After a long wait, I've finally released my next game made into a feature film - Assassin's Creed. The Assassin's Creed series is one of my favorite series this generation, and with the recent AC3 release, I thought this series would be a great next series to turn into movies.
I want to make note that this game is not the greatest game in the series. It's often referred to as either the worst or second worst. However, I thought that it was important to include it in my series in order to get a good idea of the basic idea of the series. The main reason this game is often criticized is the fact that it is extremely repetitious. Even with the editing I did, you will definitely notice this to be true. However, I hope the form of editing I did helps move the story along smoother than actually playing the game does, which should allow this game to possibly be more watchable as a movie than playable as a game.
That being said, I still love the game. The game was truly innovative when it came out, especially in regards to the control system, the animations, and the sheer amount of detail, accuracy and freedom of the climbing / freerunning aspects of the game. Not only that, but it contains a great deal of information I find critical to understanding the overall mythology of the series. While AC2 does a quick recap, I don't think you get the full experience you would playing the game instead. If you like the movie, please support the great developers at Ubisoft and buy the game!
I would like to note that while this game contains several cinematic sequences, it's not nearly as cinematic in nature as the Uncharted series, so expect it to be less movie-like and more game-like in that regard. However, I've done my best to try to bring out the movie experience in this game. I've removed as much of the HUD as I could, and as with the Uncharted series, I've only included the bare minimum gameplay necessary to understand the story. However, due to the structure of the game, this led to me including far more gameplay than I had anticipated, which is why the movie is as long as it is.
As you might know, this is the shortest Assassin's Creed game. Clearly I wasn't expecting the movie to be this long. Even the final edit has over 20 minutes cut from my original edit. So this does worry me a bit for the future games. However, the other games are far more cinematic than this game, and have a far more streamlined form of storytelling. I'm hoping that this will allow for more freedom in editing than this game allowed me to do. However, if the games result in substantially longer length movies, I may release them in 2 parts. Think of movies like Kill Bill or Lord of the Rings, where they're really just one long movie split into parts.
I want to note that I recorded this on my PC at 720p. While I've recently upgraded to a fairly beefy GTX 480 graphics card, I still have an outdated CPU. As such, many CPU-intensive portions the game will experience a drop in frame rate. This was further impacted by the capture software. I have tweaked this in spots because it caused a loss of sync in some cutscenes, but there are definitely some spots where you'll see a noticeable drop in frame rate, particularly in scenes with large crowds of people, due to the sheer detail in the character models used in this game, as well as a game engine that's not very well optimized to make use of quad core CPUs or more modern GPUs.
Finally, I will be releasing the other games as movies as well. However, they will not be released right away as the Uncharted movies were. I'm currently in school right now, so I rarely have free time. Also, the free time I do have right now will be allocated to working on finishing my other movie project "Buck and Drake 3: Buck to the Future" (trailer available on my channel). However, I hope to finish working on the project in the upcoming months, if I can, and as soon as you see that film released, you will know I'm working on the next Assassin's Creed movie.