My chat with Patrice begins with me relating how at E3 this year I’d asked fellow Ubisoft Montreal creative director Maxime Béland to describe his game, Splinter Cell: Conviction, in just one word.

“Panther,” Maxime had said back then, without pausing to think.

I tell Patrice I thought that one word encapsulated everything that was different about Conviction, compared to the previous games. So I ask Patrice if he had one word for Assassin’s Creed II. At first, he looks a little surprised.

“Two,” he says, after a few moments.

Two? I repeat.

“No, really. Two. Because for me it’s my first sequel.”

I was surprised to learn that, after serving as creative director on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Patrice did not work on any of that game’s successors. After Sands of Time shipped he went straight to work on the first Assassin’s Creed. So how did he approach making a sequel for the very first time?

“Everything that was in the first one is still there,” said Patrice. “We wanted worked on the pillars of the game, making them better, getting rid of the frustration, and we wanted to change the main character. It’s the real sequel; it’s not 1.5, it’s not more of the same.

“It really is Assassin’s Creed TWO,” he says, emphasising that word again, before smiling. “I’m sorry I don’t have as good a word as Max.”

Patrice then shoots down my suggestion that perhaps Assassin’s Creed II is everything he wanted the first game to be.

“No,” he says, firmly. “The first game was a game about a warrior monk during the Crusades, and that was the game we wanted to make. Going to Italy is not something we wanted to do in the first game. Did we learn? Did we come back with some ideas for which we didn’t have the time? For sure. But it’s not the game I wanted to make in the first place.”

The games industry can have a strange attitude towards sequel, and so can the fans. We see developers deliberately changing the mood or tone between sequels, as Ubisoft themselves did with the choice to make the Prince darker and carry more attitude in Warrior Within. Yet at other times, we see sequels arrive where, really, very little seems to have changed.

“Sometimes we react in the games industry a lot,” says Patrice. “You give the game to the world and you take the feedback. I wanted to do a sequel and so I said to the team, ‘Look, we’re going to change a lot of stuff, but it still has to be part of the overall [Assassin's Creed series].’

“I don’t know why in the games industry, we change so much between sequels. But not all of us do it. You look at the Japanese, once they establish something they like to repeat it. Look at someting like Metal Gear Solid and you can feel pretty confident about the pillars, but it is the story that will change.

“Here it is like that too,” he says. “The story will change, but the pillars are pretty much the same. The character moves the same, we kept the control scheme. We kept this idea of having an ancestor and we kept Desmond as the guy in the present. We kept the basic core mechanic of the fights, the free-running, the climbing. But we did put some stuff aside.”

Patrice wasn’t shy when it came to changing major aspects of the first, such as the entire structure. The first game was all about numbers, he tells me. There were three cities divided into three districts where you had to do six investigations and eventually carry out nine assassinations. It was all very regimented and predictable, exposing the bare framework of the game and pulling you out of the experience.

“The structure of the first game is gone,” confirms Patrice. “We went for a more organic, more narratively driven game structure.”

In large part, this is because the new assassin, Ezio, is a very different person to Altair, the original game’s protagonist. Where Altair remained apart from society, Ezio is very much a part of his. As such, his story weaves through the cities he travels to and people he meets along the way.

“In the first one it was this monk warrior who had no life at all except killing people and the creed was really important to him,” says Patrice, explaining the difference between the two characters. “Now, Ezio, he’s got a life. He knows people, he is part of society.

“The first one was very serious, maybe too much. But here we’re making jokes, there is some comic relief. For example, in the relationship between Ezio and Leonardo Da Vinci, they’re friends, they act like friends. It’s not like [adopts serious voice] ‘Oh, you’re Ezio the assassin and you’re Leonardo, the most intelligent person on earth.’ No. One time Ezio is pissed off at Leo and he’ll say ‘Oh, look, he’s trying to invent some piece of shit!’ You know, they’re real people… except he doesn’t say ‘piece of shit’ because all the swearing is in Italian!”

“When you see it,” he continues, “you’ll feel that maybe we went in a different direction. But I think it’s because we’re not talking about the same guy. So, for sure, that different guy in that different period of time has given us different ideas. It has nothing to do with a reaction to the first one; it’s just that Ezio is not Altair, and Altair is not Ezio.

“But it’s still an Assassin’s Creed game. You’ll still do viewpoints… there’s a bunch of stuff like that that repeats, that are good. You’ll still do the ‘leap of faith’ because it’s fun. Ezio is not Altair, but he’s got it in his blood.”

It appears that Patrice and his team have really taken on board criticism of the weaknesses of the first game, while at the same time amplifying its strengths. The outward appearance may seem different, but underneath that Assassin’s Creed blood still flows. Isn’t that what we really want from a sequel?

“A game is a dialogue,” Patrice Desilets was telling me earlier this month when we sat down at the Washington State Convention centre in Seattle to discuss Assassin’s Creed II. He is the game’s creative director, but his work is pretty much complete while the team back at Ubisoft Montreal wraps the game up for its fall release.

I had asked Desilets if he’d kept a checklist of complaints players of the first game had. I imagined there had been a list because, when I last spoke to the game’s executive producer, Jade Raymond, about Assassin’s Creed II in New York it seemed that all of the feedback about mission variety and pacing were being addressed.

“For Assassin’s Creed we received a real answer from the player,” Desilets told me. He wasn’t keeping a checklist but he’d heard the responses. He knew what the feedback was. That last game, acclaimed and popular as it was, was too routine, it confused people and it frustrated them. If what Desilets told me about what he and the 200-plus developers working on Assassin’s Creed II for Ubisoft is accurate, most of that will be remedied by the sequel. But not everything—because Patrice Desilets is the rare video game developer who discusses taking the messages he gets from the gaming public and then sending them a message back. He’s also still struggling with some key ideas that shape the works with which he is involved.

Let’s start with a lesson absorbed: The first game was, “too obvious,” Desilets said, finding another way of vocalising the critique that multi-million-selling Assassins’ Creed proved to be too repetitive. “We never played with the game structure. At the beginning of the game, we said to the players there’s nine guys to kill. You’ll do your investigations first. You’ll assassinate. You beat it. At the seventh one it’s still the same, and never did we play with that. So that was the first thing I threw in the trash can. I was like, ‘Let’s forget about this game structure.’ Let’s really hide the game design elements of the game structure and more have a narrative structure that is the game structure.”

And here’s a lesson resisted: The world of the old game frustrated collection-minded gamers, who discovered that there was no reward for finding all of the hidden flags in Assassin’s Creed. And while Raymond told me in New York earlier this summer that there will be rewards for some collecting in Assassin’s Creed II, Desilets informed me: “There are still some collectibles that are pretty useless.” Then he laughed.

My last meeting with Desilets, back in 2007, had been unusual and therefore memorable. He had shown up to my old offices at MTV with a review build of Assassin’s Creed, and then hung out while I started his game. Review builds of games often come in envelopes and boxes but neither before nor since have they arrived in the hands of the lead creator of the game. He was as gleeful about his team’s work then as he was when I talked to him again two weeks ago in Seattle.

As Desilets laughed about refusing to offer rewards for every single collectible in Assassin’s Creed II, I reminded him how happy he was to tell me back at MTV that flag-collecting in the first game did not yield rewards. “I know, and I still like it,” he said in Seattle. “That’s why I’m still smiling. And I know there’s a big debate about that. I’m not a collector person. I don’t collect a lot of stuff, so I don’t get it. I don’t understand.” I suggested he was giving the finger to obsessive collectors. “It’s not the middle finger,” he said. “That’s too [strong], but yes, I’m playing. I’m playing with them. It’s a dialogue. I need to talk also. This time there’ll be something else, but I’ll still be smiling in my living room.”

Desilets is not an altogether stubborn man. He’ll yield as he aims to please. He also admits he’s changing.

For the first Assassin’s Creed Desilets was driven to explain away the artifices of game design. Why is a game character controlled by a controller? Because he is a remembered ancestor of someone else, manipulated by an advanced device called the Animus. Why are there game levels? There weren’t. There were memories. Two years ago, making invisible the most game-y aspects of a video game was important to Desilets. He’s softened. “I’ve let go a bit,” he said. “I think in AC2 you’ll find a lot more video gamey elements and I’m fine with it. The head’s-up display, it’s there. There’s a lot more information. I realised it’s important people understand. Some didn’t in AC1 and we lost them. I don’t want it to happen again.”

Desilets said players ran into unnecessary confusion in that last game. For example, they didn’t understand which guards were eyeing their hero assassin. The new game adds icons that appear above the guards or at the borders of the screen to indicate the position of off-screen patrols. “That is video gamey,” Desilets said. “And I can live with that in 2009. I’m getting older. I’m getting wiser.”

Older and wiser, Desilets does still feel the push and pull about how video-gamey his video games are. “It’s still important for me that you get lost in the experience,” he said, earnestly searching for the best way to express his ideas.

“Sometimes to me playing Assassin’s Creed is not playing a video game. I don’t want it to be. You’re playing an experience.”

I pushed him to elaborate. He brought up another game. “Playing Hitman—and I have nothing against Hitman—It’s not playing the fantasy of being a Hitman. It’s playing a video game about a hitman and it’s unfolding a puzzle. That for me is very gamey and something I don’t want to do… [Assassin's Creed] is all about being this assassin in this period of time. It’s not about being an assassin in a video game. I’ll give you an example. I’m sure people would expect an assassin in a video game to hide in shadows. It’s not about that. It’s like: Those are video game rules. And for me, no, that’s not what I want to be playing or experimenting. I’m more into an experience than a video game, but we’ve put a lot more video game elements into AC2 than AC1.”

As Desilets tried to distinguish “video game” from “experience” I could already envision the responses to this dialogue between Desilets and his gamers. Might they accuse him of pretension or say he’s quibbling with semantics? Desilets talks about losing one’s self in Assassin’s Creed, of “not only playing it for numbers or objectives”. It can transport you. “You’re elsewhere for while,” he said. “That’s what I call the ‘experience’.

Maybe the “video game” term is a label that is losing its relevance, he suggested. “We decided at some point in history that it’s called a video game,” Desilets said of the things he and thousands of other people in game development create. ” A lot of stuff in video games are rules, common rules. You have to do it because it’s like that. I think, the more technology enables us to create worlds, it will be less and less about video games. AC1 we went really far in that idea. Maybe too far for where we are. That didn’t stop anyone from buying the game, because we sold a lot. But I know it stopped a lot of people from appreciating what it was. So this time around, I’ll let go like I said.”

The dialogue, it seems, will continue, not just between Desilets and his customers but among Desilets’ competing instincts as well.

Assassin’s Creed II ships in the fall on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Play it as a game. Play it as an experience. Just don’t expect there to be a reward for everything you find within it. And know that while you’re playing it, Desilets might be in his room, smiling, ready for your response.

See that Batman shot at the top of this post? I took it with my camera this morning. That’s the view I get of Batman during most of my time playing the Dark Knight’s new game, Batman Arkham Asylum. Patrice Desilets told me earlier this month during an interview at the Penny Arcade Expo, that he’s also been playing the game—Good game, he tells me, but Assassin’s Creed 2 will be better—so I thought he might have something to say about staring at the backs of characters.

Desilets is the kind of developer who would dwell on such things. He likes surmounting game design cliches or at least smoothing out their awkward aspects. In the first Assassin’s Creed, he grappled with explaining in the game’s fiction why a game character is controlled with a controller and why a game might be presented in levels. The explanation of both involved an in-game device that enabled a modern-day character to explore his memories—the bulk of the playable game.

Back to Batman’s back—and to the backs of the lead characters in Assassin’s Creed games: I like the Batman game, too. And I’m impressed by how Batman’s cape billows. I do spend a lot of time looking at his back, though. When I played Assassin’s Creed, I spent a lot of time staring at the back of that game’s hero, Altair.

So, I asked Desilets about this issue—call it a “problem” if it bothers you.

It’s not really a problem for him, he said. Because he won’t let it be. His answer to my “back problem” question introduced me to… “The Patrice Mode Camera.”

People who don’t use the Patrice Mode Camera, regular gamers like you and I, typically stare at the backs of characters. Not Patrice.

He doesn’t wind up staring at his character’s back that much when he plays Assassin’s Creed, he said. His development team has freed him of such rear-watching plight by programming a camera mode that runs the way he wants it to. It lets him switch off the game’s default camera and have it never snap back into a computer-selected position until he gives it permission to.

“As soon as I touch the camera, I don’t want anyone to change it,” he explained to me. “I lock it on a guard and a guard will pass by. The camera will flip.” The Patrice Mode Camera won’t stay centred behind the Assassin’s Creed hero. It will follow the guard, maybe putting the front of his own character now in the shot, but never—ever—snapping back to a default, programmed camera position. “Don’t put it back to the way it’s ’supposed to be,’” Desilets explained to me. He wants to be the cameraman. He wants to set up the shots.

I like this idea of doing one’s own camera work in games. I’ve tried it in Mario platformers, lining up jumps better by switching to side views. But I tried Assassin’s Creed again this morning, and even using its lock-on camera I was not able to engineer the effect Desilets described.

Perhaps Patrice Mode Camera will be in the sequel. Perhaps I’m just not skilled enough to use it yet. But if this frees us from looking at the wrong end of more video game characters, then I’m willing to learn something new. Bring on Patrice Mode, Patrice. I’m ready.

While the gaming press was falling over itself for Jade Raymond’s flowing locks in 2007, our eye had instead been caught by another Ubisoft employee. Patrice Desilets.

His name… so beautiful. His beard… so magnificent. His accent… so alluring. And yet, our admiration has been tinged with sadness, because shortly after Assassin’s Creed was released in late 2007, Patrice disappeared from the public eye.

Until now!

Here, he appears to not only tell us all about Assassin’s Creed 2, but to soothe our frayed nerves with his dulcet, Gallic tones. Highly recommended viewing.

Jade Raymond and Patrice Desilets and the entire Assassin’s Creed development team did an excellent job to create the game.

I view Jade as a very skilled and creative producer, the success of Assassin’s Creed leaves no doubt about that and the attention she received from the media is due to the anticipation, buzz and quality of the game. She’s currently working on a new project but it’s a little too early to share more about it.

BUT WHAT IS PATRICE WORKING? We are saddened that Yves Guillemot knows this, and he will not tell us. Bastard.
Yves Interview [GameDaily via FiringSquad] [Pic]

But everyone’s done previews and interviews and the game will be out in a few weeks – the 15th to be exact (thanks VURP). So instead, here’s a list of eight things you may not have heard about Assassin’s Creed.

Now, hit the jump and enjoy.8. “If you want to be a good Assassin, you have to walk.”
Yes, Desilets says good assassins are also excellent strollers. And I agree. When I first got my hands on the game, I spent most of my time running, fighting and attempting to climb.

I died. A lot.

“It’s freedom and constraint – this is really the two opposite values of Assassin’s Creed,” says Desilets. “There’s a mission where we actually asked the player not to go into open conflict. It gives really, really good emotion. You have to assassinate the guy there. You walk, and there’s a harasser coming at you. You know you cannot draw your weapon, otherwise maybe you’ll open conflict.”

7. You can play Assassin’s Creed without the HUD
During the Maritime Museum demo, Patrice went into the game’s options menu and disabled all of the HUD elements. This included the map, weapon selector, health bar and action selector. The screen was empy. According to Desilets, the game was designed first without a HUD, and the elements added in later in development.

Various visual cues keep you in the know, with a blurred red flash informing you of when you’ve been spotted, and a weird “ghostly” fade-in/fade-out effect when you’re on your last legs.

6. Altair’s American English accent is no mistake
No, Ubisoft Montreal didn’t make a boo-boo. There’s a reason why Altair doesn’t speak a word of French or Italian, even though everyone else around him seems pretty fluent. No doubt it’s all tied in to the mysterious futuristic side of the story.

5. Maps are built using “Lego blocks”
Desilets also revealed the way in which each city is built – using Lego blocks. Not actual Lego, but each building is really just a block that can be rotated and placed wherever it’s needed. This way, alleys and streets are a cinch to construct. It does put more of a burden on the artists over the level designers, I imagine.

4. There are 420 flags to collect… and they’re more than just collectables…
Dotted around each city are flags that Altair can pick up. On the Xbox 360, they act as an achievement. On the PlayStation 3… well, they’re just cool to pick up.

There’s a bit more to them though. Each time you pick up a flag it will replenish your health and save the game – as long as you’re not in the middle of an assassination mission. Definitely one for the power-gamers.

“It’s not something we actually thought of,” says Desilets. “It’s an emergent thing – where your save point is actually a collectable.” Sounds like a gaming first to me.

3. Soldiers at one point would run and get help, but it made the game too difficult
Assassin’s Creed includes a morale system for Altair’s enemies – if they see too many of their comrades slaughtered in nasty ways, they’ll make a run for it. Originally, they fetched help, but Desilets says it made the game way too hard, and was cut from the final build.

2. Assassin’s Creed can be finished in less than nine hours… if you’re Superman
Or a quality assurance tester who’s been playing it non-stop for the last couple of months.
“If you take your time a bit, and play with it, doing all the narrative objectives, it’ll take you roughly 25-30 hours,” Desilets says. “[There are] roughly 25 [narrative objectives], and the [other] 75 objectives are totally up to you.”

If the only thing you do is playtest Assassin’s Creed however, things work a bit differently.

“Right now there’s kind of a contest inside the Ubisoft QA team: Who’s going to do the game the fastest,” says Desilets. “I found the record is eight hours and a half. That guy [who did it], not only did he know everything, he made a map – he took for example the Damascus map – he tried to come up with fastest way between two objectives to get to the bureau … you have to waste no time.”

1. At Rank 7, you get a dodge move. At Rank 9, you get 15 knives
Altair not only gets new weapons as he advances in Rank, he also gets a special dodge move, and the ability to carry 15 throwing knives, up from the five of the lower ranks.

So, did you learn something new? I know I did.

Sound familiar? It’s where Ubisoft Montreal is based, arguably one of the top development houses in the world. It’s also the home of Assassin’s Creed. Need I say more?

In 1996, Quebec established a special fiscal program for multimedia titles, whereby companies developing games could receive a tax credit on labour costs. Depending on the type of game being made, developers can currently receive a break of up to 30%, with an additional 7.5% for French-language titles.

How effective have these tax incentives been? I asked Ubisoft Montreal’s creative director Patrice Desilets this very question while he was here promoting Assassin’s Creed.

So Ubisoft grew bigger, and since then EA came, now we have Eidos. Smaller companies of Quebec became larger. Right now, I think it’s 4000 people in the Montreal area are working in games. When I started [in July 1997], it was maybe 200 people, maybe a little bit more.
…
I read in the newspaper the other day, it was a survey about when Montreal … is mentioned in international media, Ubisoft was the fourth reason Montreal was mentioned in any article.

Pretty impressive growth in 10 years, wouldn’t you say?

It wasn’t a dream as a French-Canadian to become a game designer. Now it is.

Why can’t it be the Australian dream too?

According to Desilets, his boss (Raymond perhaps? Far right, above) called him the day after the comments were made and they exchanged a few words. All Desilets was willing to say today on the Xbox 360 issue was:

There’s no problem anymore. It’s gone.

And:

I learned my lesson.

Patrice is a nice bloke, so I hope whoever spoke to him wasn’t too hard on his tongue slippage.