In an interview with Play magazine, Ashraf Ismail, the game director for Assassin’s Creed Origins has revealed new information about how the AI behaves and functions in the upcoming game. There will be thousands of NPCs, all of whom have their own daily life cycles and go about it even when the player is not looking. This leads to dynamic and realistic behavior patterns, and some interesting emergent gameplay.
“We created a new AI framework that actually allows us to have thousands of persistent people living in this world,” Ismail explains, noting that all of the AI – all of the human and animal NPCs that inhabit the sprawling Egyptian space – are “virtualised”. That is to say, they function away from the immediate gaze of the player. “NPCs actually have a life out in the world,” which, we’re assured, will mean that players will no longer be forced into a reload if an objective goes awry. That’s because Origins will generate new scenarios and gameplay opportunities as you move and interact with the environments and its inhabitants; it will react to your successes and failures in real-time, without punishing you for being creative or stumbling. “It means that all of those constraints are gone, completely gone. These were,” he tells us, “frustrations that we wanted to remove.”
This further plays into assassinations that you undertake, as targets you pick also have different routines that they follow, opening up new opportunities for you depending on when you deice to attack.
“The point is this, we give this information to the player, that this AI is really living out in the world, doing whatever it is that they are doing, and as a player you get to make the choice of ‘what kind of experience do I want to have?’ When we ask you to do something in the game, the objective is now far more open ended… So yes, you do still have assassination targets but, technically, you can do whatever you want to get to your target.
“We have a target in the game who has decoys in one of the cities. You have to learn about him and his schedule. You actually have to pay attention to him, and the decoys – the ways they are living their lives – to figure out which one he really is, because the decoys are innocent people,” we’re told, though the open-ended play doesn’t end there. “The gameplay experience can change, even as you’re in the flow of chasing him down,”Ismail teases, explaining that how you approach the target once you’ve figured this puzzle out can drastically change depending on a number of factors.”
We really hope this leads to some really interesting and emergent gameplay moments for different players, and makes for a refreshing experience.
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