Assassin's Creed Syndicate (The Movie)

Assassin's Creed in Victorian London! Twins Evie and Jacob Frye attempt to regain control of London from the Templars, ending their 100 year reign.

Thanks for being patient with me while I worked on this movie. This game in particular took a long time to record footage for, because of the leveling system. I wanted to make sure my characters were at the recommended level or higher before playing each mission, and I also wanted to make sure I could liberate as much of each zone as possible before entering a mission in that zone, so there was a lot of experience grinding involved while playing this game, which resulted in a total of 32 hours recorded by the end.

Once I finished capturing footage, it didn't take very long to edit. If you don't know about my process, one of the things I do that sets me apart is that I'm determined to bring the experience as close as I can to a true movie going experience, and part of that involves removing any remaining HUD elements through editing and VFX. For the past 4 Assassin's Creed movies, there have been a lot of HUD elements that I have been removing through VFX, with typically over 100 VFX shots. This movie was a little different, for both good and bad reasons.

AC Syndicate improved one area that had been a particular annoyance in past games, and that was the saving/loading icon. Ever since Black Flag, that icon literally appeared after everything you did. Every assassination, etc. It showed up an average of every 30 seconds. Unity improved this frequency somewhat, but also made the icon larger and harder to get rid of. Syndicate did a great job of only showing the icon after major objectives have been completed, and also reduced the length it was shown on screen. I ended up only using 29 VFX shots to get rid of those. A few still remain, however.

On the other hand, Syndicate has, hands down, the most amount of HUD elements that remain on screen even when the options are set to "no HUD'. I removed as much as I can, but there are certain things that were just impossible to remove, so while the experience is a mostly clean image, there are definitely a lot of annoying HUD popups that I couldn't remove. I tried my best! Ubisoft, when we say we want no HUD, let us do just that! Yes we know you may feel certain HUD elements are absolutely necessary to play, but if we want to disable them, we want to disable them. That's why there should be a "minimal HUD" option, in addition to "no HUD". I believe both Unity and Syndicate had those options, but they can still be improved.

As for what I'm doing next, it's going to be Uncharted 4. Uncharted 4 releases May 10th, and I will be playing it day one. I will play all the difficulties and try to go for the platinum trophy, and after I'm done will all of that, I will move on to making the movie. However, I will likely be streaming my "Crushing" mode playthrough, if you're interested in that. Uncharted movies don't usually take too long though, so I'd guess early June for that one, but I'll update you more on that when I start working on it.

After Uncharted 4, I will likely do Assassin's Creed Liberation. I've been putting that one off for a long time, but now I think I will finally have the schedule cleared for that :D Later in the year I also plan to do Rise of the Tomb Raider, after that comes out for PS4. In between ACL and RotTR, I may also do Heavy Rain if I end up liking that game. I suspect there's a good chance of that, based on my experience with Beyond Two Souls, but we'll see.

Let me know what you think, and as always, if you like the movie, support the developers and buy the game! I know a lot of people skipped out on Syndicate because of poor experiences with Unity, but believe me, Syndicate is a great game!