Overview:

  • Genre: Action Adventure
  • Platform(s): Meta Quest Pro, 2 & 3 (VR)
  • Role: Lead Level Designer
  • Release Date: November 16, 2023

Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR is a virtual reality action-adventure game developed by Ubisoft for virtual reality (VR) headsets Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest Pro, and Meta Quest 3. Played from a first-person perspective, the game stars Ezio Auditore da Firenze, Connor, and Kassandra as its protagonists.

Gameplay Overview:

Responsibilities:

  • Team Management & Product Ownership: I lead a team which consisted of 10 Level Designers and Technical Level Designers at its peak size for two years during the development of ‘Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR’ at Ubisoft Düsseldorf. I was also the Product Owner of the ‘Ezio’ missions set in renaissance Venice and Monteriggioni.
  • Communication: I liaisoned between directors, production, fellow departments and our team to achieve the vision and meet the project goals.
  • Feedback: I provided feedback on the missions’ designs on a daily basis. Topics included: mission structure and pacing, player leading and navigation, tactical sandboxes, level layout, level ingredients, AI placement and balancing, VR comfort topics…
  • Mentorship: I mentored team members in their skill and career development. Example: I planned out and agreed with a team member on specific goals to be promoted. They achieved the goals and got the promotion. In result, everyone (project, studio, team member and myself) was happy with the outcome.
  • Planning & Optimization: I conducted sprint planning sessions and retrospectives with the team to prioritize the work correctly and improve our processes.

Highlights:

(Credit to ‘A Wolf in VR‘ for these videos and the many talented folks at Ubisoft who contributed to these levels)

  • Staying true to the original: The missions in which the player steps in the shoes of Ezio Auditore are based on the adventures of the main character in Assassin’s Creed 2. Nostalgia is a big appeal of the game. The player revisits locations from previous AC games and we could even re-use geometry (to an extent) for the missions in AC: Nexus. However, with that also came the responsibility to not deviate too much from the places that players remember from the original game (and their iconic real-life counterparts e.g. the towns of Monteriggioni and Venice). We did adjustments when we had to for gameplay and optimization reasons, while still respecting the source material. Some levels, like the tunnels between Monteriggioni and lair of the Cult of Hermes, were new additions that we built from scratch and where we could take more liberty in designing.

‘Return To Monteriggioni’ – Arriving in Monteriggioni (33:58 onwards):

‘Rizzo’s Humiliations’ – Arriving in Venice (30:07 onwards):

  • VR-challenges: AC: Nexus is played in first-person perspective, which is a big difference to the main series of AC games (placed in 3rd Person). Not only that, virtual reality and its interaction methods requires a whole new set of considerations for designers. There are a lot of fun aspects that VR can apply to the AC formula: climbing walls, using the ‘hidden blade’ on enemies, peaking behind cover etc. by performing hand gestures and moving/looking around in real-space. But these movements are more tiring and signal more imminent and tense than playing with a console controller on a flatscreen. For example, falling down is much more uncomfortable and disorienting in VR. Consistently high framerates are much more important to avoid nausea. Consider possible player fatigue when designing parkour routes and enemy encounters. At a minimum, work with your colleagues on VR comfort features like alternative locomotion methods and FOV-reducing vignettes etc. to allow player who are sensitive to VR-sickness to still be able to enjoy your levels.
  • Parkour: AC is well-known for allowing players to climb and parkour across environments so AC: Nexus should be no exception. Metrics had to be established, props to be created and classified between ‘parkour starters’ (that players could easily identify to initiate parkour) and other parkour elements that afforded the different parkour movements players could perform. Their placement didn’t only have to be designed with the direction of the player’s objectives in mind – the length and rhythm of each parkour route had to also respect the before-mentioned VR constraints and its difficulty be in accordance to the players progression by that point. Parkour in VR had to be taught to the player, so we designed a linear level – the tunnels beneath Monteriggioni – to teach the player advanced parkour mechanics and deliver narrative beats, as the player is chasing after Seraphina and her crew of bandits.

The Tunnels of Monteriggioni – Advanced Parkour Tutorial (11:02 onwards)

  • Tactical Sandboxes: AC Nexus levels are semi-open world and by that I mean that they are not as vast as the PC & console counterparts but they provide enough space to allow players to pick the order of completing main objectives, discovering side-missions and choosing between different approaches to complete an objective. The way these objectives and their surroundings can be analyzed from vantage points, approached from multiple angles and in different styles (action/stealth/traversal), the way that enemy patrols and gameplay ingredients (traps that can be activated by the player, objects that can be used for distractations etc.) are set-up, is commonly referred to as tactical sandboxes. They are not unique to AC Nexus or Assassin’s Creed in general (I remember designing tactical sandboxes in levels for FarCry, in 2003), but they haven’t found their way into many VR games yet and were fun to build and iterate on in this game, as well.

The Final Humiliation – The Palazzo (08:11 onwards)

  • Optimization: The game was targeted at the Meta Quest 2 VR handset which is a stand-alone device without the additional computing power of a PC or a gaming console. This meant that the target hardware’s capabilities to run the game were more similar to those of a smartphone than anything the traditional AC games were running on. This translated to very tight constraints on the number of vertices , drawcalls and memory that we could use at a time. Performance and optimization had to be at the forefront of whatever we were building. Groups of assets had to be batched and baked or reduced to meet the performance goals.
  • Puzzles: VR input methods (‘using your hands’) lend themselves well to interacting with mysterious contraptions and solving puzzles. Each one found in AC: Nexus went through numerous internal and external playtests. None of them were perfect from the start and all of them went through iterations. I remember an early version of the ‘fireworks puzzle’ in ‘Rizzo’s Humiliations’ where we did the classic mistake of showing the player the solution (location of the rockets) before showing them the problem (the half-empty box of rockets). I developed the idea for the puzzle inside the clock tower in “The Return of the Cult of Hermes” and look back fondly on working with the LD, Jibran Khan, on this.

Cult of Hermes Reborn – Clock Tower Puzzle (01:47 onwards)

  • Mission Blocks & High-Level Perspective: On AC: Nexus I’ve found an appreciation for standardization and a high-level perspective on player progression across an entire game. To elaborate: ‘Mission Blocks’ are essentially standardized player objectives (‘Assassinate X’, ‘Go to location Y’, ‘Escort Character Z’). They are meant to be plug & play modules that standardize the way a type of objective behaves across the entire game (as opposed to many custom scripts). Standardization reduces the amount of different objective types that have to be created/maintained. It also prevents player confusion when signs and feedback for an objective turn out to be different from one mission to the next even though the objectives practically tell players to do the same thing. When you take a step back and look at what and how many mission blocks are used in a mission – or across missions – you can potentially find some issues, e.g.: Too many objectives of the same type in a mission, too many new types of objectives being introduced in one mission (whereas others have only recycled objectives), too many Action- or Traversal-related objectives in one mission. You can do the same thing for any other piece of content like enemy types, player items, gameplay ingredients, …

Thanks for reading!