﻿In April 2019, a fire started in Notre Dame. It engulfed the spire, destroyed the
wooden roof, and weakened the stone vault before firefighters were able to extinguish it hours later.
The damage to the cathedral was extensive... but there was never any question about whether
it would be restored or not. Of course, the French government would try. And money poured in
from companies all over the world — including from French game developer Ubisoft.
And in the weeks following the fire, articles started popping up with another exciting
idea. Perhaps... Ubisoft could also guide restoration of the cathedral by contributing its incredibly
detailed 3D models from the much-maligned 2014 video game, ASSASSIN’S CREED UNITY?
COULD THEY?
I'm gonna tell you!
Graphically, Unity holds up incredibly well, even seven years later. And the star…
is Notre Dame. Unity’s senior level artist Caroline Miousse spent
two years building the cathedral in-game, and there was immense pressure to get it right.
Unity’s Notre Dame is stunning in its scale, in the way light filters through the glass,
and smoke drifts from lit censers. The rose windows glow. The game barely asks
you to suspend disbelief: it feels true.
And it would be such a beautiful narrative,
wouldn’t it? For the most-hated Assassin’s Creed game to help restore the
world’s most beloved cathedral?
ALAS!
As it turns out, Unity’s Notre Dame is *not* a totally faithful reproduction. The reasons why
range from gameplay (expected), to …
...copyright? On a building from 1345? So let’s talk about how a
historic monument like Notre Dame ends up in a game — and what it’ll actually take to restore it.
(solemn choral music)
NotreDame de Paris was designed as a place of worship.
(record scratch, an NPC screaming)
Notre Dame in Assassin’s Creed Unity, is designed as a place of stabbing. The player needs to run.
They need to sneak, and to hide, and to murder. You can see that design consideration reflected
broadly across Unity’s Paris: Art director Mohamed Gambouz said that Paris’ period-accurate pointy roofs
would have been a pain in the butt for the player to parkour up...and down… and up...and down…
so the team flattened them out a bit. This same ethos affects Notre Dame.
Let’s start with this upper gallery — this is a “tribune,” and it’s a part of Notre-Dame de
Paris that you or I will probablyyyyy... never go to.
And not just because it burned down.
It’s for Church Business — but it has a structural purpose too. In Gothic cathedrals like Notre Dame,
this sweet technology called:
(PARTY HORNS)
RIIIIIIIIBBBBBEEEDDDDDD VAULTINGGGGG
allowed more and bigger windows,
letting light into the cathedral. The tribune helps support these weaker, window-ful walls.
It also supports the player who uses the tribune to get around unseen. That’s why this area was
made easier to traverse for the game. In the real Notre Dame, these windows do not actually open.
Why the hell would they. And Caroline Miousse added cables that span the nave and the transept,
allowing Arno to cross this massive space. It gives you a bird’s eye view of your victim before you
go and pervert more Catholic traditions by stabbing him in a confessional.
(sound of stabbing)
Miousse also added these decorative gilt panels to corral the player’s movements.
The elements that were added are small, but the stuff that was taken away is pretty important.
Unity’s Notre Dame is missing the iconic Red Door. It’s also missing an entire building.
The sacristy is on Notre Dame’s south face. It’s where relics are kept,
and where the clergy would enter from. Our version was built in the 1800s — but there was a sacristy
here during the French Revolution. I’m honestly not sure why these things
were removed — and Ubisoft declined to comment for this video.
If I had to hazard a guess though, I would say just to simplify the cathedral's design.
The detail in a single close-up of Notre Dame’s western facade is mind-boggling. There
are geometric shapes and Biblical figures, and delicate little columns. The tympana are FULL OF
SCULPTURES, and the doors are flanked by the Pope’s most prized Warhammer figurines.
And none of that is going to fly for a video game! It would take way too much processing
power to render all of these as 3D objects. Instead, these tympana are flat; the developers used a
clever combination of textures and shaders to create the ~illusion~ of 3D carvings,
without having to render 1 billion polygons. And as you can see now that I’m making you
stare at them for a long time, there’s only two dudes on Unity’s Notre Dame:
Cross Dude and Book Dude. And they’re not the same statues that are on the real cathedral!
We have France’s copyright laws to thank for that!
Now how can a building that was finished in the 14th century be under copyright!? Well!
Notre-Dame de Paris is a designated “historic monument.” It’s owned by the French state,
and along with all the rules about how nobody can tear it down to build a shopping center, there are
also limitations on how it can be reproduced for commercial works like, oh, say, a video game.
It’s helpful to think about Notre Dame like a museum that's made up of different works of art.
So Ubisoft can reproduce the cathedral but — what about the organ? That’s a separate work of
art, and Miousse said that they couldn’t use it because of copyright. Notre Dame’s organ was
reconstructed in 1969 (nice), modified in ‘91, and then restored again in 2010. The one in Unity is
“inspired” by it. The famous rose windows
ARE in the game, but they use totally different art: it's the same images just replicated over and over,
which gives the look and feel of the original stained glass, but without needing to seek out
a separate license just to make these windows. So when you look at something like the western
facade and start thinking about how many individual pieces are in it… a detail-perfect
recreation of Notre Dame for a commercial project starts to sound, um, impossible.
Caroline Miousse took this all in stride. And obviously did a killer job.
(delightful, light-hearted music)
(music crunching)
So between the gameplay restrictions and the copyright laws, Ubisoft’s cathedral
was never going to be accurate enough to aid in the restoration. In fact, nobody’s models
are perfect recreations – but that doesn’t mean they’re useless.
One famous model of Notre Dame was created by the art historian Andrew Tallon.
Tallon spent years laser scanning the cathedral gathering data and hi-res images that he assembled
into millimetre-perfect models. And literally the year the cathedral caught fire, art historian
Stephan Albrecht had been in there using LIDAR to study paint. His team has its own models.
All of this data is currently being used in the reconstruction.
A digital working group continues to scan and photograph the cathedral to this very day.
But preserving historical monuments isn’t as simple as just photographic and scanning everything.
You can have a texture-perfect 3D model of a donut, but you still don’t know how to make a donut.
The restoration is being overseen by different working groups: researchers specializing in wood,
in acoustics, in metal, stone, glass, digital data and ...emotion. Yes, they have an Emotion
working group. It rules.
But which version of the Notre
Dame are they even trying to recreate? Construction on Notre Dame started in 1163.
It took them 182 years!!!! to build the damn thing. In 1726, the archbishop of Paris took down all
the gargoyles and replaced the stained glass...
with unstained glass. During the French Revolution,
revolutionaries ceremonially beheaded!!! these statues of Biblical kings because, well,
yeah.
Napoleon had the cathedral whitewashed!!!!! for his coronation.
And in the 19th century, Notre Dame underwent its biggest renovation yet.
The primary architect, Eugène Viollet-le Duc wanted to preserve the cathedral’s Medieval
heritage… but he also wanted to preserve the building, period. He added lead rain gutters
and gargoyle rain spouts — his argument was that hey, if they had known about gutters in 1200,
wouldn’t they have wanted them? He replaced the desecrated kings,
and added metal statues of Apostles to the roof. He also did some funky 19th century things in
the name of symmetry, like reinstalling and straightening the rose windows.
But the most visibly obvious change was of course: the spire.
Notre Dame’s original decaying, wooden spire had been demolished in 1793.
The new spire, the one that appears in the game, was 59 feet taller, and coated in lead.
Even though the spire didn’t exist until almost 100 years after the game’s events,
Caroline Miousse said they had to add it to Unity’s Notre Dame.
It’s iconic. It would be a disappointment for players to reach this famous monument and see
it looking incomplete. Without the spire, Notre Dame wouldn’t feel like Notre Dame.
The people who are restoring the cathedral now are asking the same question about the spire.
There was a REAL-LIFE debate over whether to replace it with a modern design,
or a freaking roof garden, and everyone was like uh, PLEASE DON’T?
So they’re going to restore this medieval cathedral with the spire that
everyone knows: the one from the 1800s,
but maybe with more sprinklers please?
Unity’s Notre Dame is a sort of litmus test for our own relationship with the cathedral.
Is Notre Dame "Notre Dame" without the Red Door? Without the sacristy? Without the spire?
This Notre Dame isn’t a 1:1 recreation, and it doesn’t need to be... there’s enough value in
the way it makes us feel. This digital recreation isn’t going to help rebuild the
actual cathedral, but it can still spark a sense of curiosity, familiarity, and wonder.
This video would not have been possible without the help of Professor Jennifer Feltman at the University of Alabama.
She talked to me about the restoration, and the cathedral’s history,
and helped me find research, and looked at the cathedral in-game with me to be like “huh.”
So, she’s great, thank you Jennifer so much.