2003.
"It's the original team that created the philosophy and set the bar for the behavior of all the 'Assassins,'" Pedneault explained. "They had high ambitions - and most of them wanted to improve what they achieved in 'Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.'"
"They really wanted to create a believable video game character," he added.
For the development of the first "Assassin's Creed" game, the movement of the main character was inspired by the mechanics of hockey-themed video games.
"I even heard stories where they were really looking into how you control a character in a hockey game," Pedneault recalled.
"In those games, you just push on the stick to tell your character where he wants to go, and the game responds to that, while your character on-screen doing these smooth skating animations to get there," he continued.
Aside from developing the movements of the character, the designer explained that the environment in the game also played a significant role in delivering a virtual parkour experience.
"Our world designers really did an incredible job," he said. "They mastered the freerunning system and they improved the way they created the cities. For example, the freerun starters (carts or boxes) were introduced in Assassin's Creed II."
"They also developed the philosophy of having 'highways' built throughout the cities," Pedneault added. "As good as the behavior is, it really starts to shine when world designers lay down of all these setups."
As for the franchises' latest installment, "Assassin's Creed Unity," the game creators included the parkour up and parkour down controls to give gamers more directional freedom in navigating their character, Arcade Sushi reported.
"They tried to eliminate some of these moments when you felt like the character was getting sucked into behaviors," he said.
"For example, in Assassin's Creed Unity, if Arno is standing on a beam and there are two other beams in front of him -- one above and one below -- if you hold the parkour-up input, he will jump toward the higher beam, and the lowest beam will only be targeted if you hold parkour down," he added.
Pedneault explained that in previous systems, the main character automatically jumps to the higher obstacle.
