Assassin's Creed Unity (The Movie)

The story of the game Assassin's Creed Unity edited into movie format, including cutscenes and gameplay, and edited so that anybody can understand and enjoy the story, whether you've played the game or not.

Assassin's Creed Unity tells the story of Arno, an assassin in the French Revolution. The story itself is fairly standalone, so feel free to watch this even if you haven't played any of the previous games or watched their movies. However, the other games' movies are available on my channel. If you like the movie, make sure to support the developers of the game by buying it!

Sorry about the wait. I've been working on this movie since mid January. Probably the longest I've worked on a game movie. The biggest reason is that I had to do 243 visual effects shots for this movie. Blame Ubisoft for their insane need to remind us that the game is autosaving every 10 seconds or so. Due to the way I like to make movies, I tried my hardest to remove all of them, and I got most, but some of them were impossible to remove.

For those of you unfamiliar with my process, the idea of these movies is to take a game's story and present it like a movie. I try to do it in a way where you can enjoy it whether you've played the game or not, or even if you don't play video games at all. Even if you've played the game, watching it this way can allow you to view the story in a new light, as the story is condensed into a few hours instead of spread out over what is usually several gameplay sessions. If you can watch it all in one sitting, even better.

Unlike many other youtubers who do something similar, I don't just include the cutscenes, because then you're missing out on critical moments in the story. I include whatever gameplay I feel is necessary to avoid plot holes and keep the story flowing. In order to achieve this I try to keep gameplay to a minimum, but I also try to make sure whatever gameplay I do use is done in a very efficient way, which often requires me to play the same levels multiple times until I do it in a way that I think looks good, much like a director filming multiple takes of a scene.

I also like to make sure the experience is as close to a movie as possible, instead of a game. Assassin's Creed does a great job at allowing you to disable most of the HUD in-game. Unity still shows target markers though unfortunately, and because they're present for 99% of the gameplay, I decided not to try to remove them. Like Black Flag, most of my visual effect work was on removing the autosave indicators, of which there were a lot. For an example, in the first "server bridge" scene alone, there were 14 autosaves. 14. There should have been 1, maybe 2 max.

Once again I must beg Ubisoft to change their autosave behavior. If you show a warning in the beginning it's unnecessary to keep showing an indicator throughout gameplay. You practically have to yank the power cord from the system anyway these days to cause corruption, and I think it's safe to say gamers know not to do that. Plenty of games get away with not showing an autosave indicator anymore. If you are going to show it, don't autosave every few seconds. Do it after completing an objective or starting a cutscene or something, but not after every move the player makes. It's ridiculous.

If you've never played/seen another Assassin's Creed game, don't worry, this game pretty much has no spoilers whatsoever, except maybe a couple small things that would only really be a minor spoiler if you had an eidetic memory.

As for future movie plans, my next movie will either be Shadow of Mordor or Assassin's Creed Rogue. After that it will probably be Arkham Knight, and if I have time, I may also be able to release an Assassin's Creed Liberation movie this year. Next year there's Uncharted 4 and possibly Rise of the Tomb Raider. If I run out of ideas there's always a Last of Us Remastered or Tomb Raider Definitive Edition movie I could make, as well as the rumored Uncharted Remasters. I'm also currently playing through the Metal Gear Solid series due to recommendations from my fans. Currently on MGS2. There may be some potential in that series for a movie too, but I'm not yet sure about that, and there may be length issues too. We'll see.

Thanks for waiting. I hope you enjoy this movie. I think the story works a lot better condensed as a movie than spread out in a game, personally.