One problem with making an Assassin's Creed game in Ancient Greece, says Ubisoft, is that there just weren't enough tall buildings for a 'climbing frame game'

Assassin's Creed Odyssey — (Image credit: Fahomnom)

Assassin's Creed is a game where, in the words of AC Odyssey's world director, Ban Hall, "verticality is really important." It's always been a game about seeing a giant cathedral or something, scrambling up to the top, and then admiring the view before swan-diving off. Even at more of a street level, you're still constantly gaining that little bit of height for sightlines and combat advantages. It is a game that wants players to climb.

Which meant that AC Odyssey had a little bit of an issue. Ancient Greece, you see, was just not known for its skyscrapers. Speaking to Edge Magazine for the venerable tome's 413th issue (spotted by GR+), Hall says, "It really is a climbing-frame game, and it's about moving the players through those spaces and going up and down things as much as anything else."

So when you're working on, for example, Assassin's Creed Syndicate and London in the 19th century, you have an absolute embarrassment of riches for this purpose. Hall says when the AC team was working on Syndicate, much time was spent on "creating those desire lines for players to take" up one of the many enormous buildings in Britain's capital. "How do you attract the players who want to spend their time elsewhere to climb this particular monument you need them to climb?"

The tallest structure in Ancient Greece is likely to have been the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. And this is where the Odyssey team hit upon their solution for the videogame version of Ancient Greece: AC games always straddle a fine line with historical accuracy anyway, so adding a few more statues seems like a no-brainer.

"That's kind of where some of the ideation came from when it came to building some of the big statues that we put around Greece," said Hall. "They were always based on mythological or historical fact, always based on working with the research team, working with a historian. But what we did was we took a fantastical approach to the giant statue that then gave us something epic to climb.

"It gave the player a distraction. So you could be on your main quest, going across to a different town, but like: 'Oh, there's that: I'm going to go check that out.' Then you get that climbing, you get that verticality."

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Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."

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