Aude GlonduAssassin’s Creed III Multiplayer
Back at Ubisoft Annecy to bring the multiplayer personas to life: combat, locomotion and menu animations, from the mocap stage to the engine.
In November 2011, after a few months of missions in other studios, from a TV commercial to motion capture, I came back to Ubisoft Annecy to work on the multiplayer of Assassin’s Creed III. Annecy had become the franchise’s multiplayer specialist, following up Brotherhood with Revelations before taking on this new instalment.
Released in October 2012, Assassin’s Creed III moved the series to the American Revolution. In multiplayer, players embody personas: playable assassins who each have their own weapon, silhouette and character.
Bringing the personas to life
Our scope covered all of combat: assassinations, executions, and the taunts you use to goad the other players.
It also included locomotion, and that was a serious piece of work. In the main game, player movement is a sprawling, highly complex system, built around that signature ability to climb everywhere, and all of that machinery had to be adapted to each multiplayer character.
And the solo game had moved on: Connor could now climb trees, so we added new locomotion to bring that to the multiplayer characters too.
On Assassin’s Creed III, I followed the same pipeline as on Brotherhood, from the brainstorms to the mocap shoots and the motion editing in MotionBuilder, and carried my animations all the way into the engine: integration and testing, in constant contact with the game designers and gameplay programmers, so that every animation would land in the game both beautiful and functional.
Personal favourite: Lady Maverick
Behind her socialite airs, Lady Maverick assassinates her opponents with her hairpin, and that was the whole challenge: making her kill without ever losing her poise. Coming up with fluid takedowns that almost feel choreographed, in the manner of a Black Widow, remains some of my favourite acting work.
The menu animations, the ones that have to make a character’s personality exist in just a few seconds, are where I started to find myself. I understood that bringing a character to life was what I loved most about this craft.
Assassin’s Creed III is the project where I understood what kind of animator I wanted to be.