Making a Franchise Video Game Is Like Making a Hollywood Movie

Let's be clear, this article came about because Ubisoft invited us to their Assassin's Creed Origins media event. But also, seriously, making video games is a massive job.

Aymar Azaizia is a senior producer for games company Ubisoft. He's spent the past four years overseeing production on Assassin's Creed: Origins, and now he's drinking champagne at the London Museum because it's finished. "I can't tell you the relief," he says. "It feels like having a baby."

Google "highest grossing games ever" and Assassin's Creed is on every list, along with other heavyweight titles like Fifa, Call Of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto. These are games that have sold in excess of 100 million units each, and in some cases turned boutique game developers into publicly listed companies. All have accumulated legions of fans, but companies in 2017 are also fighting to retain those fans from mobile games and VR. To do that games just have to keep getting bigger and better, because not only to do non-competitive titles risk franchises, but as THQ showed in 2013, flops can threaten companies.

For this reason game development times and costs are often surpassing that of blockbuster film productions. "On a movie you might have 200-300 people working on a set," says Aymar, snacking on hors d'oeuvres as they go past. "But in a video game you can end up with 1,200-1,400 people all working on the same game. Sometimes we have people in Singapore, Montreal, Mongolia, all doing Assassin's Creed. It's insane."

The other reason video game development is so lengthy and expensive, as this Waypoint article makes clear, is that developing a big game is like "like trying to build a house blindfolded." Waypoint charts out the way in which multiple teams work over multiple years on separate parts of huge, intangible universes that are hard to properly test-drive until they're finished. And a game like Assassin's Creed only makes that harder with its adherence to creating worlds anchored in history.

"We have to do a lot of research," says Aymar, whose team hired a team of specialists in Egyptian archaeology. Origins sees a new protagonist in the Assassin's Creed series enter the world of Cleopatra, when Egypt was under Greek control and its ancient temples and pyramids had become derelict hulks. Aymar explains that his teams were ruthless about trying to replicate history as much as possible, and it took a long time just to map out an accurate rendering of the landscape. "It took us six months to gather a team of about 200-300 people and work on the first prototype," he says. "From there we could see the game was functional, and start on actual production."

Traditionally, production takes around two years. This is a two-step forward, one-step back process as design teams make compromises between what they want and what is technically possible within an allocated time and budget. "The other thing that happens is we do play tests and sometimes realise that gamers have no interest in parts of the game, and these parts will take eight months to fix, so we'll just ditch them. The issue is that if you are giving people as much time as they want, the game will never be finished."

Finally, testing for bugs and refining gameplay can take another six months. Changes in 3D worlds mean upgrades and patches in some areas disrupt others, while often gamers will find certain missions too hard or too easy. Making sure a game works as a "game," in the traditional sense of the word, can stretch final production out to the four-year mark.

And then it's finished. New instalments of Assassin's Creed typically sell around 10 million copies for US$70 a piece, so designers know that the finished product had better be good. "What we are looking at like making a top blockbuster movie, but the mission is to do it every single year. It's like working on Avatar—so every single day at work has to be all out."

And what's the game like? Well I basically haven't played video games since Goldeneye, but things have come a way. After Aymar wandered away to I spent a few minutes playing an Origins demo and was fairly bowled over. From the fact you can explore a historically accurate representation of the entire Nile Delta without transiting between levels, or just the fact that a fly will buzz past your head and you can hear it approaching in one speaker and then trail off in another, or the fact you steal a horse and gallivant around the landscape spearing enemies from the saddle, you can really see where all those years went.

Origins launches October 27