Assassin's Creed did not start life as Assassin's Creed. According to Jean Guesdon, the creative director of Origins who also directed Black Flag, it started as a job handed to the team that had just made Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: get ready for the Xbox 360 and PS3, and while you are at it, reinvent the action-adventure genre.
That account comes from a talk Guesdon gave at the 2018 Game Developers Conference, written up by Mikel Reparaz for Ubisoft News under the title "Looking Back on 10 Years of Assassin's Creed". Guesdon joined the original team during its last year of production, in 2006, so this is a studio telling its own history from the inside. Ubisoft says the talk covered the series' successes and its missteps, beginning with the creation of the first game.
There is one name the Ubisoft write-up does not mention. Game Informer's look back at The Sands of Time notes that the 2003 Ubisoft Montreal game was helmed by Patrice Désilets, "who would later go on to create Assassin's Creed", with Prince of Persia's original creator, Jordan Mechner. Put the two accounts side by side and they line up: Game Informer credits the director of The Sands of Time with creating Assassin's Creed, and Ubisoft says the next-generation brief went to the Sands of Time team.
From the Prince to the Assassin
"Back in 2004... the team behind Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time got the mandate to prepare for [Xbox 360 and PS3], and to also reinvent the action-adventure genre," Guesdon said, as quoted by Ubisoft News. Over time, the article says, their ideas for a new Prince of Persia became faster, edgier and more grounded in reality than the series' fantasy setting.
The big break with the past was tone. "One important [decision] was to have a more realistic treatment, and to accept the M-rating," Guesdon said. "This was not the case with [Prince of Persia]." That realism brought something less expected with it: the present-day frame. "The reason behind the present day in the first place is to create relatedness between the audience and the setting," he explained. Ubisoft's write-up describes that storyline as Desmond Miles reliving an ancestor's genetic memories in an ultramodern lab. Read alongside Guesdon's explanation, Desmond looks less like a twist bolted on for mystery and more like a way to make a medieval setting feel close to home, though that is my reading rather than his words.
Other hallmarks arrived the same way. Ubisoft's write-up points to the beaked hoods and eagle-themed names, and Guesdon said the eagle idea runs through the design, "even [in] the posing of Altair", with the Assassin "overlooking the world from above, ready to strike whenever he wants."
The clearest inheritance, though, is movement. Ubisoft describes the first game's open world as one players could freely parkour through "in ways that had only really been attempted in Prince of Persia's more linear platforming levels." Game Informer makes the same connection from the other direction: the Prince's acrobatic movement "continues to be a staple of navigation in video games", most obviously in Assassin's Creed. VGC, writing in 2020 about Prince of Persia's long quiet spell, put it bluntly: the older series had been superseded by Assassin's Creed, a franchise VGC describes as having started as a Prince of Persia spin-off.
A hit that was called a tech demo
Building that open world meant building new technology, the Anvil engine, at the same time as the game. Guesdon was candid about the cost. "When you develop the engine at the same time you develop the content, there is a risk," he said. "Builds are not stable enough, so you cannot properly develop the gameplay and the full experience."
The result, as Guesdon described it, was immediate success alongside heavy criticism. "We had mixed reviews, because we were lacking of things to do," he said. "There was too much repetitiveness. Some of the journalists even said, 'is it just a tech demo?'"
What happened next set the course for the sequels. The team ran a postmortem, and Guesdon described its conclusion in plain terms. "What we realized was that the actual missions of Assassin's Creed 1 were not asking players to do what they were enjoying," he said. "We were asking you to sit on a bench and pickpocket guys, while when you were playing alone, you just liked to parkour, to fight, and to blend."
From that came the three pillars that, according to Ubisoft, shaped Assassin's Creed II: fight, navigation and social stealth. The specialised guards in the sequel, the Brutes, Agiles and Seekers, were each designed to test one pillar, while hireable mercenaries, thieves and courtesans each supported one. Guesdon's own verdict on the first game was that the team "really needed [Assassin's Creed II] to deliver the full promise of what Assassin's Creed was."
The lesson Ubisoft had to learn twice
The first game's problems did not stay in the past. Each new instalment, Ubisoft News reports, was meant to add something of its own, from Brotherhood's recruitable Assassins to Black Flag's seamless naval world and Unity's co-op. But Guesdon said Unity repeated the first game's mistake: "We fell again into this trap of working a lot on the tech, and not allowing the teams that create the content [enough freedom] to actually come up with something new." He also said Unity's move to a one-to-one scale world "had an impact on the navigation, and so the gameplay was affected."
Navigation kept being reworked rather than dropped. When Origins moved the series to Ancient Egypt, Ubisoft News notes, huge buildings were rare, so climbing became more focused on cliffs and mountains and gradually expanded to nearly any vertical surface in the game world. Viewpoints and Leaps of Faith were kept, while using them to reveal the map was removed.
Mason's take: A team told to reinvent Prince of Persia for a new console generation ended up making the series that VGC says superseded it. I'd argue the acrobatics it carried over from The Sands of Time are the inheritance that matters most: when Ubisoft had to fix the first game, navigation became one of the three pillars, and when Unity and Origins changed the world, it was the climbing that had to be rethought.
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