The latest installment in the highly popular historical assassination action adventure game series, Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed 3 has a lot of new features and settings that its preceding installments did not have. The game’s creative director, Alex Hutchinson, clues us in on what to expect from the next episode in Desmond Myle’s DNA travel through history. As previously mentioned by Ubisoft’s releases about this game, the biggest change is the switch in settings from urban settings to a wide-open countryside. Previous installments showed most of the action taking place in medieval and renaissance cities. While we are going to be treated to some of the historical cosmopolitan delights of Revolutionary War era Boston and New York, a lot of the track, hide, and slash game will take place in the unspoiled virgin wilderness of eighteenth-century New England. Instead of brushing up, and taking out, city dwellers, expect the crowd you’ll be confronting to be furry wilderness creatures. While Hutchinson expects players to try to hunt animals, the focus of the wilderness experience is for players to try tracking and trapping animals. This brings up a lot of the stealth and tactical elements that many gamers love about the Assassin’s Creed series. In essence, players get to “assassinate” animals. The game is designed to push players to this more tactical level of play by rewarding them with better quality skins and drops. Players can sell these materials or use them to meet side quest goals.
Of course, all this does not exactly sound like music to not just the militant PETA types but also rank and file animal lovers. Still, if the player develops enough animal slaughtering proficiency, this will trigger the game to send an NPC to the player who will ask the player to join a hunting club.
Besides animals, Assassin’s Creed 3 will also feature more convincing interpersonal interactions between individuals in a crowd. One of the cheesier aspects of past Assassin’s Creed installments are crowd members who chatter on among them same group of people for hours. In AC 3, people will break off from groups and interact with other people. There will be a more natural sequence. There is also another modification to crowd interaction but Hutchinson is teasing us by not discussing it just yet.