Assassin's Creed III's revolutionised combat system was inspired by the simplicity of Batman: Arkham City.
AC3 Mission Director Philippe Bergeron told MMGN that Assassin's Creed's combat had become too easy and outdated by retaining the control scheme established in the original game.
It’s a problem that we’ve had since the first game. Combat became more and more easy as time went on. It became the path of least resistance when you were doing missions," said Bergeron. "All of the crafting we did to create a stealth path and make you feel like an assassin blending into the crowds was unnecessary, as you could pretty much murder anybody."
The new combat mechanic can be largely attributed to Batman's influence on the industry.
We made something like Batman: Arkham City which, for us, was in a sense the holy grail of fighting," he said. "That was one of the main comments to come out of Batman, that the fighting was so good, so we thought ‘why can’t our fighting at least be on par with that?’ We looked at Batman and then looked at our game and tried to make things a little bit simpler to control and sequence the fight a little bit better."
By Ben Salter