A portion of an AusGamers interview with Ubisoft's Philippe Bergeron...

AusGamers: Getting back to gameplay, you’ve got this open-world and you can kind of go and do whatever you want, but everything’s kind of segmented. For you guys, from a structural point of view, and from a pacing point of view, how did you approach the space that the player can exist within?

The last few games were quite large, and a lot of the time you’re trekking for a lot of time, and not really doing anything. We talked a little bit about emergent gameplay before, but how have you guys handled the space that you had to deal with, and just tying it all together in a coherent way for the player to always be interested to go somewhere?

Philippe: That one we were actually playing both Skyrim... actually, we were playing Skyrim at the time, and it was a really good example, where you walk around Skyrim, and there’s always something in a given grid metre, where “Oh there’s something here”, then you move around “There’s another thing there”. There’s always something attracting you. So we always have, within the minimap, you always needed to have an icon drawing your attention.

So from the very beginning we had our different gameplay silos: be it the main mission path, be it the the Liberation gameplay events, the smaller low-level assassination contracts, or courier missions that... we developed a whole bunch of mission subsets or objective subsets, that we could then, once we had our main path tracked in the map, then we had our second palette, which was, I don’t want to say “the filler”, but the way to sort of complete this environment.

So we would analyse “Alright, what’s our map usage? What’s our heatmap, and where do we have more dead zones?”, and we have all these interesting gameplays that are not as environment-specific as the other ones, so these ones we can use to sort of fill in the space.