Hollywood is knee-deep in their latest attempts to revitalize movie adaptations of video game properties. Fans around the world are still recovering from the damage that the likes of DOOM, anything Uwe Boll touches, and the litany of other failed projects (what was Nintendo thinking?!?!) have done to irreparably damage the concept of a movie based on a video game. Warcraft did its best to right the ship — with mixed results — and Assassin’s Creed is the next in line when the feature film releases this December.
With the advent of VR technology, we’re also seeing a trend of Hollywood-caliber VR experiences based on popular film properties. Disney is getting on board in that regard and there are tons of VR adaptations of TV shows and movies already available to view.
“It’s not a game,” said Matthew Lewis, president of Practical Magic VR during a presentation at AMD’s Capsaicin press event according to the official Ubisoft blog. “We’re capturing and re-creating the world from the film in really high quality, using massive textures [and] complex geometry. It’s all being painstakingly done with 3D scanners. When I say painstakingly, it was our team that was literally there in a warehouse in Malta in the summer, scanning swords and weapons and costumes from this movie. It’s very, very hard work,” Lewis added. “We’re going really, really far trying to create this experience so that it’s really on par with the motion-picture experience.”
A source close to the project has also informed us that the VR experience will star none other than the film’s leading actor, Michael Fassbender (X-Men: Days of Future Past, Prometheus.)
Since Lewis, Ubisoft, and AMD prefer to keep this Assassin’s Creed experience appropriately shrouded in darkness and mystery for the time being, we don’t really know much else. I sincerely hope that it ends with a pulse-pounding Leap of Faith as a finale, because experiencing that in first-person VR would be incredible.
