Tag Archives: Andréane Meunier

Playing upcoming smartphone game, Assassin’s Creed: Utopia will have no bearing on, or contribute extra content to, your Assassin’s Creed III game, Ubisoft has confirmed. Those that abhor trans-device gaming tie-ins will be pleased, but the move seems to contradict Ubisoft’s “companion gaming” strategy.

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Ubisoft production manager Andréane Meunier has told Eurogamer that Assassin’s Creed bought Splinter Cell: Conviction more time to get things right.

“Because actually we felt that the game wasn’t well received [at Ubidays] and some of the critics were actually saying that we were missing the gameplay, when we started having maybe a bit of trouble bringing back the core gameplay, and we saw the success that Assassin’s was going to have, Ubisoft made the decision to say, ‘look guys, take the time you need to do this game, we’ve got someone bringing in the money for the next year so we’re okay, we won’t ship a game that’s not good, so go ahead and take the time to do it’.

“That took the pressure off us and allowed us to rework the core values that we wanted to bring out.”

As far as the Krav-Maga self-defense Sam pulls of in this iteration, Meunier said that the development team brought in people trained in the art used by the Israeli secret service.

“We realized that in the previous Splinter Cell it was mentioned that Sam had a training in that, and that was part of the back story he had, and we started looking into it in Montreal and the type of moves that it involves, and when we did that we found that a couple of well-known actors in Montreal were trained in Krav-Maga, so we brought them in and we mocapped them.

“So we were lucky to find both Krav-Maga and acting in the same persons.”

Ubisoft production manager Andréane Meunier has sat down with Eurogamer to discuss the stealth genre along with Splinter Cell: Conviction.

According to Meunier, stealth appeals to people in everyday life.

“It appeals to everybody. We’ve all had sneaking around as kids and surprising somebody. Stealth is something I think people enjoy, and even if you watch movies about spies and infiltration or whatever, it’s interesting that people like stealth,” said Meunier. “The way the gameplay was done, it was really constraining, and it was really hardcore: you do this or not, I’m going to slap your wrist if you do it that way. Maybe that’s not the way people feel they should play stealth.

“Some people just say, ‘oh, the stealth genre is dead’ or is too hardcore, but we’re saying no, there is a feeling that people want to play stealth, we just need to give them a way to play with it.

Meunier feels that despite the fact that stealth is present in many other action games, Ubisoft tries to remain one step ahead.

“Obviously if something works you try to copy and take advantage of it, but we’re questioning ourselves and saying let’s push this a bit further.”

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