High-end Odyssey

ASSASSIN’S CREED: BLOCKBUSTER GAME HAS NEW, EXCITING STORYLINE

Daniel Bingham is one of 12 scribes tasked with writing epic about two siblings during the Peloponnesian War.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is a big game. Not just in terms of its commercial heft – it’s the latest entry in one of the most lucrative and popular video game franchises – but also its in-game size.

The series has always been open-world, offering players a sprawling map with tons of quests, challenges and collectibles to get stuck into, but Odyssey takes things to a new level.

The game plants players in the sandals of one of two siblings in ancient Greece, just as the Peloponnesian War begins, and allows them to explore a lush and highly detailed representation of that classical civilisation.

Odyssey is beautiful, to be sure, but the hook that keeps players glued is its story, which uses the war as a backdrop and unveils a secret war between assassins and Templars for artefacts that promise great power.

Daniel Bingham is a member of the team in charge of the game’s narrative and he’s upfront with the size of the task he had, heading into the game two years ago.

“It’s intimidating. I had been away from gaming for a very long time. But they gave us the time to research both the franchise and ancient Greece, so I’d played and read a lot by the time I wrote my first line of dialogue,” he says.

Bingham’s background is slightly unconventional for someone charged with plotting one of the year’s biggest video games; while copywriting for telco firms, he became a stand-up comedian and went pro for 12 years. It was then he tapped into his love of storytelling and working with other writers.

“I really wanted to work with a team – I’d written two one-man plays and I needed a team to write those. I found that collaborating with others produced some of my best work,” he says. “I went back to school for writing so I could get more involved with maybe film or television. I hadn’t even considered gaming as a place or a medium that I could tell stories in.”

While at school, Bingham gravitated to video games – much in the same way most students do. He picked up a copy of The Last Of

Us – the PS4 post-apocalyptic epic – and at that time, he says, a light came on.

“The character development and storytelling blew me away and planted a seed ... and thank God it did, because I’ve found that video games are, perhaps, the most collaborative industry for writers to work in,” he says.

“A writer for television or film doesn’t get to work with a quest designer or character artists. I got to work with the actors on the mocap floor when they were shooting our dialogue and scenes.”

While writing for a game is very different than any other visual medium, Bingham says there are similarities that keep the team on point.

“It was very much set up the same way a TV showrunner would do it. They’d know the beginning, how it was going to end and the major beats in the plot they need to hit at certain stages. Then, because it’s the biggest Assassin’s Creed game we’ve created, we had a large team of 12 writers who would each write their own episode,” he says.

Bingham even got the opportunity to play a little Alfred Hitchcock and insert himself into the game – although players won’t ever get to see it.

“I was in there early on, but the developers took me out,” he laughs. “I got cut.”