A portion of a Gamasutra interview with creative director Alex Hutchinson...

GS: What new opportunities for game design did the setting of the American Revolution provide?

AH: We started the game in January 2010, so Assassin's Creed II had just hit. It feels like the franchise is into the fifth game, but when we started on this we barely launched the second game. So there were a lot of questions about how much do we need to change.

People were very excited about Ezio and the setting of The Renaissance. It's now a different mindset. Now it seems very obvious that a big change was necessary, but there were a lot of debates early on.

We felt that a new assassin and a new time period is something that would really resonate. And we wanted to go someplace that other games hadn't and hopefully people would be surprised, where people would want to know how we could make the franchise work in that setting.

All of those things, plus the idea that thematically the American Revolution, at least in its retelling, is about control versus freedom, power versus slavery. We like that because it fits very cleanly with the ongoing argument of assassins versus templars.