Welcome to our first Inside the Studio for Assassin's Creed Odyssey! To [Spartan] kick things off, we met with Game Director Scott Phillips for an interview.

Scott shared his insight about working with the Assassin's Creed Syndicate core team, and how they came together again to build their vision for Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

You can read his answers below or – if you want to dive deeper – you can hear it raw and straight from the source!

You can also find this episode on iTunes.

Could you tell us a little bit about you and your history at Ubisoft?

I've been making games since 2002, and I joined Ubisoft in 2014 to be the game director on Assassin's Creed Syndicate. I was looking for a challenge or something different, and this also came with a new country and a new language.

Quite the adventure!

Definitely. I had a really good feeling about the project, about the studio, and the size of it. When I saw what Syndicate was and what Unity looked like, I was blown away by the quality. When I joined, Unity was just going through the end stages of production, so I was able to play little bits of it. Then I was on Syndicate straightaway, and I got to know the team very well.

And you're still working with the same team as on Assassin's Creed Syndicate?

It's a very similar core directors team. I'm continuing as the game director. Jonathan Dumont, who was the world director on Syndicate, is the creative director on Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Marc Alexis is now the producer, and our world director, Benjamin Hall, was one of the leads on Syndicate. We've gotten to know each other better over the last three or four years with Syndicate and now with Odyssey. I think having a shorthand with people and knowing what they're thinking before they've said it really helps production.

Now, if I want to do something in a certain area with animation or with the world, I know exactly who to talk to and how to make that happen, and we can quickly move forward because we trust each other.

Could you tell us more about being a game director, and what your day-to-day looks like?

My day-to-day changes during different parts of the project. For instance, since we're approaching the end, my day is mostly playing the game as much as possible. That's something that's actually nice with Odyssey, because the game is so big that I'm always discovering new things.

At a high level, the game director works closely with the creative director on the overall vision for the game: what's the fantasy? What's the experience we want people to have across every aspect of it? Then I work with all of the individual directors – audio, art, animation, world – and very closely with all of the game designers. We're always owning the experience of it, and trying to convey to the team what the player should be feeling when they're doing this, or what experience we want to deliver within these 30 minutes, or with this feature. I work with all the individual teams to make sure we hit that ultimate vision.

What were the biggest accomplishments in creating the world of Assassin's Creed Odyssey?

Since we worked on Syndicate, we always compare it to London. One city in our world is the size of London, which was our entire world last time. Being able to keep the places feeling like they're alive and interesting and authentic is probably the biggest thing we've done. It took a long time to get the world to a feeling of the proper density. Ben (our world director) and I had a lot of discussions about how many cities there should be, how much wilderness, and how much space the player should have to just sort of travel. We're also always under time pressure, so you have to figure that stuff out quickly! I think what we've delivered is a really cool version of what Ancient Greece would have felt like had you been there 2,500 years ago.

What are you most excited for our community to experience playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey?

I'm excited to see what people do differently now that we have choice as an overall theme of the game with dialogues and with quests, with the customization of your gear, abilities, ship, and crew. All these elements will lead to a lot of people making the game feel like their own. I really think people will feel surprised and happy with the variety of things they can choose and the different outcomes they can get.

Was choice a conversation that you had early on?

In one of our very first discussions, we talked about choice being key to the game. That was our line in the sand very early on of something we wanted to achieve, and I think we've accomplished something really great in these three years. There are a lot of really, really cool moments throughout the game, and when I play it now I'm still discovering things that were done or things that are getting added for post-launch. It's a whole new feeling to Assassin's Creed where it feels like an RPG, like a world you're going to spend a lot of time in, a world you're going to make your own.

I'm really looking forward to the community getting to experience all of this. Any final thoughts to share with us?

I really hope people enjoy the game. We put a lot of love into it, and I'm an Assassin's Creed fan myself. I hope the community likes the direction, the choice, the options, the RPG, and the naval system. The game that we decided to make three years ago is pretty much the game that we will be shipping. That is rare, and I definitely feel proud that the vision that we had early on is what we are delivering – and I think that vision turned out very, very nicely.

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We hope you enjoyed reading or listening to our interview with Scott Phillips. We'd love to hear your thoughts – whether it's about topics or guests you'd like for us to explore down the road, or even what you think about this audio edition.

Join the discussion with our community on the official forums or reach us on Twitter with #ACInsidetheStudio.

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