Summary
It’s no secret thatUbisoft’sAssassin’s Creedfranchise is wickedly popular. Since its inception in 2007,the series has gone on to sell over 200 million copies to date. And it’s not stopping anytime soon, either. That’s becauseUbisoft is rumored to be releasing 10 Assassin’s Creed titles within the next 5 years alone.
That said, as popular as Assassin’s Creed is, the series has taken a shift, for better or worse, into a more action-RPG aesthetic not too dissimilar from The Witcher. Said shift has alienated some longtime fans, while also helping make the series even more popular than where it once was.
However, could the franchise’s “staleness” be due to a lack of motion capture? Well, that’s what a former Assassin’s Creed voice actor has theorized.
The Secret Sauce Is Motion Capture
In a new interview with GamesRadar, Ralph Ineson, a well-regarded voice actor, who served as the voice and capture of Charles Vane in Black Flag, shared his thoughts on the importance of motion capture in gaming, as opposed to strict voice acting.
“[Motion capture] is brilliant, a completely different acting experience,” Ineson said. “I wish that more video game companies would use mocap, because I think the performance stuff in Black Flag is brilliant.”
As part of the interview, Ineson,who also has an extensive TV background, shared just how much work he put into his role. “Once every month, for about four months, I went out to Montreal with Mark Bonnar and a couple of other British actors and spent a week in their motion-capture studio,” Ineson revealed of the process.
It’s with that in mind that Ineson believes that the current games are missing. “When you compare it to some of the later Assassin’s Creeds, there may be a little bit of facial capture, but they haven’t got the physical stuff, and I think you’re able to notice that,” Ineson said. “My son — who is more of an expert than me — said, ‘Dad, the one you did was by far the best one - they’ve gone downhill from there!‘”
His theory makes some sense. With the later games shifting to a more RPG-like aesthetic, a lot of the dialogue is choice-based, leaving the scenes static as players can choose between a male or female main character. That can break immersion, compared to the series' roots in full-length cutscenes.
That’s not to say the current iterations of the franchise are bad. But it is interesting to hear the perspective of someone intimately involved with one of the most popular games.
