What makes the cities of the Assassin’s Creed series so interesting is all that verticality and quirks. Philadelphia at the time was ”mostly made out of a grid.” Streets were kilometers long.
Maxime Durand served as their historian, and he revealed the ugly truth about the revolutionary times of Philadelphia during an AMA on Reddit.
”So there are thousands of things we were really happy to fit in the game, such as people opening windows (because they use to throw their chamberpots) or all the military stuff, but one of the elements which did not make it was a big chunk: Philadelphia,” posted Durand.
“Although there was a lot of historical evidence to recreate it, it would have been technically ugly. At the time of the Revolution, the city was mostly made out of a grid. Imagine how boring navigating through that would have been, with no points of orientation… Also the loading on a street that stretches for kilometers would have been problematic.”
The loading problem all comes down to memory limitations, which of course are determined by what the Xbox 360 and PS3 has at their disposal. Fortunately at least the PC version of Assassin’s Creed III due next week contains plenty of upgrades like DirectX 11’s tessellation and generally higher textures all-round; as well as all patches to-date.
