I dread telling developers what I dislike about their work. At preview events, that is. I have no qualms running games down on high-horseback via the ephemeral medium of Internet, but when you’re actually sharing room space with one or more members of a team, room space bought and paid for by the people paying them, wolfing what is thus indirectly their finger-food, downing their tequila, leaving fingerstains all over their very own dev units, snorting ground-up kittens from the chests of their very own wives and mothers… well, it’s hard to do anything other than grin radiantly in response to the awful, awful question “so, what are your thoughts so far?”

That’s rather naïve and ungenerous of me, though. Naïve because when PR folk stuff you full of free booze, grub and hookers, the idea is naturally less to feed you up as to feed up the score you’ll pluck from the recesses of your psyche six months down the line. And ungenerous because contrary to popular belief/CliffyB’s Twitter account, not every developer has an ego the size of Harrods. Most of these people are quite happy to entertain the idea that other people, knowing relatively little about the internal mechanics of videogame development, might nevertheless be entitled to analyse videogames. Most developers can take outsider criticism, in other words, even to their faces. Even from me.

Julien Laferrière is one of those developers. He was a Production Manager on Assassin’s Creed II, and is now Production Manager on Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. During our most recent hands on with the latter, I had the opportunity to pick his brains about three particular problems with the former. Just what has Ubisoft done to address matters? Brace for subheadings.

VGD’s beef #1: There was too little incentive to use stealth

If you’ve read my previous pieces on Brotherhood, you’ll know that one of my big issues with AC2 was that you weren’t really obliged to be sneaky. Leading man Ezio is an assassin, a deliverer of unexpected death. Ergo, he should be neither seen nor heard. Why, then, am I allowed to run up to this merchant in full view of all Roma, knife him in the ear, counter-kill a dozen Swiss guards, spend 30 seconds in a haystack and stroll away whistling?

Julien’s response: We’ve scaled objectives so that stealthier players are rewarded

“A thing we’ve introduced in AC Brotherhood is the constraints system, so that almost every mission in the game – once you’ve passed a few missions – they have a constraint, an optional constraint. Basically it might be “do this mission and don’t get detected”, for example. So a more casual player could just try to finish the mission, and somebody [more ambitious] could say “I’m going to do it without getting detected”. And in a way, it’s getting into some sort of a special relationship with the developers, because the guys who designed the mission, they’d say “well that mission would be really cool if you played it super-stealthy”. So it’s a way we’ve found to appeal to lots of different kinds of players.”

VGD’s beef #2: PS3 fans got sorry leftovers

Though a far sight from the staticky, juddering mess owners of the buxom black box were lumped with in 2007, Assassin’s Creed II on PS3 is still quantifiably inferior to its Xbox 360 cousin, with tearing in particular many times as rife.

Julien’s response: We’ve learned our lesson, tech-wise

“It’s really important to us of course to release our games on both platforms, and I’d say that the level of maturity and experience we have with the consoles makes us pretty solid on developing for both at the same time. We really know them inside out, so we can extract everything we can from the console. It just makes the whole development cycle easier, because we know them so well we can really focus on the gameplay and telling a story, making a good game instead of struggling with new hardware.”

VGD’s beef #3: Too many bolt-on features

As much as I enjoyed strolling through the precincts of my own, custom-designed Monteriggioni like the Renaissance equivalent of the Godfather, twirling my new wine-red cloak, mulling over the next shoe purchase, I wasn’t really conscious of a connection between these simple pleasures and, well, being an assassin. I also struggled to see many of AC2′s sidequests – rooftop races, beat-downs, poster-ripping, thief-catching, etc – as more than filler material.

Julien’s response: We’re doing more to tie peripheral content into the narrative

“The goal for Brotherhood was to offer the same level of variety by adding new layers – for example, the Borgia towers that change the whole experience – but to have everything tie into the main narrative more. So you might remember the beat ‘em up missions and the races from Assassin’s Creed 2 – now we’ve made them side-missions involving the different factions. So every time you do a side-mission, it might be a race, afterwards you might have a beat ‘em up section, but it will have some sort of story around it to justify it to the main narrative.”

Convinced, readers? Am I blowing smoke up Julien’s arse, or is he blowing smoke up mine? Check out our hands-ons here and here, and an interview with Associate Producer Jean-Francois Boivin here.

I could have started this Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood preview 45 minutes ago, were it not for the council road-sweeper merrily whirring and beeping up and down below the window. Or the fair-haired toddler screaming randomly in the garden opposite. Or the bastard in the “office” downstairs listening to Kanye West at bone-dislocating volume.

Were I inside a game of Brotherhood right now (and given the franchise’s hunger for faithfully recreated settings and eras, a London-based instalment doesn’t seem entirely unlikely), I would have to Take Steps. Down the stairs and into the street, to whit, where I’d sidle in amongst the city-slickers at the bus stop. I’d let a few seconds pass, then chop the air absently, as though scooping a strand of hair out of my face – and implacable killers would pop into being on surrounding rooftops and descend, like so many Swords of Damocles, on each and every source of distraction.

It’d be over in seconds – the faintest tinkle of breaking glass, a few punctured gasps, blissful silence. I wouldn’t even bother to watch. I’d just stroll back to my door, safe in the knowledge that followers of the Creed leave no trails of evidence, disintegrating into thin air after completing their lethal work. Then I’d sit down and finally be able to get on with my – well, it appears that I already have. Lucky break for you, Mr Kanye West Fan.

The flash of pistol-fire by moonlight. Ah, Rome.

Player-directed NPC assassins are, of course, Brotherhood’s major new single player feature. They’re more like sharply tailored homing missiles than allies per se. A maximum of twelve are available for disposal at once, appearing as red bars beneath your synch (health) gauge in top left.

To cash in those bars for streaks of cold, hooded vengeance, simply tag whoever needs bumping off with left trigger and squeeze right bumper. Whole groups of cheerfully oblivious blood-bags can be roped into the fun by keeping the trigger held and twitching left analog stick, the number of sharp points you have trained on each man displayed as red dots beside the lock-on bracket.

The obvious comparison is Splinter Cell: Conviction‘s controversial Mark & Execute ability, whereby furrowed terrorist foreheads could be queued up and perforated in a blaze of automated fire, but the checks and balances are a damn sight weightier than a depleted energy bar. Assassins can die, see. The initial strike never seems to miss, but with the element of surprise lost your disciples will be vulnerable to counter-attack. Best avert your eyes and quit the hotzone, then, giving the exposed Creedsters an opportunity to de-expose themselves before guardsmen arrive. They won’t evaporate in full view, because that would leave the most dreadful unsightly holes in Assassin’s Creed’s already rocky sense of realism. They’re a bit like Invisible Boy from Mystery Men, basically. Just handier with a dagger.

They’re also off-limits till you’re a few hours in. Assassin’s Creed 2 liked a bit of semi-playable preamble, and despite beginning in media res Brotherhood is almost as methodical in design. It’s just as accessible too, with a laughably simple premise that absolutely doesn’t require a thorough grounding in conspiracy politics and quantum mechanics.

The action picks up where the previous game left off, with hot shot Renaissance assassin Ezio Auditore standing in a secret part of the Vatican, having wrested a pre-human artefact from the hands of the avaricious Templars, chewing the fat with some kind of astral projection, who’s actually talking to Ezio’s distant descendent Desmond, who’s listening in on the conversation via the memories embedded in his genetic code, holographically re-enacted by the wondrous Animus machine, in order to glean the locations of mystic temples in the present. Got all that? I didn’t think so. David Cage, eat your heart out.

Leonardo da Vinci has put together a few new gadgets for Ezio to play with, like this glider thing. Beware - not all of them are in friendly hands.

Suffice to say gruff old uncle Mario shows up and the two men elope to the Auditore villa in Monteriggioni, where Ezio gets propositioned by women a lot, tries his hand at wielding a cannon, rescues a horse and has a bust-up with political genius and fellow assassin Niccolò Machiavelli. All of which helpfully enables you to brush up on your parkour, trotting across the township’s terracotta rooftops and taking in the sunset from its towers.

Before long however Monteriggioni is besieged by the Borgia family, Templar figureheads to a sneering, simpering man. His morning cuddles interrupted by cannon ball, Ezio dutifully nips over to the walls (cue a rather thrilling horse-riding sequence) and puts those fledgling artillery skills to good use, picking and popping enemy batteries, but all is lost when the invaders breach the front gate, gun down Mario and seriously injure the young assassin himself. Did I say all is lost? I meant apart from the bit where the surviving Auditores high-tail it down a hidden passageway. Having seen his mother and sister to safety, Ezio sets off for Rome and vengeance.

Several hundred years later, VR voyager Desmond and his band of groovy young hipster hackers are on the run from Abstergo, the modern-day corporate manifestation of the Templar conspiracy, and where should their travels take them but to the ruins of the Auditore mansion. Smart move as it transpires, because Desmond’s frequent trips into the computer-generated past have left imprints on his psyche, enabling him to trace his ancestor’s movements in the present.

Do you really trust me, reader? How do you know I’m who and more importantly what I say I am? There’s a name up there at the top of this page, and if you click through to our staff section you’ll be able to put a face to that name, but what does that prove, exactly? How does it set this sentence apart from the spam comments that clog our CMS? Everything can be falsified on the internet, after all, humanity included.

Browsing Google the other day, I stumbled on one of my very own articles, pilfered and fed into some clumsy but effective piece of script that swapped out every adjective, noun or verb for a synonym. It was an unnerving experience, like peering into a carnival mirror: familiar constructions rewired, turns of phrase bent back on themselves, a weird alloy of man and program.

I know that face.

I’m getting a similar vibe from the monk walking down this bustling alleyway towards me. He’s wrong on some level, out of step. Literally out of step, that is. He keeps dodging forward, jostling the elbows of the group he’s with. When they turn to avoid a pile of crates he looks, for a second, like he’s about to scamper up onto the obstacle and springboard off it. He isn’t my target – my proximity gauge is only one-quarter full – but I may very well be his.

Keeping my pace slow and natural I tilt the reticle over him, lock on and shift my thumb to circle button, ready to unleash a debilitating counter-blow. But caught in my crosshairs, he seems suddenly harmless. I note that he gets a leg caught on an awning – a pathfinding issue, possibly. Perhaps he’s just a bot after all. Perhaps it’s safe to break cover.

As I shuffle on, undecided, a courtesan idling on a bench stands up casually and whisks a razor-tipped Venetian fan across my jugular. Blast. Top assassin’s tip: let your prey come to you. I was right to be wary of the monk, though. My assailant’s arm barely has time to complete its sweep before he jerks out of formation, stamps on the back of her knee and rams his crucifix into the top of her skull. Second top assassin’s tip: catch ‘em in the act.

You’d better pay attention to NPCs when playing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood online. They’re important people. Or at least, they may be important people. Ubisoft Montreal’s crowds are as convincingly realised as ever, bewitching in their ebb and flow, but they’re a whole lot more, nowadays, than spongy, bovine masses to elbow through or terrorise. Nowadays they’re secretly stuffed full of sharp objects – breeding grounds for rival killers, hunters and hunted in turn.

The Courtesan does her thing. Not for long though. That guy with the penknife wants a word.

Each player’s character spawns with cruise control toggled, another ordinary citizen about his business, and it pays to spend a few seconds just watching yourself move, getting reacquainted with how an NPC walks, how sharply an NPC turns, whether they favour the middle or the sides of a street, where they stand when they’re chatting to one another. Learn the computer’s habits, and learn them well. Sudden changes of direction, moments of only-human hesitancy, shoving too authoritatively past bystanders – these are behaviours to watch for and avoid. Cultivate a serene automaton’s demeanour. Settle into that lobotomised stroll. Bide your time.

There are special abilities, two per player per match once you’ve unlocked the slots, to make blending into the AI mob easier. Morph, for example, transforms all nearby civilians into dummies of your character. If you’re lucky, the player on your tail will knife one of these hapless innocents by mistake, invalidating his assassination contract, diminishing his score and exposing himself to a swift smack round the ear (you can’t bump off pursuers, but you can knock them senseless for a few seconds, leaving them vulnerable to assassination themselves).

There’s still a place for directness, mind. Sooner or later a target will get wise, whether because he’s looked straight at you and gleaned ill-intent, or because the game itself has decided that you’ve caused enough ruckus to trip the warning lights on his HUD. The best and most common response is to leg it, breaking line of sight for long enough that the contract will expire, and so the softly-softliness of each round periodically escalates into panicky bouts of the parkour the franchise is famous for.

The best views are to be had from aloft, naturally, but this is kind of like painting a bullseye on your head. Watch out for wrist guns.

The key difference between Brotherhood online and the campaigns of prior games is that lethal, eye-catching agility and studied discretion are now equal partners in the endeavour. Entertaining though they were, Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2 struggled to foster a sense of consequence. You were nudged towards stealth, encouraged to work the crowd, but you were never punished too much for simply barging into a hotspot, stabbing at random till you found your target, then beating it up the nearest vertical surface. It wasn’t so much a game for assassins as a game for pre-industrial Spidermen, all speed and flourish.

The new game rectifies this, and in doing so produces something quietly revolutionary: an online experience where the challenge is to identify a human being while passing yourself off as a lump of software, to distinguish the one from the many while remaining indistinct. There’s a lot more to talk about – not least the single player mode, which we’ll be getting our hands on next week – but that, for the moment, is enough to make Brotherhood one of this winter’s most exciting propositions.

The game’s out for PS3 and Xbox 360 in November, with a PC version following in Q1 2011.

Last night I finally got around to firing up Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Ninja Theory’s very loose homage to Journey to the West, the sprawling anthropomorphic 16th century novel penned by Wu Cheng’en. Colour me impressed. Actually, colour me a wonderful mingled shade of tropical fern and verdigris. One of the game’s big achievements, as Rupert notes in his preview, is to reintroduce greens, oranges, yellows among other “girlier” hues to shabby post-nuclear spectrums. It’s like looking at an earthquake zone through the bottom of a Sprite bottle, or to pick out a few gaming analogies, like getting Fallout 3 hammered at Jak & Daxter’s private club, then sending it on a blind date with the Oddworld franchise.

As you’d expect from the minds behind King Bohan, the characters are well-rounded, conventional enough to be comfortable but quirky enough to keep you guessing. While he looks quite the bruiser with his sledgehammer jaw and elephant biceps, leading man Monkey’s far more of an action-slapstick fall-guy, Jackie-Chan-style, than an unsmiling Fenix clone. The big-eyed Trip, Monkey’s fellow fugitive turned slave-driver, is a funny mix of cowardice, petulance and artfulness – sexy in a gangly kind of way, very much a damsel in distress, but no mere sun-tanned chunk of eye candy.

Trip's a bit of a tech whiz. One of the first things she does is clamp a mind-control helmet on Monkey's head. Cute.

Characters are “brought to life”, as the cliché goes, by dynamic animation, like the way Monkey straightens up from a scurrying sprint to a measured jog as you hold the left stick. Cut scenes are marvels of direction and optimisation. Lips wrap themselves around Hollywood-level dialogue exactly, performances convince with deft touches like a dropping of the eyes.

If Enslaved’s art design, technical chops and characterisations appeal, I’m left more than a little worried by what I’ve actually played, rather than passively appreciated. Ninja Theory appears to have taken the same road they took with Heavenly Sword, that of the linear cinematic blockbuster founded on an alluring depth of fiction. The game has already been praised, in fact, on precisely this count: Edge’s reviewer notes that it’s “unafraid to make the case for a rollercoaster of a story, well told.”

There’s certainly a place for games that funnel the player from one lavishly arrayed story flashpoint or scenic overview to the next, and indeed many of the industry’s top-scorers, like Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, are cut from this cloth. But it’s a formula that demands a bit of underlying flex if the title in question isn’t to hit a critical glass ceiling. Naughty Dog’s peek-shoot-and-jumper might have kept its point As and Bs firmly in line, but it introduced variance at the micro level in the form of props like riot shields and propane tanks, multiple elevations and asymmetrical or destructable cover layouts. It also had an online component to bust the confines of the storyline wide open. Enslaved certainly lacks the latter, and may also, I fear, lack the former.

Armed with a power shield, multi-purpose combat staff and exceedingly large muscles, Monkey's more than a match for a mech.

The first couple of chapters give this impression, anyway. Ninja Theory has thrown together a truly mind-bending opener, with Monkey hauling arse through and over the surface of a fast-deteriorating slaver airship, but the thunder of prison pods kicking loose from their tethers and the crunch of detaching wings are patently of the smoke-and-mirrors school of spectacle, meant to obfuscate the tedium of repeatedly tapping A to leapfrog shimmering handholds, or massaging X and Y to shatter Enslaved’s mechanical baddies.

The game’s “rollercoaster” credentials make me wonder how much of an asset Andy Serkis, who produced it and mo-capped the star, and Alex Garland, who wrote the script, really were. Serkis and Garland are gifted artists, but they’re artists best-known for their work in film and literature, comparative strangers to the art of videogame development (the former marginally less so, of course, having worked as dramatic director on Heavenly Sword). They’re accustomed to handling, organising the perceptions and responses of those who encounter their work, rather than allowing the user to handle and organise the work in turn.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West has attracted positive buzz already. There’s little doubt that the story will be worth experiencing, and Ninja Theory’s reimagining of antiquated Chinese conceits is striking. But will the game be volatile and open-minded enough to qualify as a “game” in the sense that ought, one feels, to remain the norm? Or will it be that most tepid of things, a “movie game” or “popcorn muncher”, a squandering of the imagination on a choice-free framework, cinematic safari as opposed to a world to dispose of?

Our Enslaved review drops soon – the game’s out on 5th October in the States and 8th October over ‘ere. Feel free to call the score.

When Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood was dated for release almost 12 months to the day after Assassin’s Creed 2, many pundits expressed fears that the franchise would become Ubisoft’s Call of Duty – the publishing equivalent of Santa Claus, shoved out into the cold to wow the kiddies on a yearly basis.

If you’re one of those pundits, here are two things to reflect on:  (1) Activision’s high intensity release schedule hasn’t exactly brought Call of Duty to its knees, or at least not yet, and (2) as far as Assassin’s Creed is concerned, Ubisoft is happy to take things slow. Like a Venetian assassin stalking a well-defended prelate, perhaps.

So said Brotherhood’s Associate Producer Jean-Francois Boivin when we prodded him on the subject at a preview event yesterday. ‘It’s not going to be one a year,’ he observed flatly. ‘It’s a hard question to answer because we’re not doing it one a year.’

Brotherhood was born of a wish to capitalise on the lasting popularity of Assassin’s Creed 2 in particular, Boivin revealed. ‘This made sense to us because it’s the continuing story of Ezio, and it’s still very fresh in people’s minds. A lot of people are still playing Assassin’s Creed – we have the data, online and whatnot, of the people who sign in and they’re online – we know a lot of people are still playing the game, we know that people are still buying the game. The story’s still fresh, so it makes sense to us to release it that quickly.’

Boivin thinks putting a lot of time pressure on a franchise is a bad idea, especially a franchise as storied and substantial as Assassin’s Creed. ‘I don’t think it’s a service to the license to release something every year, I think a license like anything in life needs to breathe and resource itself once in a while.

‘You can’t force a tree to grow more rapidly than it should, if you’re ploughing a field year in and year out, one day your earth is going to have nothing, so you have to let it rest. The same thing is true for every living thing in the universe.

‘So there’s definitely going to be a gap between this opus of Assassin’s Creed and the next.’

Read the full interview with Boivin here, and watch out for our hands-on soon. Game’s out for Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 on 16th November.

Staying true to the spirit of past games has been of more than usual importance during development of the third home format Assassin’s Creed, which retains a protagonist, era, sandbox template, stealth and free-run mechanics from its predecessor but folds in a multiplayer mode and online character development. Having run appreciative fingers over the game itself, we joined Producer Jean-Francois Boivin in the shady grounds of Royal Hospital Chelsea for a chat.

VideoGamesDaily: I was surprised to see Assassin’s Creed attract a multiplayer-oriented sequel. Can you explain the thinking behind that move?

Jean-Francois Boivin: We’ve been dabbling with the idea of including a multiplayer component for quite a few years now. I think the important part for us was making sure that it wasn’t something that felt slapped on.

We needed to keep it true to the core values of our franchise. We wanted it to be smart, we wanted it to be something that stands out from the mass, in regards to what else is out there in multiplayer kind of games, so all those things make us really go back to the drawing board many, many times, and we’re finally very happy with how it came out. It’s true to our license because it really promotes the core pillars of our game, which are social, stealth, navigation and fighting.

The hidden gun lends a bit more emphasis to Ezio's counterkills.

It’s true to our universe in the sense that there’s a very strong part of the story tied into it, it’s basically ‘meanwhile what’s going on at Abstergo…’ Assassin’s Creed is all about Desmond Miles’s story, and now the multiplayer aspect – the single player is more of Desmond Miles, but the multiplayer aspect has become what Abstergo’s story is, what the Templar side of the story is. So the whole premise is that, if you remember at the start of AC2 there’s an escape from Abstergo and you see a bunch of Aima there, and that’s sort of a wink of what’s to come.

Basically, what Abstergo is doing is they’re recruiting subjects and sort of uploading genetic memories into their brains, into their minds, and allowing them to train with the assassin’s skills. So in consequence you will have Templars with assassin skills.

The ‘Wanted’ mode you showed off today put the emphasis on stealth. Will the other modes feed into the other gameplay ‘pillars’ you mentioned? Will there be a more traditional deathmatch-style melee option, perhaps?

I’ll answer it this way. Right now the mode we’re showing is Wanted – it’s a cat and mouse game, where you’re both the cat and the mouse. Many different modes are available – there are three main modes in all but within them you have submodes and whatnot, so there will be varieties within the same kind of mode.

So more information is to come, so speculation is wide open as to what is available, but you have to understand that those are the pillars of our universe, and this is what keeps us unique, and we need to keep showing the respect to our players and encourage smart players to use the game as it was intended to be. Or else it just becomes a mishmash of whatever. So we want to keep it smart, we want to keep it true to the universe. I know I say that all the time but it’s very very important.

In hindsight, we shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Ubisoft’s fifth home format Prince of Persia game, The Forgotten Sands, handles exactly like its first, Sands of Time, with all the monkey bars, pillars and pressure panels you can swing a time-rewinding dagger at. The project’s inherent retrospectiveness is, after all, right there plain as day in the subtitle.

Ubisoft has never really ‘forgotten’ Sands of Time, of course: released in 2003, the game broke one mould for third-person action platforming only to trap itself, its creators and to an extent its own genre firmly inside another. The same-generation sequels, Warrior Within and Two Thrones, played with different narrative tones but kept the formula intact, and while 2008′s cell-shaded episode brought some interesting new ideas to the table, it repulsed as many pundits as it impressed.

Besides upgraded though not quite razor edge looks and a new plot, which pits the Prince, fresh from his original Azad adventure, against a host of sand creatures unleashed on a besieging army by errant brother Malik, the second Xbox 360 and PS3 title makes use of elemental powers such as rock armor, ice projectiles and a wind area attack. When not in combat, the Prince can also freeze flowing water to provide scalable surfaces. Nothing all that game-changing, as noted, but enough perhaps to keep the franchise’s deep-rooted fanbase ticking over.

Jan-Erik Sjovall, Animation Director, was on hand at the preview event to talk shop. And talk shop he certainly did. Read on.

The Prince puts water sources in stasis to traverse a room from above.

VideoGamesDaily: Thanks for making time for us, Jan. You worked on the art and cinematics for Prince of Persia 2008, which looked absolutely terrific.

Jan-Erik Sjovall: We got an award for that from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Animation’, so yeah!

VGD: Nice job. And this is running on an upgraded version of the same engine, but the colour palette seems to have been played down a bit…

Sjovall: It depends on where you are in the levels. The colour palette changes. So it’s very reddish-orange at the beginning, and changes towards blueish-green when you’re in the underground sewers and the prison, and then it lights up again – it really shifts, for all the maps. Every single map has a primary colour palette to it, there’s a primary colour for every map, so there’s massive thought put into this.

VGD: Yes. Still, it does seem to be much less stylised this time round. Did you find that the previous game’s aesthetic was too esoteric for some players?

Sjovall: No, I don’t think that. Of all the things that were put into this, there was a lot of thought process put into game design, level design, which move to take, how everything was put together, but for the visual art style, we simply said that the illustrative art style used for Prince of Persia 2008 is uniquely reserved for that brand.

We wanted to go back and see what we could do with Sands of Time. Sands of Time was not necessarily meant to be photorealistic, but when you see the sequel, the sequel – let’s call it the sequel – to Sands of Time was actually internally Assassin’s Creed. So Assassin’s Creed came out of the Sands of Time seam, the Prince of Persia seam. And they went photorealistic because they could. And if the technology had been there for PS2, probably Sands of Time would have been a photorealistic game.

So that was the basic idea, we said ‘OK, we’ll make the game Sands of Time would have been if we’d had Xbox 360 or PS3 at the time it was made’. That was the idea. It has nothing to do with [the art design being too esoteric] – the same art director who did Warrior Within with the broodingly complex Prince and the heavy metal, that same art director was also doing Prince of Persia 2008 and that same art director’s now on this title. I call that range!

VGD: Let’s talk about range in another sense. The Prince of Persia series isn’t quite as discontinuous as Final Fantasy, but every iteration of the Prince himself does seem to be an entirely different character. Who is the Prince for you, at this point?

Sjovall: For me, of course, because I’m working on Forgotten Sands I think this is the Prince for me, in the sense that you take the Sands of Time guy and the Warrior Within guy and you merge them somewhat. So you have not as brooding, as goth-style a Prince, but he has seen some bad things, and that made him grow to a certain degree, so he’s a tough guy, he’s seen some stuff and he can hold his own.

The story of Splinter Cell: Conviction, so far? It goes something like this: ‘Now you see Sam, now you don’t, now you see him – crikey, he’s got a beard, what gives, Ubisoft? And why’s there so much daylight? Oh, now he’s gone again. Oh, there he is. Yay, he’s had a shave. Gosh, he just smashed that man’s face into a toilet.’ Sort of like Jack Bauer doing a pantomime, then.

Last month VGD slipped on some PVC pants, screwed three Magilites to its forehead and skulked down to south London to interview Maxime Beland, Creative Director on Sam Fisher’s much-delayed, grim-faced return to the world of gaming. Set your jaw and read on.

VideoGamesDaily: Conviction has had quite a troubled development period. We hear earlier builds were scrapped because it was felt the game was becoming too similar to Assassin’s Creed. Is that a worry now? What did you change, in particular?

Maxime Beland: It was actually never a worry, that it was too much like Assassin’s Creed. The stress and the reason why we changed was because it didn’t feel like a Splinter Cell game anymore. So many things had changed – there were no gadgets, there were no lights and shadows, there were no athletic moves – a lot of the core values that Splinter Cell depends on.

And that’s what we changed, we brought them back. We were delivering them in a different way, it’s faster, it’s more dynamic – as you’ve seen, it’s still stealth but it’s a new type of stealth. I’m happy because I think we’ve succeeded in delivering stealth that is going to reach more people. It’s going to ring true with a lot more people, because it’s more permissive.

VGD: Some of our forum members have expressed concerns that the changes are still too drastic. If nothing else, Sam himself looks very different – the three-scope visor no longer graces the box art. What would you say to reassure fans of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, for instance, that this is still recognisably the same sort of experience?

Beland: I think it’s interesting what you say, because I think everybody has a different perception of who Sam is. I think to me the three dots are probably one of the best icons of the game industry – it’s so powerful, it’s such a powerful image, we know they’re very iconic for the franchise, and that’s why they’re back, that’s why Sam gets his goggles back in the game. Our main menu has the three dots.

So to me, that is still Splinter Cell. What is also Splinter Cell is Sam Fisher himself. But to me, a black wetsuit is not Sam Fisher. It’s one of the tools he uses when the situation asks for that. But in Conviction, because it’s much more of an urban environment, because there are moments with crowds, because Sam is not dropped off a chopper into a Siberian base, he is dressed in a way that fits the crowd, that fits the context for Conviction.

So we didn’t change Sam because we didn’t like the wet suit, I love the wet suit, he looks great in a wet suit – for me Sam is dressed for the party he’s going to. And for the next Splinter Cell, the context will define his uniform.

VGD: Will the crowd play more of a part later in the game? Or will it be more a question of secluded interior areas and patrolling guards?

Beland: There’s a lot of variety. A big point for me in Conviction was trying to give a lot of variety for the player. So we’ve got all kinds of maps. We’ve got maps that are more open, outside, with crowds, where you get to do some exotic gameplay in there in the crowd, and we’ve got moments like you saw where the crowd is a bit more window dressing – they’re there, but if combat starts they’re just going to run away and that’s going to be it. We’ve got maps that are completely isolated from civilians, more classic Splinter Cell if you want. So I think we’ve got a good variety of those.

There’s a tension in every open-ended game (or even every game, period), a tension between avatar and surroundings, figure and backdrop, between the simplifications which allow players to interpret and act upon the world they’re given and the fertile, vital unpredictabilities of that world – in short, between the rules of ‘gameplay’ and the ruled-upon ‘setting’. Faced with so challenging a dichotomy, many developers lean one way or another. The randomly generated ASCI landscapes of cult hit Dwarf Fortress are famously more than a match for their colonists, for instance, while Jak II’s capaciously chunky steam-punk environs are quite passive, sterile, despite their graphical liveliness.

Ubisoft Montreal’s Assassin’s Creed series tackles this tension head on, and therein perhaps lies its claim to greatness. Where other third-person sandboxers cloak the enmity between order and chaos in make-believe, Assassin’s Creed transforms it into a component of the make-believe, a premise. Your character, Desmond Miles, springs from a long line of assassins, each engaged in a shadowy war with the Illuminati-like organisation known as the Templars. To penetrate the centuries-old mysteries of Abstergo, the vast military-pharmaceutical corporation the Templars have become, Desmond must tap into the “genetic memories” of his ancestors – 12th century Arabian backstabber Altair in the first game, Renaissance nobleman Ezio in this one – reliving their thoughts and deeds with the aid of a high-tech VR machine termed the “Animus”.

I've been to Florence. The Duomo looks even better when you're standing on top of it.

What this effectively means is that the game’s rules, regulations and – of course – limitations exist as a game within the game, “externalised” for consideration in the form of the Animus’s mechanisms and interfaces. It’s an elegant transposition of a key design concern – elegant enough that we can overlook both the contrivedness of the temporally riven plot and the present-day cast’s painful lack of charisma – and one which underlines the assuredness with which Ubisoft has mediated the conflict between gameplay and setting.

“Eagle vision” encapsulates this mediation rather handily. Approach a busy thoroughfare in Venice from aloft and you may struggle to make sense of it: the developer’s fidelity to the original clothing styles, building materials, types of shop and social mannerisms is as impressive as before, and while the engine is a few steps behind the times (tearing, pop-in and frame-rate drops are all very evident) it pushes out a respectable level of detail. Hold down triangle, however, and the Animus will dim the global lighting, strip out the rich yet impractical distractions and swathe enemies, friends and objectives in shimmering, arcade red, blue and golden auras.

Enemies now poke through haystacks when alerted. Fortunately, you can return the favour.

The mostly unchanged free-running mechanic works on the same principle of equilibrium. Hold R1 and X button down and the Animus will take over the business of picking and gripping individual handholds or leaping from beam to beam, leaving the player to handle broader questions of high road or low road, whether to scurry along a clothing line or leap from a fluted stone pillar, whether to make use of the side-route subtly advertised by a cluster of pigeons or carve out a path of your own.