It's been over a decade since Assassin's Creed 3 launched, and I still remember the controversy over the game's extended narrative opening, which spent hours setting you up for a big plot twist before finally putting you in control of the actual protagonist and letting you loose to play the game. Looking back, creative Alex Hutchinson agrees that the intro is too long, but it was there to solve a very particular problem common in game narratives.
First, a quick spoiler warning if you still plan to play Assassin's Creed 3 and want the act one twist to remain a surprise. Still here? Good. While the game was always marketed as starring a Native American protagonist who goes by Conner, the game actually opens by putting you in control of a British character named Haytham Kenway. After you play through the lengthy intro, Kenway turns out to be a member of the villainous Templar faction and Conner's father, turning into the villain of the game as you take control of the true protagonist.
"It's hard in franchise [development] especially with lots of marketing to have any surprise and any freshness and we wanted that, or at least I did,” Hutchinson tells FRVR. "So the idea [was] that Haytham would be Connor's dad and, spoiler, that he would be a Templar and then, spoiler, he would be the villain."
Hutchinson wanted to spend the time to properly establish Kenway as the bad guy so players would have more investment in fighting him. "In video games," he explains, "you're always taught you have to conquer this villain, but you really don't care about the villain because you've never met the villain, and this villain's never done anything to you."
I was deep in Assassin's Creed lore at the time of the game's launch, so I found the extended story wind-up pretty compelling. People more eager to actually, y'know, explore an open-world game found it pretty tedious, especially when compounded with all the required excursions into the modern day wrapper with series protagonist Desmond.
"I think it's too long," Hutchinson agrees. "But you don't see that until, you know, the last two months [of development]. So, the exact timing of things – because you're waiting for things to work or things to come on – then it gets longer because that becomes the tutorial section where we're also teaching you [the mechanics]."
Hutchinson says that, "If we were doing it again, you know, we [would've] trimmed down the start probably a bit."
The creative director, who would eventually lead Far Cry 4 before going independent to head the two Savage Planet games, has been pretty candid about some of the behind-the-scenes issues around games he's worked on. That includes the original plan for the Assassin's Creed trilogy that was supposed to end with the third game – before Ubisoft realized there was a whole lot more money to be made with more spin-offs and sequels.
Assassin's Creed 3 is in the lower range of our rankings of the best Assassin's Creed games.
