Original Assassin’s Creed designer and Ubisoft Toronto boss Jade Raymond likes candlelit dinners, long walks on the beach, and video games that don’t rely on explosions to entertain the player.
“I really do feel it’s time for our medium to grow up,” she told CVG. “I think we don’t need to make the equivalent to a Michael Bay flick in order to sell five million copies. I think things can be exciting, have meaning and hit important topics, and I’m not the only one that thinks that.”
“I think every other entertainment medium or art form does manage to have commercial success and have the viewers or audience think or be inspired,” she added. “Games, I think, have even more potential than that given that on top of the narrative side we do have all of the gameplay mechanics and we create rule sets from scratch which can have any kind of meaning embedded in them. It’s not easy to do that, because it requires breaking our recipe and trying to find new recipes, but I think it’s an important thing for us to strive for.”
Raymond is currently in charge of the new Splinter Cell game, which she described as “something a little bit more interesting” than the average action game. Maybe this time, instead of shooting people indiscriminately, Sam Fisher will have to talk to enemies and persuade them that their emotional ideologies are being manipulated by unscrupulous bad guys. Even better with Kinect.
Probably not.
