Building a Living World from Ancient Ruins in Assassin's Creed Odyssey

[Music] so welcome to our presentation building a living world from ancient ruins my name is Benjamin Hall World director on Assassin's Creed Odyssey and I'm joined today by my good friend and colleague so I was the art director in Assassin's Creed Odyssey so Ben and I have been working uh around three years together on that project and we are very very happy to be with you guys today for today's talk and we do hope that you'll enjoy it so in terms of takeaways one of the big things that we'd like to share today is the philosophy of how we went about building the world of ancient Greece for Assassin's Creed and some of the things that we learned along the way and some of the things that we are really proud of what we accomplished along that route so one of the big things for us was by remaining true to our vision and disciplined in how we worked trusting in each other and with with our team as well we were able to build a world that was everything we wanted it to be while keeping the team engaged and empowered

and building a world that was laid the foundations for a game that was critically acclaimed yes and you'll see throughout this presentation there's key aspect that for us were very important in the production of this world those are the six main key point that we'll go back at the very end of this presentation and it will be detail throughout also the presentation so of course there's going to be a very a lots of content share with you guys today so we to make it clear and very understandable as possible we separated this this presentation in parts so we'll go through the project overview we'll speak on how we did establish a vision for this game we'll talk about the world phases that we've put in place for the production of this game and then we'll conclude and you'll be able to ask us question at the very end so you'll be able to know where we're at at any given moment just by looking at the upper bar on the presentation so as always in Assassin's Creed we wanted to create and pick a setting that is a pivotal moment in his story a period that deeply impacts the story of mankind which will allow for

plenty of gameplay opportunities so we also wanted a sitting in a period that are connected to the story we want to tell that idea of a place Thorn uh between the order and Free Will a Time the old world and the new world a sitting where mankind is a Eve of its more astonishing progress and Discovery but at the same time risking of looted it all to war and violence and that war was the pelian War uh the onset of the pelian war allowed us to focus on the picture postcard of Greece while at the same time implementing the little Bubbles and pockets of the contrast of War and the of the onset of war in ancient Greece so really ancient Greece in its golden age was the perfect setting for what we wanted to do true but to do that we need a a vision so the vision was laid out at the very beginning of the project by the creative director Jonathan deore and the vision that was going to be part of the pillars of every single part of the game the world the narrative the art was to during the Golden Age of ancient Greece determine your path on the on the Epic

Odyssey of a legendary Greek hero so this was something that was divine defined very very early on as with a lot of video games and was something that was going to filter down into everything we did for the next three years so the first thing we really started to do is to try to gather as much reference as possible so the first thing we've did is to get to see what type of movie were produced with the ancient Greece or the Greek mythology as main topic so we've been watching a lot and a lot and a lot of movie and screenshot them to make sure that we've nail what they had in common we did the same exercise with all the game that were produced with the Greek mology or the Greek as a main setting so the key Trad were here were to uh to see what were the key tread in those game and movies to see if we could either tap into them or reinvent them in some cases and we did the same exercise with contemporary painters so we wanted to see how they painted or visualized

those that time period so artists like John William goodward or John William waterous were very inspirational for us and of course being an Assassin's Creed game everything's based on history so we wanted to make sure we tapped into the rich ancient history of Greece which was something that was incredibly diverse and something that we realized we didn't know very much about so we needed help so our goal was to build a living world an authentic credible world based on this ancient setting um but today most of that world is only a few centimeters above the ground quite a lot of that world is still actually many feet below the ground so we needed to find somebody who could help us understand what this world was so that we could best create it and we could make credible choices creatively so our help arrived when we met Stephanie Arata who's uh a doctor in in Greek history uh and we met her during the reference trip to Greece which TI will talk about a little bit later on and it became apparent very quickly that the things that she knew about Greece with things that we needed

to know things that we could tap into things that we could utilize and things that were going to help us make a better game Stephanie also had a really cool Lego figure made after her uh so hint hint so here's a few words from Stephanie reconstructing ancient Greeks was quite a challenge for some city it was harder to find some specific data for example on mikas nothing is remain so it was quite hard to produce exactly the city as it was during antique time we try to capture the importance of Mythology for the ancient Greece the mythology is the integral part of their society their social behavior their belief their religious tradition mythology also inspired them in their art in their decoration of their Temple also mythology was used during that time period as a politic

propaganda so working with stepan Yan and other expert made us realized that as game developer we knew nothing about ancient Greece and so the best way to get to learn about Greece and itri was to get there so some of us did that the tremendous chance in fact threee group were sent to do a scouting trip in Greece which was an amazing experience each group were ACC compined by experts so we could ask any question and the goal of this scotting trip was to gather as much knowledge as possible and when we say everything we did ask question for everything because we had to build that world from grounds up so we asked question about topology history Temple architectures animal life food everything you can think of uh we asked we took around 13,000 pictures and video the oral strips we visited numeral historical site we went to Hatton PARTA Olympia Deli cre tasas Macedonia only to

name a few extensive academic research were done Workshop were given by expert to our team as well uh since most of the prop and statue are now kept in museum we visited all of them so Museum database were used also extensively and in addition to that another team of researcher work with stefanian to create a web- based Resource Bank called the world texture facility or what the [ __ ] by most people on the team so and those data were not only used by the the world team it was the the data was used by the quest designer animator character modelers uh World director everyone in fact used that data so to help us to create a more credible but also a very creative world so more than 1,000 reference page have been written to support the the team throughout the old project so before we move to the second part of this presentation

here's a quick video extract of our scanting trip in Greece [Music] [Music]

so there was me rocking the GDC t-shirt in Athens like it was all planned from the beginning so the next step of that we moved into was defining the visual pillars so we'd been on this massive epic trip we'd come back with thousands of photographs we been through them started doing metadata so that we could understand where they were all were and to define the visual pillars what we decided to do was actually to Define what we are not we thought it was easier to go down that route so after going through all of the previous media that we've been through watching loads of cool movies quite often Greece was depicted as a overcast Brown desaturated world it was quite often monochromatic and and quite dry and arid and that was definitely not what we experienced when we went to Greece instead we discovered a world that was filled with Lush biomes different forer and Flora around the world diverse and and surrounded by that clear turquoise blue water that he just wanted to jump in and go swimming and

that was the grease that we wanted to try and recapture to give to the player to go on their own Journey we wanted to create a world that felt though he'd been birthed by the gods and and have much more variety than just that dry arid landscape that was often depicted so like based on our early research in Scot in Greece those keyword were chosen as guideline for the art and World direction of the world so all the art opportunities that and artistic decision that were made along the way were to make sure to create the most diverse visually appealing and our inspiring world to play in so from a visual point of view the player will experience a magnificent World filled with mountains and sea giving the landscape of grander never seen before within the brand the player will discover and experience a massive vibrant colorful and diverse World filled with contrast and that not only in its biome but also in his architectures and props uh because it was very important for us uh to achieve that

so here in the next slide you'll see the early concept art that we've produced to Define our art intention but also uh to inspire the team so as you can see we wanted to make sure to have epic visual element throughout the world like those giant big statues we also wanted to push the color in the ction as an overall remember we didn't want to create a monochromatic world and here you can see that even the marketing image that we produced were produced with that in mind so that means that the vision that we had at the very beginning stayed until the very end of the project which is very great contrast became a key pillar for us uh so it was something we really want uh wanted to make sure that we run through the art of the world and alongside the notion of contrast is dynamism so blending those two pillars were also very important for us so that's why we've created a systemic weather system that allowed us to go for from full power thunderstorm

to a raining afternoon to searing blue sea skies and also sun-kissed beaches we wanted the World to Change around you and continue to offer New Sensation as you travel we've paid a lot of attention to a dynamic time of day to truly support a world contrast between tradition and modernity religion and Science and the war between Sparta and Athens Greece is EP picking grandio in fact 85% of the Greek ape it's made out of mountains which makes the whole country pretty epic by itself but it extended beyond the landscape we've learned through our research to the to the ancient Greeks the building and art were being produced in this period were colossal compared with anything that had seen before so it was really important for us to recapture that feeling for the player so building statues and natural landscape all needed to feel like they had been created created by the

gods so once we'd established the visual pillars as a group it was time to start looking at the world pillars what did we want the player to experience as they traveled around the world what did we want them to to to yeah to feel as they exploded uh so we tapped into the the nature of the contrast so contrast was a pillar that was from the very top of the the the game was running right the way through the art Direction and we tapped into that with the world as well so as they're traveling around the world they get to feel this change as they as they move around so we tapped into the contrast of nature versus man land versus sea reason versus myth Beauty versus war and of course Sparta versus Athens he's a sneak peek at the way the the world actually transformed throughout production from the very first map in the top left transitioning right the way through to the final version you can see from the very early stages before we'd even been to visit Greece we wanted to try and capture the entire Greek Empire which actually was including Persia as well and the reason that we decided not to to do that in the end turn out to be the fact that we wanted to capture this grandiose

landscape so what we needed to do was to expand on the landscape to be able to build the ppines build moss and it mountain ranges to the to show the scale and diversity of the landscape but also the relationship between the urban C sanctu of the world and how they related to the terrain and of course the water 60% of our world was water we were bringing Naval back as a open World gameplay for the first time since Black Flag and it was incredibly important that we gave the player space to be able to explore the the World on their boat one of the key core philosophies of the actual World itself was the idea of honeycomb so the notion of honeycomb actually copies quite significantly the way the ancient Greeks used to own their landscape which is different city states would actually utilize the land between different mountain ranges and both C States would know that the the region on the other side of that mountain wouldn't cross into their region because that was their region and I wanted to tap into that we wanted to tap into that so that we could utilize the different regions

as a separate space we could change the Thematic we could change the the type of people the type of um work that you'd see going on in the different regions based on this honeycomb building mountain ranges between the different areas so the player as they're adventuring they'd climb up a mountain and they' get a cool view of the next Vista and then they can move down into that region and play inside of that region so now that our visual pillars were done for both the art and the world it was time for us to move into the production phases so the real fund could begin so before moving to the phase three of this presentation let's have a little bit of fun choose life choose a job choose a career choose a family choose Leisure wear and matching luggage choose a three-piece Suite on higher purchase in a range of fabrics

choose a [ __ ] big television choose washing machines cars compact dis players and electrical tin openers chose good health low cholesteral and dental insurance choose fixed interest mortgage repayments choose a starter home choose your friends choose DIY and wondering who the [ __ ] you are on a Sunday morning she's sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing Spirit crushing game shows stuffing [ __ ] junk food into your mouth she's rotting away at the end of it all pissing your last in a miserable home nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish [ __ ] up brass you spawn to replace yourself do this choose your future choose life

so now we've done the Shameless plug we'll move on to the rest of the presentation sorry we couldn't R so in order to build this this monster we needed to be disciplined in how we built it and we needed to be free to iterate SC scale scope as we work without costing the Earth at the same time and this massive Enterprise would not have been possible with the help of our world managers they played a key role in organizing the production and supporting the director's Vision was was a key here so we did change the team structures to be more agile so not fully agile but our own version of agile so each core art department at their own product owner empowering the experts to be responsible for the quality and quantity of asset produced for the game world so by trusting our people we've created engagement and commitment amongst them and we can say that they

all added huge impact on the final look of the game because they were part of the decision- making process so the notion of one team became something that was incredibly important for us throughout production and the slogan was something that we built on as we went coming off the back of Assassin's Creed Syndicate we wanted to build on the relationships that we created to build that game and we wanted to work together as one team under One Vision so we actually utilized the skill sets of nine other teams LED from Ubisoft Quebec to utilize the skill sets of multiple different studios around the world all focusing together and channeling their energy on this one Vision making sure that we could build a world that was cohesive and playable as one whole thing so next came the world phases now this phaser system isn't something that's that's brand spanking new it's not rocket science but it's something that I've been work way I've been working for many years working back on games like Need for Speed and it's a way of making sure that we can clearly Define at se at separated Gates how the world's going be and how you're going to

be able to play inside of that world at any different given time during production so we knew that the SC scope of what we were trying to do was huge so we needed to make sure we worked in a disciplined way to make sure we could make informed decisions at each step of the production process so phase one was all about learning so we'd been doing all this research we'd gone back to school we'd been getting help from a historian who was now in house but it was now time for the team to get that empowerment it was time for the level artists level designers textures narrative team everyone to start to understand this information so at this point in the project the level artists and level designers are working together as one World building team uh learning each other's skill set understanding how each other's uh disciplines are are important to each other and they start to work on the information that we we've put together as a group and they start to input into that information so we created lots of documentation and this one specifically was interesting because it was a visual map that we created that had a host of different elements of information that could be tapped into look into the actual historical data of

each of the different regions of ancient Greece tapping into the trade the population whether it was an oligarchy or a Mona monarchy um how much how big their army was especially what kind of things they were making or doing because that tapped into then what we wanted to do with that region to give it its thematic from that the team then started to build their own world documents which we could then look into giving them the creativity to take all this information we've been given them and start to build up the the plans for what they want to do with the world and how the world's going to be built based around this information and as part of the the phase one we build the what we call the paper map so we created 2D Photoshop maps of every single region of the world and we looked into how the topology was going to work what was going to what we were going to see in terms of is it going to be foresty is it going to be Fields is it and what kind of cultivation is going to be happening and we did this for the entire Greek world before we did anything in 3D allowing us to communicate clearly with each of the different departments what they were going to to get obviously this is not

final things are going to change but it allowed the quest team to start look at where their Quest hubs are going to be the narrative team could tap into the different thematics we were planning on doing so they could write stories around that and start to decide where key characters are going to be positioned throughout the world so there comes thematization or pizza slice as we love to call this so building a such a massive worldall made out of tons of cities Villages sanctuaries and uh everything you can think of for us thematization was super important because we don't didn't want our player to have a s or de as we say in French so uh we work a lot with thematization and simplification so let's say for example with in a city like attens which would be made out of several districts uh each district had their own thematics so let's say the pottery Zone will have only potteries and maybe open to cook potteries but we would avoid placing too much prop in it so the pair could easily identify what was the that was about and we did that same recipe throughout the

the old world to make sure that the player will never encounter the same recipe all over the place with the documentation and paper maps in place and and and approved we were started to look at how the terrain was going to work the terrain forms a foundation of everything we're going to do and it was incredibly important to the ancient Greeks they Ed the terrain very logically to use it for fortification and use it for for where they're going to plan to place their cities so we referenced elements such as digital elev ation data from NASA a lot of Google Earth I think a lot of people were zooming in on Greece quite often during this project and then as well as that the reference that we took when we went out to Greece to build up a visual picture of the simplification of the terrain at this point so that we could create these honeycomb elements around the different regions of the game and jumping forward a little bit what we did with that terrain then was hand it off to our three terrain artists who covered the entire 256 square kilm of Greece working the that basic terrain through mudbox sculpting it into something that's more find and then adding the erosion pass through World machine to

give us the final version of the terrain that we see in the game today so now that our tering was giving shape we could start kicking in the biome team and the loop so under the leadership of mang which was the biome leader uh we established that uh the the world needed a great visual diversity so the biome played a key role into that so so we we had to make sure that each of our biome were contrasted from one another and in fact there's probably two biome in Greece but we decided to play with season and an exotic biome to make sure that the land look and fill different as an overall so here we did apply the same technique as we did for everything else based on our study and research we started to create like Elation Stripes so Bas uh we took so many picture and we found also picture all over the place we established like which type of plant were uh uh growing at different type of elevation uh in the Greek landscape because that's how our

biome recipe were applied by per elevation so we did that same uh technique for every biome and once we were happy with the result and making sure that each biome look and feel different from one another we could start the production of them so when we do a biome we need to produce every assets that's take place in it so we need to produce all the trees bushes clutter name it there's a lot of them and also we needed to produce all the texture for for all those vegetation assets and the same thing applies to the Rocks Boulder ground textures for this production and we'll talk it very soon we use substance designer substance painters to produce all our material and texture water then briefly talk about water but the water play a massive role in our R in gameplay experience since 60% of our world surface is made out of water we try to create the most awesome and divers Diversified experience when it comes to water and we treat it as a

main character so we wanted to be able to convey a feeling of embarking on a true Odyssey which mean being able to travel by boat and engage in eval combat so the agenes the O of many dangers and treasures which will T the play to set cell explor farthest reach and dive into its depth and so we are pretty happy to have created a seamless Naval experience so here you'll see uh uh the first uh volumetric foam and crashing wave test that we did with our friends in Bucharest which were in charge of uh our water so flowing wave and volumetric form were super important in a big challenge as you can see it's even lagging because it's a prototype but uh we once we saw that we were we knew that we had something very special in our end and we are more than happy with the in-game result that we have right now but even with seven key biome we thought it was not enough our land landscape is so huge we needed more so we've created sub biomes to make sure to

offer the most visual diversity to our players so we've created here the clay uh mine uh the snow peak cap mountains Marshland and also burnt Forest as example so running in parallel with the biome work the the World building team are starting to put together what we called phase three which is great blocking again not a new notion whatsoever but one thing that were incredibly was incredibly important to us was to make sure that we did did this great blocking pass for the entirety of the grep landscape so that we could make informed decisions on how things were laying in the land the relationship between the urban sanctuaries and Villages and cities and the the natural terrain and Landscape so that we could move forward with a with a logical step at each phase of the way but also so that the entire game could be played very very early on you could explore the entire world and we could have the quest team play it and they could start planning where things are going to be sight lines between Quest givers and Quest objectives so it was very important for us to get this in very very quickly the top two screens there

are actually from Athens that we built in 2016 and the layout of Athens hasn't really changed that much it's just that we've evolved on it over time one of the other big things that tiar tapped on as one of our six key points was the notion of um two weekly Sprints so every two weeks we would get together with the entire team and showcase the work of the world team uh and this was the entire world we'd make a video over the weekend before the before the week the week before the presentation would be on the Monday and we could showcase to everybody the world that was going to be available to play that week in the build and it allowed us to have constant communication constant feedback from the team and and be able to see the progression of the world as we move forward and to do that we were going to need architecture and lots of it so this was the the product owner for architecture was Dominque glti who had a lot of experience working on previous Assassin's Creed titles so it was a great person to take on the architecture mandate uh for his during Odyssey and again he started the process and you'll hear us repeat this a couple time more um making sure he tapped into the

historical information that was available for architecture because while the the the notion of a of Greek architecture is something I think most people can picture the number of details and fine elements that actually go into making these buildings is incredible and it was important for us to make sure that we built them in a correct manner so throughout our research we've learned something that we did not expect archaeologist has founded that everything was painted back then so from an aration point of view that kind was a blessing so we took that opportunity and add colors almost all manmade structures which gave us a I think a very unique incredible way of how ancient Greece could have looked like 2,500 years ago which I think is fairly incredible so historically colors have always been seen as a status symbol and our Collective Tes have definitely changed over centuries so seeing those statues classic statues recreate in Vivid color seems scy almost obscene to us today because we expect ancient Greeks statu to bear that dignify blank

white look but then when they were created bright colors helped them to give detail and depth to the scultpures and even according to the artist and art lover of that time period their statues were considered ugly and unsightly so that's why you're seeing a lot of painted statues in sassin Street Odyssey because we wanted to see true to how they were back then but just because we're making a game based in history doesn't mean we're making a recreation with still an awful lot of creativity that goes into building this world world and we relied heavily on our concept artists especially early on because like we said a lot of the things that we were going to try and build in our game don't exist anymore they're merely just bricks in the ground or in most cases they've been been rebuilt on top of from many other civilizations so with all this information about color we started to tap into the concept art of how we're going to compose the different elements of the game especially for some of the things like the suburbs and places that aren't concentrated on so much by archaeologists and they were able to start producing these strips that we created that would then be used by the World building team to build the composition of cities and Villages

throughout the world but also looking at the materials and the colors a lot of elements in Greece were actually built out of wood which is something that we never expected so wooden temples was something that was a bit of a surprise to us and allowed us to bring a flavor and a thematic to grease that I think most people didn't expect to see as well as that we wanted to be we it it was important to us to make sure we tapped into the history beyond the history that we were recreating so the ancient Greeks of our time period were aware of the m and and the minow civilizations that had come before so it was important for us to make sure we captured that and the team went ahead and made the m and minoan kits for us to be able to utilize on the World building side to create some of the really interesting pois that you can explore play and in most cases fight in here's a few example of some some of the other architecture kits that were built for the project in total we built over 35 architecture kits and while you see them on this big one page there's a lot of similarities between them as we mentioned before it's all about the fine details making sure that the columns are the correct type of column making sure that the pediments the correct type of

pediment and these details were something that we really wanted to pay attention to to make a credible world so I think you will all agree that the world without texture would be missing something so of course we had texture in Assassin's Creed Odyssey but we did change something in our Pipeline and that wouldn't have been been possible without the help of those two guy who did the talk like Tuesday and it's available it's called texturing the world of Assassin's Creed so didn't make this change happen so what prior to Assassin's cre see most most of T texure were created in Photoshop then exported in our inil in-house engine which is envil it's a proven technique it's working very well it's a can give awesome result but we wanted something more homogeneous homogeneous and uh so uh and also that would react well under every lighting condition so we wanted all our materials to be PBR which means physically based rendering so we integrated substance designer substance

painter trout or pipeline so meaning that every texture were and material were built using those two software and also what they did is they used both software strin so they use painter and substance uh main key uh points to create our materials so the thing is the the old team converted and started to use those software as an overall so every texture that you seeing in Assassin's Creed LC have been created using those two software they've created a total of 1,500 texture but relatively small team which is very good and the other big aspect of working with substance designer that we can iterate and very fast it's it's a procedural software so we could ask for changes and they could react very fast and we could then polish our game which was a bit more difficult using the old technique so the next part of the project we're run about halfway through at this point about one and a half years in was what we called f phase four which was intent so this point of the project

especially on the World building side was the first time we actually split the team between level art and level design specific disciplines so that we could start to focus in on the very key details of each of the two disciplines the level designers making sure that they could make the most fun areas that they could concentrating on the forts the caves making sure that the tombs were fun to to explore and navigate and had a little bit of Challenge and puzzle while at the same time the level artists were making sure that the placement of every single object in the world was just perfect so this came down to the two product owners for each of the disciplines Matthew Lance was lead level designer and safis was in charge of the level art and these guys were the guys responsible for pushing the world to what we call Alpha so Alpha for us was one year before launch an incredibly important milestone for us to ensure that we've got enough time to be able to polish the world to its full Max that we can making sure that we can change the world and tweak the world to make sure that the quests have got everything that they need and we can tell the stories that we want the player to experience as they travel around the world to do this we made some pretty

cool tools and here's just a couple this is one of my favorite it's called The Cave tool it was built by a multi-disciplinary team and it allowed us to be able to create Lego kits that had a logical system with a logical UI that could allow pretty much anyone on the team and we tested it with producers and producers could make caves that were fun they had lighting they had navigation parkour and collectibles and this system allowed us to create the vast amount of caves that we we built throughout the world the system was built on top of the entity maker which was a tool that was created to tap into to allow us to create the numerous statues that you see in the world there's thousands and thousands of different iterations of the statues and basically it was built on the same system Lego kit statues that could plug into each other all with logic and data to make sure you couldn't do wacky different posers and we also use the same system for the market so that we could allow the level artists to concentrate on doing cool stuff instead of placing pots after pots after pots and there's a lot of props in our game So speaking of prop in order to make a

vibrant and viir and dense world we needed a lot of props so the pro owner for the props were was responsible for the creation of the the props were the entire world and to ensure that each of them were compliant with the technical and also game playay guidelines so the props were under the leadership of Arian so since most of the props have long time gone since the our time period was 2,500 years ago we needed to add the concept artist into that team so to conceptualize needs uh uh given by either the quest designer level artist level uh level designer as well so uh so they could uh actually illustrate those prop that don't exist anymore the team was also responsible for making all the boats that you see in the game so they did all the archetypes like the Spartan Athenian and also pirate boats but also they did the player boat with all this customization and also uh upgrades they did all the statues and Assassin's Creed obviously there there's a lot of statues around 120 of them and

it it adds up with the entity maker where you can make tons of variation of most of the statues so they've been been doing also all the props that were uh placed in the entity maker as been as just shown and of course all the texture and material used or created for those prop were done also in substance designer in substance sub substance painter sorry about that so in Assassin's Creed odyc we've created around 4,000 props which is a lot but they were used in specific region so it helped us to thematize each zone of the world uh so we've created a showroom to have an overview because there were so many of them so the main challenge was to use them all so we' now built a beautiful world it's it's got incredible gameplay it's fun to play in but it's not yet a living world and our goal was to create a living world so this is where we brought in mik jaguara bit of my K that I learned while I was up there um and he was the product owner for Living World um so what Mike did is surprise surprise

he did his research and working with the historian we made sure that he understood the people of Ancient Greece how the people lived how they worked where they slept what tools they used what did they wear did they wear hats hats became incredibly important for some reason at some point um so he basically went in and did all of that research and then started working with his team to build the Living World of ancient Greece so building on top of the meta AI system that was created for Assassin's Creed Origins is an incredibly powerful tool that men that each NPC in the world has their own schedule they need to go to work they need to go to sleep they need to go and pee and they will have their life and they will do it so you can follow them around and you can watch people as they move around the world living their life one of the new things that we brought for Assassin's Creed Odyssey was the fact that they would actually not just do this life without paying attention to you the player if you get caught by an NPC and Assassin Creed obiously doing something that you shouldn't do the thing that we introduced was the notion of smart objects an NPC will react to the fact that you are doing something that you shouldn't be if they're a

courageous person they will then go and find a nearby prop it might be a spade it might be a shovel it might be a sword if they're lucky and they'll bring that fight to you so that the loop of fighting continues and some of them are pretty tough to beat as well this also included the animal pass no we created over 450 individually motion captured stations for Assassin's Creed Odyssey and we also built all of the props that we needed to make sure that they were using the correct items that they they would do but also using the system of meteri it created thousands of different possibilities of living world scenarios that you could see taking place throughout the world this also moved on to animals um we also wanted to bring mythology to the world and we haven't talked about it much but we drenched the world in different mythology and one of the ones we tapped into was the 12 labors of Hercules so scattered throughout the world of these incredibly awesome legendary animals and these were part of the open living world that you could experience as you traveled around so we're coming towards the end end of production at this point and we move into phase five which is what we

call the final level pass it's the quality pass at this point level artists are really taking the time to move each little item just a few centimeters checking it from every angle like they like to do and making sure it's perfect at the same time the level designers are making sure that all of the NPCs have got everything they need to fulfill their actions make sure that if you attack a fort they've got all the weapons they need to attack you make sure they've got places that they can go and sleep and go and eat without leaving the fort undefended which did happen at one point and we're getting to the point now where we're making a world that's starting to feel like it's ready to be played [Music]

so it's nearly the end guys so by reming true to our vision focus and discipline in how we worked trusting in each other we were able to create a world that we wanted to create while keeping the game engaged and empowered without any major scope and then building at the same time the foundation that was for a game that was critically claim so for us the six keyword the thing that change everything on to this production is that we started to do our own work we gathered the knowledge we didn't rush in production we took the time to get to know about what was ancient Greece we studi so much and not only at the beginning but throughout the old production and even today we think still think we can learn about ancient Greece essential to the to the product as well was the team engagement and empowerment by giving product ownership to The Experts we were able to tap into their their knowledge and expertise to allow them to control their own vision control their own quality control their own background plog and really build upon their own Department which were all filtering down

into the quality that we we ended up with on top of that the world phases by sticking to that we rigidly fought for that to make sure that we could continuously build the world up in these different layers from beginning to end to make sure that we we could continuously make empowered decisions as we worked yes and the integration of substance designer and painter to our peline truly changed things not only gave us the homogeneity we were looking for but it gave us the possibility to iterate easily so we polish the game quite a lot the Sprint review every two weeks also at first was perceived as a big burden by most teams but then the turnaround uh happen and people were quite happy to Showcase what they were working on it helped us greatly on the communication side so everyone could have inside the vision of their old project so it proven to be very efficient for us it sounds super cliche but we're making a video game so having fun was definitely something that was important for us we're like two kids so we like to mess about so it was important the rest of the team got to mess about two and I think that's something that you can see as you play

the game for yourself true so I can speak for Ben and I want to aspect that we're the most proud of is definitely the fact that as a team we've managed to produce this massive world and it was an enormous Challenge and we did it build it always trying to improve the game frequently questioning oursel Having the courage to change things when needed so the willingness and the commitment of the team is something that we're definitely proud of so that's it guys this is the end of our presentation we hope you enjoyed it thank you very [Music] much before we jump into questions we got somebody who's just got a message for everybody in the room alexio tell us when AC Japan's coming out let me tell you what I know about Assassin's Creed Japan nothing there is no place more glorious

than Sparta so if some of you have any questions there's Mike in the room hello um first off brilliant talk thank you very much um it was a really tiny part of the presentation but you touched on um a cave tool that you built and it was just after level you spoke about level designers and artists working together can you just talk through the process that you went through with creating those small caves obviously was it a case of the artist fed the tool and the designers built the caves from that and uh and overall like how many a cave systems did you end up building for the game uh so in terms of process it definitely wasn't art-driven it was a multidisciplinary team that got

together so we had a level designer level artist and technical director that was in the room when we first kicked off building that tool um and it needed that technical input to make sure we had all the data labeled correctly uh it was very much design driven from that point onwards building out all of the gray block versions of the caves to create all the pieces that we need to create interesting navigational routes make sure we're hitting all the different lighting requirements in terms of GI um and then once we' got that locked down we got the art team involved with building the actual final versions of the cave cuz they're expensive right so we we want to make sure that we we've got it right before we move forward um and then it was kind of empowerment for level designers and artists to be able to create caves in the world and we ended up with I think off the top of my head it's about 400 cave systems in the world thanks very much hello uh so if you look at a game like Zelda breath of the wild they are super disciplined about res observing certain colors Silhouettes and shapes to

for their visual language to communicate kind of gameplay information diegetically in the world uh and I I'm pretty sure you have a very different process than they did but I'm curious whether you have any like high level rules or takeaways from kind of developing a visual language like that in your world yeah absolutely we did we we created a pallet of objects that were going to be utilized by the different factions throughout the game so the military had their specific types of of asset that we would use to communicate okay you're going to get involved with the military at this point so you know what kind of gameplay you're going to get and then similarly the different factions of the game the daughters of emus the followers of Aries they had very specific pallet of of props that we used to communicate clearly as you were arriving and then on top of that we layered the dynamic um banners with the logos and things to really just push it home after iterating it through play test we just wanted to make sure that was Hamed home thanks so uh the scale of your world is really impressive and the sheer amount of detail you're packing into pretty much every square meter I

was walking wondering if uh you could talk at all about your approach to working with a world on that scale like um did you use procedural techniques and how do you manage so many artists working on one world at the same time well of course we did use procedural generation especially all for the biome so every plants trees that you see that are not in cities are proced generated so uh that's one of the uh without that we wouldn't have been possible to to put that word on the box because there there's so many ground to cover and uh the managing artists yeah yeah the world so big that was kind of easy to manage every artist because they they've been put in each section so each of them had their own sections to work on uh the workload will share also with other Studio Singapore was eily involved with the islands of that you see in the game so each one each artist or group of

artists had their own zone so it was quite simple plus we had Rockstar leads as well I'm just curious how do you split up the world world between artists do they check out tiles of the world or do they uh work on that data in other ways so the system that we've got is a little bit more Dynamic than checking out tiles um but what we tried to do so early in the early phases we were actually very kind of hippie with how we worked on the world to make sure that we could everyone kind of got a little bit of input into everything and then as we got throughout the phases we started to solidify the world we also started to solidify the team so then we'd have a level artist level designer binome who'd be working together specifically on a region so that we had clear points of contact thank you very much you so one of my favorite things about Origins was the history that went into all the work and essentially dis like using historians to discover things that we didn't actually know before some of the research that this uh your company had done is there you know how how much of

that did you did happen with Odyssey and is there any chance of a discovery tour as well because I think that was one of the most fantastic things about Origins so I'll jump on to that one so the world actually we really it was really important to us to tap into the history so pretty much everything we put in the game even though there's a there's a massive amount of creativity has some fine some type of historical link back to it so if it's a mythical statue we've placed out in the country side it relates back to a paragraph of a book somewhere that's been researched and and we're tapping into that and then when it so they're actually all in the game and there is actually a massive amount of historical detail in the historical pois that most people don't find you have to change the filter on the map um and yes I can confirm that there will be a discovery to her for ass Creed Odyssey awesome I think we're going to go that way yeah hi so um first of all thank you so much for coming down and sharing your insights with us the talk was really

amazing loved it uh I was really impressed by the amount of uh research the extent of research that had gone into the project right from the very beginning um I wanted to know cuz I know that uh there are a lot of companies out there that still do not invest the amount of time and budget in research so what does it take how much of a budget goes into uh researching before you actually get Hands-On get started with a project and how would you en encourage younger companies to invest time in research and development before they actually get into production for a project so I won't talk about it in terms of money cost but in terms of people cost it was incredibly important to us and like like tierry said as one of the takeaways the fact that we put that time up front was important because not only did we start to learn more about what we were dealing with but also being an Assassin's Creed game history was incredibly important and we want to make sure that we do justice to the culture that we're working with as well it's a Greek culture it's Rich it's it's very passionate and we wanted to make sure we were you know looking at that

properly um and I just say that doing that homework up front was definitely a benefit and and and if you're going to be doing something along those lines it's definitely worthwhile all right thank you uh thanks for the great presentation I uh I would like it if you could touch a little bit about um VFX integration with the world and at what point did you start integrating things like the weather systems and other interactive effects ambient effects and did the did the world artists or anybody else have to do anything in particular to uh make the world work well with those effects uh we started right from the beginning working on on our time of day in weather system and we iterated on them throughout the old production until we were satisfied with uh the workload for the artist is mostly on the material in texture so they had to make sure that when it's raining let's say those material will go wet and reflective so uh and also the wind the wind has a huge

impact on the perception of weather so we had to make sure that the our tree would react trees and every CR in fact that has tissues and stuff like that would react well to the wind thank you thank you I am super interested in hearing more about the processes of the historical research that went into it you mentioned that you guys consulted with a historian who later became an in-house historian and I wanted to ask what their job is like what are their duties what uh contributions does that particular position give to the project I'll speak for Stephanie she um she's basically a Powerhouse who knows everything we needed to know about the history of Greece but also being a doctor in this already she knows how to research and that was the important thing was she knew where to go to get the information which book she needed to read and literally her desk was just littered with books and like they're everywhere right and she can read ancient Greek yeah that's yeah she can

read ancient Greek and she was reading books that I think probably haven't been read by anyone for many many years um and finding things that probably haven't been read again for many many years so these things that we were able to put into it into the world that probably people didn't expect because it had been forgotten somewhere that is awesome thank you hi um first off wonderful talk thank you thank you so much um something I'm really curious about is you said that there are 10 different um Studios working on the same project so all across the world different time zones and and everything and how did you um how did Art directing so many teams work and how are you able to keep them all on the same page Catherine yeah well course but uh the thing that every Studio has his own art director or associate art director so they are they are managing their team on their side so and we we talk about

trusting people so uh as long you know as our directory establish a frame but it's to your people to Define what's within the frame so of course we're always there as director to make sure that the Visions stay true to the anten but then it's up to them to put uh water to the mill so they were uh all participant in the overall our direction of the game in a way so uh and then we did like weekly communication with them come call on link Skype uh so sometime it was morning for us evening for them and vice versa so we do try to because the secret of that is communication so we need to talk with them the more often as possible thank you thank you hi there I'm curious what the relationship between the researcher and the directors were was it a good relationship was there ever any tension when when we came up with history for the win that was a good day so no Stephanie was incredible and we we worked very closely together so when we were defining a lot of the early on uh

research and we were starting to put things on maps and put things into documents she was involved in pretty much every single meeting like I say she's she's a Powerhouse Stephanie and she like worked like crazy for us throughout the project um just the amount of information she was bringing to us it was always something new for us to play with um and I I wouldn't say that there were there was tension but there was she obviously wanted to make sure everything we were doing as as credible as possible um so whenever we got a little bit too crazy with our creativity she try and reign us back in again and that was the only time where we had kind of the ying and the Yang and we feel like we managed to to balance everything thank you hey you mentioned a procedural tools for the terrain generation as well as for the vegetation um and also you have this cool thing about the statues which is really inspiring what about the buildings were they all individually created or was there any kind of like way to automate some of that well all the level art that you in the game is placed by hand so but though uh working

with the architecture it's it's made out of modules so we can assemble like houses and kits uh the all gain of that is memory so uh so we can it's iteration of the same module so but uh everything that you see that this level art is basically made by end so we have exclusion Zone in our world so where the the vation won't be generated so it's kind of off the map so we have ton of those area and those area were very uh work in detail tell by our level artists and of course the final message uh Ubisoft are hiring so if you've be interested in joining us on one of our incredible projects uh you can visit the Ubisoft Lounge on the second floor of the West Hall there'll be people there to to chat with you yeah thank you very much for coming