Stop Being Wrong About Assassin’s Creed Unity

This summer’s Olympic Games in Paris brought an old story to life: Ubisoft’s models of Notre-Dame Cathedral, created for Assassin’s Creed Unithelped rebuild the cathedral after it burned down in 2019.

People have been saying this since the fire, and I made a YouTube video in 2021 debunking itBut strangely enough, not everyone in the world has seen it, and videos claiming otherwise still rack up thousands of views on TikTok.

So let’s debunk it again.

One of the first outlets to spread this story was NME. Here’s what it published in 2019:

It is also believed that French publisher Ubisoft still possesses the original 3D models and photographs that could aid in the reconstruction of the cathedral. Ubisoft has yet to comment on the claims, and a full restoration plan for Notre Dame has not yet been confirmed.

That doesn’t sound very certain, does it? Well, veteran games journalist Keza MacDonald, writing for The Guardian, saw this and reached out to Ubisoft for comment. She posted the response from a Ubisoft spokespersonwhich should probably have been the last word on this matter:

We are not currently involved in the reconstruction of Notre-Dame, but we would like to lend our expertise in any way we can to assist in these efforts. (…) It is important to keep in mind that what we did for the game was not a scientific reconstruction, but rather an artistic vision.

But despite that fairly clear reaction, the rumors about the Notre Dame models persisted. They were further spread by an ArtStation blog post from 2023, which is currently one of the first things that comes up when you google the topic. It was written by an artist who does not appear to be associated with Ubisoft and who does not provide any sources for the claims he makes in the piece.

In 2019, Ubisoft said it had no involvement in the restoration. If it had, I think the company would have rightly made a big deal out of it. Just as it did with a press release at the time it announced it would donate €500,000 to Notre-Dame and sell Windows PC copies of Unit for a week. The company also made its stance pretty clear: it encouraged people to explore Notre Dame in the game and donate to the restoration effort if they could.

Now let’s take a look at what the developers at Ubisoft to have talked about how they designed the cathedral. Senior level artist Caroline Miousse is the person who is widely praised for building Unit‘s Notre-Dame. She was interviewed by Destructoid as well as IGNand Ubisoft’s news blog also did an extensive interview with her that since republished by Siggraph.

Miousse was asked what sources she used in the construction of the cathedral. This is what she said:

We were able to find a lot of blueprints that showed us exactly how Notre Dame was built. (Maxime Durand, historian of “Assassin’s Creed”) helped me a lot with that because he has the historical background. I also have a lot of books. Google was also my best friend for a while. You can just find so much stuff on the internet now.

The Notre Dame that appears in the game has been modified for the sake of level design and gameplay – and for copyright compliancebecause some elements, such as the rose window and the organ, are protected by copyright and cannot be legally reproduced.

But even then, it doesn’t sound like Ubisoft had detailed scans of the cathedral to work with. Miousse cited photos, blueprints, books, and Google.

Do you know who did make scans of the cathedral?

Hundreds of people have studied it for decades!

Among them was Cédric Gachaud, the CEO of a company called Life3D, which was scanning the cathedral for restoration work that was already underway before the fire. In 2019, he spoke about it with the French Prime Minister’s newspaper Le Monde. You can find his original quote at the link, but here is my translation of it:

The people behind Assassin’s Creed did a great job. But these are graphic artists, very skilled, working from photographs and blueprints that they have found. They are looking for a coherent visual representation. But if a statue is two meters higher than it is in reality, that is not important to them. We are looking for millimeter precision, we work with engineers, with data analysts.

Le Monde also cited a quote from the Assassin’s Creed franchise’s resident historian, Maxime Durand, who spoke to the Quebec newspaper La Presse about the restoration of Notre-Dame. As above, the quote is in French, and here is my translation:

The monument we have reconstructed has a beautiful artistic freedom. I cannot say that those who reconstruct the cathedral will necessarily be interested in our modeling of it.

Again, as Ubisoft had If the game’s models had been able to contribute to the restoration, the company would have rightly bragged about it. But they haven’t. Everyone involved with the game continues to harp on about the creative, artistic vision of their game.

The cathedral’s restoration involves “fifty research teams and laboratories spread across France, bringing together a total of 175 researchers,” according to the French Ministry of Culture. These individuals come from a variety of disciplines, such as ‘archaeologists, historians, art historians, anthropologists, physicists, chemists, engineers, and computer scientists.’

To further demonstrate why this scientific work is so different from what Ubisoft did, we can look at the scans made by the deceased Andrew Tallon of Vassar CollegeThe laser technology he used to scan the cathedral has a margin of error of “often less than five millimeters.”

That’s the kind of data that exists. During a 2023 visit to Vassar, Philippe Villeneuve, the lead architect of the Notre Dame project, confirmed that Tallon’s data on the vaulted ceilings of the cathedral had contributed to its reconstruction.

Tallon was far from the only one doing this work. Professor Dr. Stephen Albrecht is one of the people involved in the restorationHe and his colleagues had been working on the cathedral for 20 years. Before the fire, they had made 3D scans of the transept and that data was given to the restoration.

Ubisoft didn’t do these types of scans. Because it wasn’t need to. Because the cathedral in the game is an artistic creation that captures how it feels. It does feeling really, that’s it feeling accurately, and that is a huge achievement.

We don’t need to make up stories about the video game that is so literally accurate that it can help rebuild Notre Dame. It’s a shame for the artists who UnitNotre Dame, erasing the incredible work they did. And it’s a shame for the scientists who have worked all this time to understand and maintain the real cathedral.