Assassin's Creed Revelations marks the fourth Assassin's Creed title to release in the last five years. While that might seem punishing from the perspective of a AAA game developer, Assassin's Creed Revelations mission design director Falco Poiker thinks it works out just right.
“These games, the production cycle is less than a year, which actually for me is about ideal,” said Poiker to Edge. “Most productions – real production is about that length, but because you have the previous game that's just finishing on production and you start the next game's production, there's this very quick ramp-up time where you're just swallowing resources saying, 'OK, let's make this team.' And from a 20-person team to a 180-people team within a few months, even that is a bit of a nightmare. Getting to know everybody, what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses, who do I give this important mission to? It's a creative mission – is that person creative or are they technical? So yeah, the time is definitely not on our side.”
“But a lot of people complain about that, I mean I'm talking internally – people say there's not enough time. But it gives an impetus to the team and we find a direction that we say we're going to run in, and there's very little of the indecision that comes with teams that spend two, three, four years developing games. Frequently those games will restart completely from the ground-up because they're like, 'We're not satisfied where we are.' We don't have that luxury so the time actually kind of works in our favor. We go one direction and we go with it. If there's problems, oh well, we'll fix it along the way.”
