Assassin’s Creed: Liberation HD Preview – Bringing Aveline To The Masses

Assassin’s Creed: Liberation HD is really quite a pretty game. Where the PS Vita original struggled with the limitations of the hardware, and could often look quite murky with it’s sub-native resolution, Liberation HD looks vibrant and open.

This off-shoot from the main franchise, originally released on Vita last October, saw the series’ first female character, Aveline de Grandpré, an African-French assassin in and around New Orleans. It follows her story, as she strives to free slaves from captivity, whilst simultaneously taking down Templars who get in the way.

As a game, it really didn’t have to do much more than be Assassin’s Creed transposed to the Vita, but it was quite a positive step to see them pushing for this fresh take on proceedings, and Aveline’s popularity has been such that she is now the protagonist in the PlayStation exclusive Assassin’s Creed IV content.

“We wanted to bring Aveline to the wider audience, because, just the reaction from the [fans], when we announced Aveline, was amazing. So I think it’s worth it,” said Associate Producer, Momchil Gindyanov.

Ubisoft Sofia have come back to their game, almost directly off the back of their PS Vita release.

Momchil revealed that, “We are the same team. So when we started doing the HD version, the whole team gathered together and said, ‘OK. We want to fix this and this and this.’ So everybody that has been working on the Vita version has at some time gone through [and asked to fix things]. This is really our baby, and we are glad and proud to be releasing Aveline’s story on other consoles.”

It’s a great opportunity for them to dive back into the game, and address issues which they’ve seen in the original release. Just on the graphical side, there has been a huge overhaul of the engine.

“The general graphical improvements are what you would expect from a console,” explained Momchil. “Geometry is higher, textures are higher and redone, all of the skeletons of all the characters are redone, the crowd is absolutely improved with more characters and more reactions. We did unique reactions and animations, different situations that do improve the life in the city. We put animal life in the city and in the bayou, because before it was just the crocodiles, but now we have enriched that.

“With the rendering, all the lighting is new; we implemented linear lighting, and HDR algorithms plus dynamic change of the day. So this called for a full change of all the colours and materials and the shaders.”

It certainly sounds like an almost endless list of changes and improvements, and it is quite an impressive step up. Admittedly, I’ve only spent a short amount of time with the Vita original, but it didn’t tickle my graphical funny bone the way that this showing did. I found it looked so good that I had to double check that it wasn’t running at more than 720p – it is.

Their overhaul hasn’t merely extended to graphics, though, and they have gone through the game with a fine comb, to better balance certain missions and tweak the gameplay.

“All of the existing missions, on the main path and side content, were remastered,” said Momchil. “Meaning we had a lot of data from play-testing and fans, and our own internal reviews, about different properties for the missions.

“So we had the fun factor, based on fun and difficulty and on challenge. So all of the objectives were tweaked, mission by mission. So we say, ‘OK, this mission isn’t fun, but what will make it fun?’ and we move characters here and there, put a surprise here, maybe, so that something different will happen. Then we put it again into testing.”

However, even with 15 new side missions, which are set to put Aveline’s various guises to use in some new ways, it doesn’t seem that this will add much to entice Vita players to buy it again. These should help to expand on Aveline’s character somewhat, but without touching the main story arc is far from essential to existing owners.

Having said that, there are always possibilities for Ubisoft to give back to Vita fans and – as reported by The Average Gamer – there might be the opportunity to discount the HD re-release for those existing fans.

Similarly, I wondered if some of the changes made to the gameplay for this overhaul might potentially be rolled back to the handheld, to which Momchil replied, “That’s a good idea and we might think about that, yeah.”

Of course, these are long shots in many ways, but would be a nice way to give back. The important thing here is that Aveline’s story is able to reach a wider audience, and in bringing the game to PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, they’re able to make it look and play better than it has before.