Last week I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and you can read my preview here. During the event, I also had a chat with Syndicate's Game Director, Scott Phillips to learn more about how Ubisoft picks time periods, the tone of the latest game, and fundamental questions about changes to the parkour and combat mechanics.

The meat of the interview comes in the second half, a snippet of which you can see below.

AusGamers: I also noticed that, but I couldn’t really repeat it in game, but I noticed there was a time when I ran Evie towards an edge and she pulled up short and stopped. I was curious, is that the game trying to tell me I wouldn’t be able to make that jump?

Scott Phillips: When you hit an edge and if you don’t continue with just the right trigger, it’s because the distance is too far down below you. What we set out to do with the parkour is to make sure that the player has what we refer to as RTA/RTB [right trigger + A / right trigger + B], which would be the Xbox controls. Essentially it’s parkour up and then parkour down, and we wanted to make it more obvious and more clear cut what does what. So parkour up will always take you up walls and make you go above and climb on top of things. RT [right trigger] will take you in the core trajectory, you’ll always be moving forward as fast as possible, and then RTB or parkour down will take you down as fast as you can possibly go. So we wanted to give the player more control over where they wanted to go, which can sometimes mean that until you’re used to how you should use the system, you’ll get stopped sometimes because we don’t want to blend every movement mode to the point where you’re confused and you don’t know what you’re going to get. So you may get stopped sometimes until you learn how to use the system a little bit better, and then you’ll feel much more in control of that character.

Click here to read the full interview.