I rather like Alex Hutchinson, the outspoken creative director of Far Cry 4, but in one regard, he and I are and shall forever remain mortal foes. Hutchinson, you see,observed to OXM in 2012 that an Assassin's Creed set in feudal Japan would be "boring" - a remark that roused me to a fearful, office-emptying splutter when I wrote it up for the website.
Earlier this month, I was able to broach my difference of opinion to the man himself at a preview event. "Say Mr Hutchinson, sir," I recall saying through clenched teeth, the souls of my outraged and probably fictional ronin ancestors shrieking in my ears. "What's all this rot about Japan as a setting? Sounds like you just don't like ninjas, if you ask me. Are you prejudiced against ninjas, Alex? Such terrible bigotry. You have made a powerful enemy, my friend."
It transpired, however, that Hutchinson's apathy is grounded in something slightly more complex than an inexplicable hatred of murderers in black pyjamas: he feels Japan is too well-explored as a setting, though it would work perfectly well from a design perspective.
"You could always do it, but the point I was trying to make was that in the broad strokes and scale of history, that's a theme that's been well-mined in videogames," Hutchinson began. "So, Assassin's Creed is one of those games that can take [lesser-known] time periods or corners of the world and make them cool, fun, new and refreshing.
"Feudal Japan would work as an Assassin's game, for sure, but I feel like it would start to look like 'oh, have I played this?' You know what I mean - 'oh, I've been a ninja before, I've been a samurai before'."
"Is the setting really so over-subscribed right now, though?" I objected, reaching involuntarily for an invisible katana. "It's been a while since somebody released a new Tenchu." "Well, I did say it a few years ago!" retorted Hutchinson.
As for where Hutchinson might take Assassin's Creed, were he back in charge of the franchise - the answer remains India during the British Raj (aka, the mid-19th to mid-20th century). It's not just Hutchinson's call, of course: Assassin's Creed 4 game director Ashraf Ismail has said that he'd "love" to visit Egypt during the time of the Pharaohs.
I'm just going to leave this little, unrelated list of cool things here, for historians of the internet to ponder: throwing stars, bamboo forests, walls made out of paper, nodachi, mountain temples and dangling from a beam to garrotte the Shogun's adversaries. Your call, Ubisoft.
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