At the Reboot Develop confernece in Croatia, Patrice Desilets finally got to show us what he’d been working on for years — 1666 Amsterdam. The ambitious title began its life at THQ Montreal, whose assets were sold to Ubisoft upon closure, which — to the amusement of many — returned 1666 Amsterdam creative director Patrice Desilets to his former employer, where he and his teams made Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and the Assassin’s Creed series.
Desilets started his own studio, Panache Digital, where he and his team are making an episodic game called Ancestors. “I want to show you all that I’ve been working on something — the six years between my last Assassin’s, and Ancestors,” he told conference attendees. “And eventually we will finish it, but… I have to ship something, I’ll go crazy,” he said, referring to Ancestors.
The rights just returned to Desilets last week. “The game doesn’t even belong to Panache, it’s owned just by me. It’s very emotional for me to show this for the first time, after all those years.”
The game, whose vision concept was “to be as good as the devil,” takes place across one entire year — the 365 days within 1666, in Amsterdam, when the city was considered the seat of power in the Western world. In the demo shown, the player controlled a man who commanded various animals associated with witchcraft, in collaboration with a veiled woman, using Assassin’s-style distraction and destruction techniques, alongside stealth attacks and timing-based puzzles.
The in-game footage is recorded from someone playing the game live, in-engine says Desilets, and the trailer was meant to be something of an internal pitch and vision document, though everything in the video was made, not fabricated.
Though the game won’t be worked on in earnest until Ancestors is released, for now you can enjoy this phone-cam footage we took during the event.
[edit: the original text had the wrong vision concept]
