Later this year, Assassin's Creed: Origins will make its way to PS4, PC, and Xbox One, marking its return after a one-year self-imposed hiatus.

Set in ancient Egypt, the game follows the journey of Bayek of Siwa, an Egyptian assassin who lays the foundation for the Brotherhood seen in earlier games. Despite being an origin story, Assassin's Creed Origins does look to tread new ground by heading to a setting that's comparatively less historically documented than its sibling games. 

We caught up with Ubisoft game director Ashraf Ismail, who previously directed Assasin's Creed IV: Black Flag. We wanted to know more about directing games that have multiple studios involved, and why Ubisoft Montreal decided to explore ancient Egypt in this new game. 

Below is a (lightly edited) document of our conversation, which includes insight into how Ubisoft takes advantage of its multiple studios, and what advice Ismail has for other directors. 

What was the first thing you noticed about making the jump from designing games to directing an Assassin’s Creed game? 

Ashraf Ismail: So being game director at Ubisoft, I’m in charge of the overall experience of the game, the player's experience. So from mechanics systems to how all of the stuff is integrated into the narrative, so that touches upon, ‘Who are you in the world?’ We have a character that has a name and that has a background, but we also have to make sure that this character is a vessel that the player can inhabit and it can make sense for them to do the things you do in this game.

As a designer, you're really in charge of mechanics systems going down to the very low level details of how does this work and what's the feedback for it, how does the system grow, and so on. As a director, it's much more macro, less in the micro details. It's more about giving a vision, giving a direction and trusting your designers, your team members that the details will come from them, but the direction it needs to go, it needs to come from the director. 

So making that mental switch, it's not easy. It's something I think every director struggles with for a while to understand that you're not coming up with the details anymore. You're giving a vision, you're giving a direction that hopefully somebody will surprise you. Like they'll still go in that direction and then blow you away with what they come up with because they're much more intimately into it at that point. 

I think one of the interesting things about the game industry is that directors aren't the sole author of a given work. Games are so broad, it's very rare that you can say this is one person's handwork. Ubisoft is a large company and we sort of joke about how many Ubisofts worked on a game. How does this direction process work when your studio is built across the globe like that? 

So yes, we actually have many studios involved. For Assassin's Creed Origins we have Sofia, Singapore, Bucharest, Kiev and so on. Montreal's the lead studio. 

What that generally means is that when we start the project, the first, let's say, six months to a year, maybe even a year and a half we're a very small core team. That's really developing the vision, the direction of what we're trying to make. And once we feel solid about that, and once we have a good enough understanding of what that is, this is when we start building the team bigger. This is where we bring more people on, start introducing new studios where we can now give them the mandate, the vision. Understanding, let's say general scope, understanding the direction we want to take. 

But it's been defined at that point. That's one way of maintaining cohesiveness, let's say. And then, once the teams are starting to get bigger and we're really getting into the details of the experience, in Montreal we have a core team of people, that's the collaboration team. Their job is to take care of communication, make sure people get the answers they're looking for, make sure reviews are being done. 

So there's a team of people dedicated to just the internal communications of the team. And besides that, guys like myself, let's say art director, we travel to those studios every few months to make sure that, you know again, do people understand the vision? 

Having said that, we see the value of having so many teams because they, for me, at the end of the day, again it's always: you give a vision, you give a direction, but you want the people doing the work to surprise you. 

What we see with different studios is they always come with a different flavor of the same thing and it's awesome. So for example, Singapore worked on what we showed off at E3. And you'll see that the quests in that area, the feeling of the environment is slightly different than the other places. It's cohesive, it's the same world. You don't lose a sense of where the characters are. But you see that there is a flavor difference and that's cool. That's something we value.

So you're saying every Ubisoft studio sort of has their flavor, if you will? 

Yeah, it's something like that. I'm not sure we can put a name on it, like this studio is this or that, but you do feel that, yes, the general work from this studio has its own unique flavor. And that's actually, for a huge game that has a massive scope, that's actually very cool. It's very important, because then as a player, it's almost a slight refresh without necessarily saying it's a new mechanic, it's a new character. Even though there's tons of new characters, but it's really something refreshing. We put value in it. And it helps us ship the game with this scope. 

Ancient Egypt is a time period that we know, obviously some stuff about, but it's also such a huge time period that there are more holes compared to the other eras that Assassin's Creed has been set in. How much do you have history guide you and where do you have to strike out on your own?