Assassin's Creed Revelations: Writing history

Assassin's Creed is currently one of gaming's most popular series, and it's also one of its wordiest. Aside from the dialogue and cutscenes in its main plot and side missions, its locations and characters are all embellished with pithy database entries, grounded in historical research spiced with conspiracy theory, romance and a bit of absurdist humour.

How is this complex puzzle assembled? How do Assassin's Creed's writers twist historical fact into gaming fantasy, and how do they weave its many secrets into the overall story? We ask Assassin's Creed Revelations scriptwriter Darby McDevitt, who previously worked on the series' handheld titles, Bloodlines and Discovery, as well as The Sims 2.

How does the writing workload change over the course of a project like Assassin's Creed Revelations?
With any Assassin's Creed game, the bulk of the writing up-front is of course the script, and researching the script, and then it ends up with all the database entries, the menu texts and mission objectives. Those are the last things that get done. We do a lot of localisation so we have to get the script translated very quickly. I think we do six languages, full recordings, so teams in various countries have to get the script translated very quickly. Once that's locked down I switch to just hammering out, writing almost like a term paper. I write thousands of lines of database text and that gradually transitions into correcting my spelling and cleaning up any bad writing I feel I've done in any of the menus. Down to just the nuts and bolts.

One of the things you've changed for Revelations is having fewer characters but investigating them in more depth. Who's your favourite character?
I'm very proud of them all. And as you said there are fewer of them, so we spend more time with them, we get to know them. Early on you'll meet Yusuf, I think he's a very boisterous character, but with a good heart and a sort of sibling rivalry with Ezio. Then [there's] the Sofia character. I worked really hard to make a very plausible romance evolve between Ezio and her over almost the entire course of the game. It was a nice challenge – Ezio usually gets the girl within a few missions because he's so charming. But this one he has to work for, and I think we did a good job with her.

What does Constantinople bring you as a location?
Symbolically we all immediately thought of Constantinople as the perfect blend between Altair and Ezio. It's a perfect blend between east and west, it sits right on the border of Asia and Europe. And you definitely see that as you wander around the city. You'll turn a corner and see the Hippodrome, which is a very old Greek stadium, where horse and chariot races occurred. And then you'll see these beautiful mosques, with these minarets everywhere. It's this really nice, chaotic city that's just like a seven-layer cake, it's got remnants of everything that's ever been there.

How do you move from your research to writing the game?
One of things that's really tempting in Assassin's Creed is to see an historical event, and another one and another one, and to want to put them all in, like dominoes in a row. But what that ends up doing sometimes – and what we didn't want to do – is stretch your story out to accommodate all these wild turns in history. We did the best we could to find a middle ground between representing history, but not trying to stick so close to it that it felt like paint by numbers.

It was important for us to come up with a story that was our own story, Ezio's story, and have major historical events on the background, or on the periphery, or be hinted at in different ways. One of the things that underpins the conflict in our game is that the current Sultan, Beyazid II, is sick, he's old, he's named Ahmet as his successor, but the younger brother Selim wants the throne. In history there's actually a third brother called Korkut, and historically he's cruising around the periphery of the empire, hanging out almost down near Egypt sometimes. And we thought, there's no reason to bring him in, to complicate things, so we just left Korkut by the wayside.