Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Syndicate is introducing dual protagonists for the first time to the Assassin's Creed series. With players able to switch freely between twins Evie and Jacob Frye throughout the game, Syndicate offers different ways for players to approach situations.
I sat down with game director Scott Phillips to discuss the advantages of telling a story through two characters, expectations for how fans will receive the game, and more.
GameSpot: At what point was it decided that there would be two main characters that you can switch between in Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and that they would be twins? Why twins?
Phillips: Jacob and Evie were around from the beginning. We always knew we wanted this ability to tell a story from two different sides, to be able to have one side, and then show the consequences of what happens when you do it a certain way with another character. And so it just organically grew out of that. Their story together changed over time and developed more, and they became more interesting characters. They sort of bicker with each other in a sibling fashion, and I think they're really interesting characters.
Was it always going to be siblings? Did Ubisoft build the game around the two characters?
I came on to the project a year ago. So I wasn't there in the very early times. When I started at Ubisoft Quebec, there were two characters for sure.
I'd say the most important thing that the framework through which everything else came was the London 1868 setting, that time period. From there we developed characters, we developed what these characters would go through, what the story is we want to tell, what's the setting, what's the world like, what's the atmosphere, what other people would exist in that time period, can we interact with them. It develops organically from that origin of that time period.