Assassin’s Creed Unity: Creating Notre Dame in the Game Took 5,000 Man-Hours

In June we learned that Notre Dame in Assassin's Creed Unity will be as big as the real cathedral but now Ubisoft has revealed just how much work went into recreating the famous church in the game. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that a "mind boggling 5,000 man-hours" were dedicated to the creation of Notre Dame in Unity. The publisher, which is French, worked with historians to create a depiction of Paris during the country's infamous revolution which is as accurate as possible. 

As for why this particular era was chosen, the games' creative director Alex Amancio commented, “And something we wanted to showcase was large crowds of people, and that’s why we chose the French Revolution.”

Alain Corre, head of Ubisoft Europe, added: 

“Large console games have become increasingly bigger and more complex to make. Today’s console games are really becoming huge projects.

“The new hardware has enabled us software makers to do a lot of new things. For instance, it’s easier to make open world games, and add social elements to the productions. So the games are becoming much richer. You can move through the individual floors of an entire building, which makes for an entirely new experience.”

One quarter of the buildings of Paris in Unity will have completely navigable interiors, a huge step-up from previous Assassin's Creed games. 

While the amount of work dedicated to replicating Notre Dame is impressive, it makes one wonder about Ubisoft's priorities in a game which the company claimed could not feature playable women for technical reasons. While we've since discovered that all players in the game will appear as protagonist Arno when playing co-op, there's little reason some of the other player avatars, which will change in your game, couldn't have been female. 

Assassin's Creed Unity launches on October 28th for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. You can watch 11 minutes of playable solo-gameplay from this week's gamescom here.