I had the opportunity to interview Assassins Creed: Brotherhood’s game director, Patrick Plourde. He did work on different levels on all 3 Assassins Creed games and is actively working on the fourth game, AC: Revelation, which will close out the Ezio trilogy.

Patrick Plourde

Plourde was one of the few people that I met at MIGS 2011, who actually has tried Onlive, and that is why we started the interview by discussing the platform and its place in the current video game market.  To start, Plourde mentioned the downside of the platform. First are the bandwidth caps that many ISPs put on their costumers in countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and the US. Popular ISPs provide enough monthly bandwidth to play about 40 hours per month.  That is certainly not appealing to major gamers.

The second downside, is the requirement for an internet connection and the lag in response time that could result from that network. While broadband internet is now widely available, some parts of the US, UK and Canada still do not have access to these connections. Other parts of the world are also limited or rely on wireless networks that could be unstable. Plourde believes that the technology behind both OnLive, and the internet itself, will correct those flaws in the near future, and the service will become a serious competitor in the current market.

Some of the many positives of OnLive are as follows:

OnLive has gained popularity because it has become a cheap alternative to building a gaming computer.  Keeping a computer up to date to play the latest games, can be quite expensive and time consuming.  “Today I have a huge problem with the way the market is fragmented” said Plourde, when I asked him about how the console works.

He compared games with the movie industry. In the movie industry, format wars really settle fast. Today, if you are a movie studio, you can release a movie on DVD and Blu-ray and it will work on all the readers out there; on PCs, in consoles, and on almost any devices where you can insert the disc.  The gaming industry is the total opposite. The console wars have been raging for decades now, and when you want to develop a game, you have to consider every platform and their own particular way that they work. For example, Xbox 360 games only work on the Xbox 360 console. Even backward compatibility is not a standard in today’s industry. Plourde closed the subject with his personal opinion, saying, “As a content creator, it’s a shame when there’s a proportion of the players that would like to experiment and they can’t.”

More than just the the limitations of gaming platforms and their market reach, another point that game developers all agree is that the market segmentation also makes it harder, and more expensive, to create a game and adapt it to every console, in today’s world. A solution like OnLive makes it really easier to develop and bring games to the market because it will be able to reach PC gamers, console gamers and mobile device players at once, without needing different versions or different teams working on them.

Ubisoft is the first company to present a game that is optimized for tablets on OnLive. That game is ‘From Dust’.  While Plourde wishes he could know everything that happens at Ubisoft, unfortunately he does not have a clue on when we are going to see this game released for OnLive.

While talking about the technology used in making games, Plourde pointed out that the power of OnLive will not only be putting more polygons into objects. While services like OnLive will not necessarily push development into high demanding games, the positive aspect of cloud gaming is that you won’t have to buy new hardware. He explained that OnLive gives developers the resources needed to build pretty much any game. These resources mostly help make games more realistic and visually appealing. He told me that what scares him is that “characters are so photo realistic, that the acting will have to follow”. This means that games will tend to be more and more focused on bringing entertainment to gamers in a more immersive way.

How about Assassin’s Creed : Revelation?

Assassins Creed Revelations is supposed to be released on several major platforms, very soon, and it will most likely come to OnLive. Unfortunately, we could not get confirmation if we will see it day and date with the console and PC release, or even if we will get it at all.  Still we talked about the game itself and what to expect.  First of all, it will be more streamline, meaning that the story will be more presented throughout the game.  Plourde explained this, by comparing the previous games where you play a few missions and then get into a long cut-scene explaining the story. In Revelations, cut-scenes will be integrated into the game during the missions and will offer an experience where the players should feel like they are more a part of the story themselves.

For the gameplay tweaks, we can expect new weapons and gadgets, such as the hook blade that will help climb faster and the zip line which will allow players to go from one roof to another. The whole experience of moving around has been improved. They also tried to insert and polish mini games like the Assassin’s den. Plourde described this as a tower defense type of mini-game.

As for the multiplayer experience in AC: Revelations, Ubisoft polished the experience of Brotherhood’s multiplayer and added new modes as well, including team based modes. The matchmaking has also been tweaked for better and faster matchmaking.

When I asked about any DLC for Revelations, nothing has been announced yet, but we can expect big news in the near future. Plourde qualified it as “weird and assassinish, but not in an assassin’s creed kind of way”. It’s really intriguing and we will keep an eye on it.

The Tom Clancy franchises have some great games in the works; two upcoming titles are Ghost Recon Online (planned for PC and Wii U), and GR: Future Soldier on PS3, Xbox360 and PC. The last one should be the big Ubisoft title released in the beginning of 2012. While OnLive isn’t displayed as a platform on Ubisoft’s website, we talked about Ubisoft’s commitment to the cloud gaming service. While he could not talk for the whole company, Ubisoft shows support toward platform there are internal discussions going on inside of the studio about the future of OnLive, and the fact that cloud gaming does have major advantages, as well as some concerns.

In closing, Patrick Plourde wanted to thank the OnLive community for supporting their games and being fans. Ubisoft will continue to listen to your feedback in order to make better games for us to play.

What do you think of this interview, and the many things that Plourde touched on? Let us know at OnLiveFans.com Forum

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