Ex-Assassin's Creed and Far Cry lead describes making landscapes in a way that sounds an awful lot like a Shrek metaphor: "It becomes like an onion skin, where we think outwards"

While Ubisoft is often criticized for having a very similar open-world structure across many of its games, we don't often see the work that goes into making them different. As such, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Far Cry 6 world director Ben Hall has spoken about the process of creating the land for massive open-world games, and how his experience differed across both games.

Speaking to Edge Magazine (in issue 413), Hall explains, "the landscapes are very different [between Far Cry and Assassin's Creed]. And that was one of the big learning curves for me, moving throughout these different types of genres." Hall mostly worked on driving games at Criterion (namely Burnout: Paradise and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, the absolute GOATS) before joining Ubisoft with Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, so his pedigree with open-world games speaks for itself.

Hall adds, "You've got to learn the core gameplay loop of what you're making, and with a Far Cry game, typically speaking, we're trying to have these big, open environments."

He explains that for every single point of interest, such as an enemy base, there is a broader impact on the world. "We'll always be thinking about the landscape directly surrounding a point of interest, and then how the landscape surrounding that landscape informs that landscape inside of it." Using the Shrek-like analogy, "It becomes like an onion skin, where we think outwards."

"Having vantage points on an enemy stronghold is super-important," Hall explains, due to it allowing the developers to "give players time and space to be able to build a cognitive map of where they are." Hall adds, "Because we give players these big worlds to explore, we work on them for three or however many years the production takes. So we've learned them intricately, inside and out. We know exactly where to go. We need to get the players up to speed with that. So it's about giving them opportunities to [see a space] and not get overwhelmed by the amount of everything that's around them."

I took 140 hours to finish Assassin's Creed Shadows, but post-launch updates are making it harder than ever to feel satisfied by RPGs.