Assassin's Creed III's epic naval battles weren't expected to work

- Assassin's Creed III creative director Alex Hutchinson on how Ubisoft engineers got the game's new naval battles up and running. "For naval, I remember our design technical director Marc-Antoine Lussier saying, 'So we make a game that's about open world, huge spaces, generic crowd, where you can do anything you want. And you want to make a game with unique people, on a moving ocean, high detail, where everything is specific. You want to do the opposite of what the engine was built to do,'" recalls Hutchinson. According to Hutchinson, Lussier was "very skeptical" that this mode could be made to work. "Which is why we sent some amazing engineers to [the team in] Singapore to look at it," he says. "They didn't know how unlikely it was to work, so they made it work." Naval was a creative risk for the team, too, which made it all the sweeter when everything came together, Hutchinson reveals. "People thought naval was not going to work or it was not going to be that interesting," says Hutchinson, "So it was very satisfying when we demoed it on the Sony stage at E3, just to hear the reaction of the crowd. That was very validating." You can find out more about the development of Assassin's Creed III in Gamasutra's new feature interview with Hutchinson, which is live now.