Assassin's Creed Syndicate time-lapse: world in motion

[Administrator]

Time of day dynamic lighting has returned to the Assassin's Creed series in its latest outing - and we thought we'd make the most out of it. Over the course of the last week, one of our PlayStation 4s has been attached to a spare capture system, patiently recording time-lapse video of Victorian London while we busy ourselves with other tasks. It's been a fascinating experience - exploring an environment we know so well, finding key locations and comparing Ubisoft's renderings of 1868 with our own knowledge of the city 147 years later.
It's an often uncanny facsimile of Britain's capital but of course, there are cut-backs and compromises in the game architecture. Necessarily, the city is made smaller and more navigable, with some key locations relocated or omitted as a result. Oxford Street - a part of London in some shape or form since Roman times - doesn't seem to make the cut. Nearby Regent Street is also missing, though Piccadilly Circus is present, looking very different to its present day incarnation. Liverpool Street station is absent, St Pancras is a stone's throw from Trafalgar Square and the Animus' map falls just short when it comes to allowing acces to the Tower of London, and of course the iconic Tower Bridge had yet to be build in Syndicate's 1868 timeframe. This is London then, but even long-term city dwellers may end up confused by Ubisoft's gamification of the map.
But what's there remains a remarkable achievement: seven boroughs' worth of intricate detail, complete with a range of world famous landmarks - many of them just as you remember them from any given 21st century visit. Others are very different, yet still oddly familiar. Buckingham Palace had yet to receive its 1913 facelift, while Leicester Square only hints at the entertainment centre it was to become. Ubisoft had just one shot at getting London right and by and large, the developers have done a fantastic job - the irony being that it's the renderings of the less charted streets in the poorer boroughs that give us more of an indication of what life as actually like back then for the vast majority of the 3.2m population.
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