Valiant Hearts: WW I's human horror in a videogame

When Ubisofts mega-game Assassins Creed: Unity launches this week, historical accuracy in video games again falls under the microscope, thanks to its gigantic digital recreation of Paris.

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But for a smaller-scale game by Ubisofts Montpellier studio in France, artistic license and history were intertwined to drive home the human cost of World War I, rather than serve as a power fantasy for the player.

Released last July, Valiant Hearts: The Great War follows the stories of four characters on either side of the Western Front, but is primarily focused on a German soldier named Karl and his quest to find his wife and son, from whom he was separated at the beginning of the war.

Creative director Yoan Fanise says the team behind Valiant Hearts read letters of correspondence from soldiers and their families from the war, including Fanises great godfather, who lost both legs in the fighting.

Survival, not conquest

While the body count in an Assassins Creed game will easily reach the hundreds, as you stab or shoot hundreds of nameless soldiers on the way to the ending, Fanise said they wanted the opposite with Valiant Hearts.

Instead most of the game is spent solving environmental puzzles, such as moving mine carts and broken equipment in an abandoned factory to open up new paths and reach the next areas. In some scenes you race through the trenches, trying to avoid getting killed instead of killing enemies.

Occasionally the camera will zoom out, revealing the bodies of dozens of nameless soldiers felled not by your hand, but by the war at large.

We wanted to say that if someone is dying, it is really important. This was a man, who was alive, who had a family; it has to make you feel something, he says.

A lot of video games are the opposite: they want to remove this aspect, becauseotherwise youre not going to kill another guy.

Playing through Vimy Ridge and Ypres

Canadian battles feature prominently during the game, with sequences featuring the battle for Vimy Ridge, and the chlorine gas attacks at the Second Battle of Ypres.

"It was important for us to [have the player] play Vimy Ridge, because many Canadians gave their lives very far from their homes,"explains Fanise. "So for us, its about paying respects."

Ubisoft Montpellier teamed up with Ideacom, a Montreal-based production company that has been working on a multimedia project based on the First World War called Apocalypse.

Ideacom provided much of the footage and photography from the War thats used in Valiant Hearts extensive in-game encyclopedia. Players can pause the action and take a moment to learn more about the events from the Great War that directly inspired the levels in the game.

A different war game

Fanise has worked on major game franchises throughout his career with Ubisoft, including Assassins Creed III and the 2003 cult classic Beyond Good and Evil.

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But hes most proud of the reception to Valiant Hearts, especially from those who were affected by the human cost of war throughout the storyline.

"We had some parents, they played the game with their kids, and they told us that their kids were asking them, 'Daddy, would you go? If they asked you to go to war, would you go?'because theres a young boy in the game,"he says.

Fanise was pleasantly surprised that reviewers felt the same gravitas they described when playing the game, that he felt while researching for it. "All the people were saying, 'wow, I didnt think about war that way, and now the next game Im going to play about war, I will think differently.'"