Assassin's Creed creator offers candid take on blockbuster game development

It'll strike most as the most redundant of truisms, but making blockbuster video games involves a fair bit of compromise. If you're the 'creator' of the game, you need to not only collaborate with hundreds of people on its creation, but you also need to please the businessfolk upstairs. And that holds especially true when it comes to a series as massive as Assassin's Creed. Recent comments by its creator Patrice Desilets are exemplary.

Speaking to Gameology, via Gamespot, Desilets laid out some of the reasons he left Ubisoft shortly after the release of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood in 2010. "My biggest struggle with being in an organization is that I was the guy at the end or in the middle also… I was the guy doing interviews like what we're doing right now and I had to come up with political lying and I would receive comments and decisions made by other people and not me because it's all about compromising when you're in a big organization somehow," he said.

"And as my role, the creative director, it's tough to live by the decisions of others when being in front of the camera or Skype and I said I'm not a really good liar so I can't do it anymore. And then I also realized that when you do a really big franchise, you also make money for other people and they don't really care about you. So I said, enough! if I do another Assassin's Creed at least it would be for me and my guys and also for Quebec and for my people in Montreal."

Desilets inevitably worked for Ubisoft again, when the publisher bought THQ Montreal. He didn't stick around though, and amid a confusing flurry of legal squabbles he left and joined Panache Studios, which is currently developing Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. It looks like we'll be hearing more about that during 2017.

Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.