Game Informer Interview with Jade Raymond

For those living under a rock for the past few years, Jade Raymond is a spicy hot G4 Host and Sony programmer turned EA Producer.

She's currently been working on Assassin's Creed for the XBOX360 and PS3. In a recent interview with Raymond, Game Informer hits some important answers concerning the upcoming medieval title.

When questioned what the difference between the two SKU's would be:

"There shouldn’t be any differences at all. We’re sharing the exact same assets. The engines have the same capabilities. Both systems have different things going for them. With PlayStation 3, currently, you can see maybe a slight difference in some of the textures. With Xbox 360 right now you may see a little bit smoother framerate, maybe a couple more frames per second right now. It’s so negligible right now that unless you’re sitting there looking at them both side by side, you’re not going to see any difference. And that’s our goal—to deliver the exact same experience on both of them."

There are no current plans to utilize Sony's Sixaxis controller for the title either.

When questioned about a Wii port Raymond was quite blunt stating:

Totally out of the question. You would have to change the gameplay completely. Our mandate was to deliver a game that wouldn’t be possible on a previous system. That’s what we were told to do. So we were like, “OK, what wouldn’t have been possible? One hundred and fifty people on-screen, each with their own AI. What else wouldn’t have been possible? Climbing absolutely everywhere, a free path where you can go anywhere, all that stuff. The AI is chasing you everywhere you can go. Great. Let’s do that.” So we wrapped it all up and did Assassin’s Creed. Of course you could make a great Wii game based on the franchise and story and have it fit and stuff, because that’s something we thought about—having episodic content and having different things. But gameplay wise it would have to have a totally different set of key features.

All in all this rationale makes sense. Developers should not be looking to port games from other systems to the Wii being that to fully take advantage of what the Wii has to offer the game truly needs to be build from the ground up with the intent of pushing its hardware, both from an art and engineering side as well as design. Use the system to it's fullest, and unfortunately I don't see that very likely when reverse engineering an existing engine.

Full Article Here

\\drew