John-ShepardAssassin's Creed III was a super ambitious project, and one that almost didn't make it to current consoles.
Ubisoft technical director Marc-Antoine Lussier told T3 that getting ACIII on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 was "almost a miracle." The problem was that they had this grand vision and yet, the same two pieces of hardware on the market.
In order to achieve their goals, they needed to create the revolutionary AnvilNext engine from scratch, which has allowed the team to develop a bigger, more vibrant environment. Said Lussier:
" If you remember in Assassins' Creed we were very lucky that the streets were narrow and we didn’t have such long line of sight and you couldn’t necessarily see the characters on the street; New York is a totally different story.
We can have a couple thousand NPCs that you see in the distance and as you get closer as you move into New York or Boston, we dynamically switch from low detail NPC to full detail NPC…so you have the illusion of being surrounded by a gigantic crowd. "
There are plenty of reasons to be excited about Assassin's Creed III , and that AnvilNext engine is definitely one of those reasons. Just about everything we've seen thus far has proven its worth, and showed what a great new piece of tech can do. …wonder if Activision is listening.