{"id":166483,"date":"2022-12-23T20:40:27","date_gmt":"2022-12-23T20:40:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/how-ubisofts-editorial-teams-are-quietly-shifting-games-like-assassins-creed-roller-champions\/"},"modified":"2022-12-23T20:40:27","modified_gmt":"2022-12-23T20:40:27","slug":"how-ubisofts-editorial-teams-are-quietly-shifting-games-like-assassins-creed-roller-champions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/how-ubisofts-editorial-teams-are-quietly-shifting-games-like-assassins-creed-roller-champions\/","title":{"rendered":"How Ubisoft’s Editorial Teams Are Quietly Shifting Games Like Assassin’s Creed, Roller Champions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You’ve probably familiar with video game development jobs like programmer, artist, or designer. But one of the most influential roles at Ubisoft is one that doesn’t always immediately parse for most people: the role of its editorial team.<\/p>\n

This advisory group’s job is on a large scale, to determine the creative direction for Ubisoft and its games, and it’s been in a state of upheaval lately. The editorial team had previously gotten an overhaul<\/u> in early 2020, only to need another later that year<\/u> after a wave of abuse Levied at multiple senior Ubisoft employees<\/u>including editorial leads. <\/p>\n

In the pre-2020 structure, reports suggested that many of Ubisoft’s games ended up very same-y due to just one or two people dictating the creative direction of the company as a whole. And while the initial team shake-up may have been well-intentioned enough, it left at least two individuals with dictating the company’s creative pillars. So it had to change again.<\/p>\n

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Which is where Fawzi Mesmar came in. Mesmar joined Ubisoft as VP of editorial just over a year ago, coming with almost two decades of industry design experience at companies including Atlus, Gameloft, King, and EA DICE. He stepped into the role at a particularly tenuous moment, and while his team’s overall directive of shaping the company’s creative direction remains intact, the nuances appear to be changing. Speaking to IGN, Mesmar describes the broad strokes of his role as working with senior leadership to put together a \u201ccreative framework\u201d to help direct individual game teams in their creative visions. They put the pillars in place, then help teams reach them throughout the development process.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe treat these as guidelines,\u201d Mesmar says. \u201cSo that these are not things that every single project needs to have or that every single project needs to abide by. They are creative guidelines. Think of them as a framework that you can use to activate your creativity, but not a checkbox that you need to address\u2026and one game can’t be everything. We wouldn’t expect [that from] even the games that want to follow through with the guidelines or take some of those criteria into consideration. Games need to be focused on what they are and who they’re for.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what is this framework? Mesmar’s alluded to it before<\/u>, and it effectively centers around three pillars. The first, \u201ccomplete focus on quality,\u201d is fairly self-explanatory. The second is to make games that are culturally significant, which Mesmar describes as a drive to make games that form the overall fabric of pop culture at large. So, quite bluntly, games that are made well and that a lot of people like \u2013 fairly straightforward.<\/p>\n

The third pillar is a bit different \u2013 \u200b\u200bMesmar wants to \u201ccreate third spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf work is your first space and home is your second, then the third space is this\u2026You can just pop in, pop out, and connect with like-minded individuals or groups of people in which you can express yourself and connect with freely . I’d like to think about it as similar to a skate park. You can show up [whenever] at a skate park, even if you don’t want to skate, you just sit there and hang out.\u201d<\/p>\n