Cannons and Muskets

ACIII is not intended as a shooter, though there is violence and frequent hand-to-hand combat. Yet players will find themselves amid artillery and musket fire. To re-create historic battles, the developers made sure the muskets were fairly inaccurate and could not shoot more than about 50 yards in a battle. Cannons can be re-positioned in the game, but only up and down, not side to side, since many Revolutionary cannons were placed on wagons. (Even those not on wagons were hard to move from side to side.)"Soldiers were often afraid that a musket would explode in their own face," says Maxime Durand, a Ubisoft employee who served as the full-time historian for ACIII. "The accuracy of the weapons forced them to get in line. This also forced them to stay in a group and obey the commanding officer."Samuel A. Forman, a historian and author of Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty , says, "Volley musket-fire tactics were born both of the limitations of the flintlock smooth-bore musket and from long usage... so the greatest and most reliable impact was firing all at once."Durand says the game reflects the firearm limitations of the times: Soldiers can fire a shot once every 30 seconds, as it takes that long for them to clean the barrel, rearm, ram the ammo, and fire. Interestingly, this opens up a new game-play element that the developers lovingly call a "meat shield": grabbing a slow infantryman and using him as a human shield.Musket inaccuracy also lets players sneak around in trademark Assassin's Creed fashion. The main character, a colonist named Connor Kenway who is under the control of the AC time-traveling protagonist Desmond Miles, can do this in several battle scenes, including the Battle of Bunker Hill. Thank military etiquette of the 18th century, when the British especially considered random skirmishes to be barbaric and wholly unethical. "Even the Americans aspired to the military order and discipline inherent in volley firing," Forman says.