Ubisoft is putting a whole lot of muscle behind Assassin’s Creed 2 – three times as much as they had for the first game, to be exact.
Sometimes it doesn’t take very many people to make a game. Braid took two people. Sometimes it takes a whole lot of people to make a game. The first Assassin’s Creed took around 150 people to make. And sometimes it takes a small army to make a game. The second Assassin’s Creed is one of those games.
The Assassin’s Creed 2 crew, producer Sebastien Puel estimated in an interview with NowGamer, is “about three times the size of the team of the first game.” That makes about 450 people. You could form a small militia and lead a failed revolution with those numbers. Or you could hunker down, get everyone to work their butts off, and make the best dang assassinating game set in Renaissance Italy ever.
Of those 450 folks, Puel says that some of them were key staff on the original Assassin’s Creed team. “Making [Assassin’s Creed] from A to Z took around four years,” he said. “It’s a very good thing we are keeping most of the core members who envisioned the first Assassin’s Creed. They know the project well.”
Knowing the project well doesn’t just mean what it was before, but what it could have been. Puel says that the old Assassin’s Creed staff had “thousands of ideas” that didn’t make it into the first game but that they’re “integrating” into the new one. One game with thousands of ideas? Might be a little bit of idea overload there.
