Q&A

We speak to Jonathan Dumont, creative director on assassin's creed odyssey, about player choices, romance and staying true to history.

What made you decide to go with the branching choices for Odyssey?

We felt that giving our players a new way to explore history and a new way to really connect with the main character’s action was taking the next step into transforming the Assassin’s Creed franchise into a full RPG We wanted your choices to give you not necessarily a different outcome like in the main storyline, but you always think about what you’re going to say and embrace different roles so we all come into a game having different expectations. the game has a base personality and an expressive personality – it gives you the fantasy of being a mercenary from Sparta and then allows you to play that as you are, so if you want to be a mercenary doing things for money or if you want to be more compassionate like a hero you can do both. it allows you to really interject yourself into the story and make it your own odyssey

it’s quite a change development wise – what challenges has changing that structure brought to development?

first of all we had to create a tool to allow us to do this so we created our own dialogue tool that enabled us to go from around three to four hours of pure cinematic where you don’t have an input, to having over 30 hours of dynamic dialogue with player choices. so it’s something where we can get an automatic generation based on the lines that we have and then our cinematic team can retouch everything and really create scenes that are interesting.