The protagonist in Assassin’s Creed Unity can crouch at will, making him something of a god-like figure in Ubisoft’s ongoing rewrite of history. Arno traverses a dense and dirty recreation of 18th-century Paris, packed with jostling citizens screaming for a revolution. But as massive as the city is, with the Notre Dame de Paris looming over pockets of opulent residences and rain-slick squalor, the game’s struggles happen on a small scale, crouched close to the ground.

“The engine was … I mean, we rewrote like 6 million lines of code for this,” says Alex Amancio, the creative director who speaks for the work of ten different Ubisoft studios. “It’s not a joke.”