Assassin's Creed 3 is set to take place all across the Eastern seaboard during and around the time of the American Revolution. This, we know, and the developer has already revealed a few of the locations that we can expect to traverse as Connor in the game.
Thus far, we know that Connor will participate in the battle of Bunker Hill, traverse the British-occupied streets of Boston, and even sail to the West Indies in his naval operations.
In a new interview, the game's creative director Alex Hutchinson revealed that Connor will make his way to New York. Hutchinson revealed that during early development of Assassin's Creed 3, it was planned for Connor to be able to ride from Boston through the Frontier to New York by having a contiguous map. However, the developers felt that having a contiguous map "made it feel like Disneyland." The game, he says, "stops feeling real" if players are able to run in five minutes from one city to the next.
For that reason, Ubisoft Montreal decided to keep the cities separated with load screens with most of the action in New York happening only in the densest part of the city rather than its surrounding, swampy outskirts.
The city will look different from Boston in terms of architecture due to the influence of the Dutch.
“So we have those unusual buildings with fake fronts… and then sloped roofs behind them. That changes the free-running a little bit. It’s most of lower Manhattan, the tip that was there at the time. The population wasn’t anywhere near as big as it is now obviously, so we were able to get a lot of the city in that was actually there.”
Much of the action in New York will take place after The Great Fire of 1776, which destroyed over a quarter of the city. Players may expect to discover who started the fire and why, the cause of which remains a mystery to this date.
Assassin's Creed 3 is set for release on the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 later this year.
