Assassin’s Creed Creator Says Working At Ubisoft Involved Lying To Gamers

It has been a while since Patrice Desilets, creator of the Assassin’s Creed series, left Ubisoft to start working on his own game, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. However, previously he had been rather tight lipped about his time at Ubisoft, and their eventual fallout.

In a recent interview with Gameology, Desilets has opened up and described how his time spent at Ubisoft, among other things, involved “political lying”. Here’s the exact quote as translated by GameSpot:

“My biggest struggle with being in an organization is that I was the guy at the end or in the middle also… I was the guy doing interviews like what we’re doing right now and I had to come up with political lying and I would receive comments and decisions made by other people and not me because it’s all about compromising when you’re in a big organization somehow,” he said. “And as my role, the creative director, it’s tough to live by the decisions of others when being in front of the camera or Skype and I said I’m not a really good liar so I can’t do it anymore.

“And then I also realized that when you do a really big franchise, you also make money for other people and they don’t really care about you (Laugh). So I said, enough! if I do another Assassin’s Creed at least it would be for me and my guys and also for Quebec and for my people in Montreal.”

This sounds a lot like some of the shady stuff Ubisoft has been up to in the last few years, including showing footage with upgraded visuals at press conferences, lying about no microtransactions coming to their games, annual sequels, etc.

It seems like Desilets wanted nothing more to do with Ubisoft, and left to join THQ. However, after THQ shut down Ubisoft picked up Desilets team and the projects he had been involved with. Desilets left again to start his own studio. However, he did try to regain rights to 1666: Amsterdam, which was the game he had been working on at THQ. The game had strong similarities to Assassin’s Creed, and it’s no wonder that Ubisoft wanted to get all over that.

As of now, he is heading Panace Studios, a 24 person team, working on Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey.

Register with us for the best in gaming, and join us for video game discussions on our forums.