Assassin’s Creed 2: Fan Day In Montreal

First I want to start this article thanking SCEE and Jem for letting us participate in this blog.

So last week, I mentioned on Twitter that we were having a fan day in Montreal and I got tons of private messages about it!

So now is the time to unveil all the details about that event. Basically, we decided a while ago to welcome a few fans into our studio, a couple of weeks before the launch of the game, and give them the opportunity to see where we are creating Assassin’s Creed 2, but also introduce them to the people behind the game!

I had to say that our team was excited to meet fans, and we had a few surprises waiting for them. You are probably wondering who these fans are, and I have to say that it’s quite a mix of nationalities and profiles. We had the chance to gather people from UK, France, Italy, Canada and even Austria, to name a few. Among them were gamers, active forums members, blog writers, editors and lucky sweepstakes winners.

The first time we met was the day before the event, where we all went to a restaurant together. The evening was really cool with tons of questions and discussion about the game, our schedule, but also gaming in general. However, their main request was “who is the mysterious key speaker we’ll meet during the event?” Well even though they tried hard to corrupt me, I remained silent!

On Friday morning, I walked to the hotel to meet our fans and video staff. Yes, we had cameras during the event, and I mean lots of them! You’ll see why later on.

So, we met in the Hotel lobby and then we took taxis to go to the Ubisoft Montreal studio. We started the day with a studio tour, which is always exciting for everyone. They loved our video studio, especially the audio recording department, where they got to play with swords! Then we showed them how we create all the cool assets and videos you guys see on Internet. We also had a surprise for them, our Dev Diary #6 was just finished the day before and they were treated to a world premiere in our studio! But that was only the beginning…

We then went down to the Assassin’s Creed 2 floor, where we had prepared a huge room full of HDTVs and Playstation 3. After watching a couple of videos and trailers, we welcomed our main guest: Sébastien Puel, Producer for AC2!

He was kind enough to spend more than an hour answering a staggering number of questions (and that’s exactly where the cameras became important, you should be able to see a video done with SONY on this blog and on the PSN). And then Sébastien took a couple of hours to do some one-on-one interviews with all the fans, with the help of Benoit Lambert, our Game Director, and Francois Roughol, one of our main Game Designers.

[viddler id=cec44086&w=545&h=327&playertype=simple]

After this really interesting round of Q&A, we let our fans play the game for 3-5 hours and about one hour on Assassin’s Creed PSP depending on their schedules, and if you want to know what other gamers thinks of the game just click on the following links!

Once again, I want to thank SONY and our fans for attending, it was a blast and we enjoyed welcoming you in Montreal!

Atmon