And honi soit qui mal y pense.
Five years on from its ruinous fire, Notre Dame cathedral has reopened its doors and is ready to crown Bonapartes again. So, naturally, Ubisoft is celebrating by reminding everyone of that time it made an exact replica of the whole thing and asked you to whack a French guy in it for Assassin’s Creed Unity.
In a video called Assassin’s Creed Unity Tribute: Exploring Notre Dame with Arno, Ubi welcomes the revival of Paris’ most fashionable holy site by inviting you to “join Arno, our hero Assassin, as we rediscover our recreation of Paris during the French Revolution.”
Ubi says it took its devs “more than two years” to get its recreation of Notre Dame just right for AC Unity, rebuilding the whole thing “at true one-to-one scale” in its at-the-time newfangled tech that let you do things like move from outdoor to indoor spaces without loading transitions.
The company does cop to one anachronism, though. For as much as it likes boasting about the historical authenticity of its AC settings, our narrator admits that the cathedral’s famous spire—present in-game—was actually completed in 1859 by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. AC Unity takes place in the early days of the French Revolution—1789 onwards. By rights, it shouldn’t be there.
“The Unity team researched [the spire’s] predecessor, a shorter wooden spire, but due to limited information and because the spire is such an important part of how we see the cathedral today, they made the anachronistic choice to include it.” Ubi says the choice is about honouring Notre Dame’s iconic modern design, and also conveniently gives you a really tall thing to climb and survey its recreation of Paris from. Anachronisms like that are probably why, contrary to rumours, the models from Unity weren’t actually used in the rebuilding process.
Which I’ll never forgive, to be honest. I expect more historical fidelity from my games where you uppercut the Pope and have tête-à-têtes with alien holograms. Do better, Ubisoft.
The whole video is actually a little odd. In some ways, it feels like an E3 presentation from ten years ago, touting all the latest whizzbang tech of 2014. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s bad, it’s just that the entire thing feels a little like an out-of-time artefact.
But perhaps Ubisoft is just taking the opportunity to remind people it once made AC Unity and it was—once those disastrous launch bugs were quashed—actually pretty good. To be honest, it’s one of my favourite games in the series (weirdly reactionary historiography aside), and I still wish we lived in the world where Ubisoft had leant in the more stealth-focused, dense-environment design style it represented instead of the faux-Witcher 3 games it makes now.
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