In a rather fruitful interview with CVG, Ubisoft Montreal Lead Writer Matt Turner shares a lot of interesting details about Assassin's Creed 3, offering much insight into the game's development process and goals.

On the topic of the time period, Turner explains how the team have taken pains towards historical accuracy and the challenges that having a game set in a much more recent and more thoroughly documented era (The American Revolution) has presented:

The historical record back during the Crusades is obviously a little bit more of a structure and you can cut your own dots in the middle, which gives you a little bit more freedom. In comparison this time period is very well documented so you have to pay attention to it.

Turner also describes the reaction of the team -- who have been working on the game for over two years already -- when Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption landed and so successfully executed the untamed-wilderness and hunting concepts that their game was also poised to feature.

We'd been working on the animal and the frontier stuff and then Red Dead Redemption came out. We saw it, played it cover to cover, and it was less of an 'oh shit' and more of a 'aha! How can we do better than that?'

Because that's something that Rockstar does - it always strives to be the best. They always try to push things in new directions and I think we need to do the same thing. As a team we saw how good it was and how they had tonnes of success and we were like, 'OK, let's look at their success and see how we can take it in new directions.' That's what I think we've tried to do.

Finally, after confirming that the game would still follow the series' underlying plots of the Templar conspiritors -- which he makes a point, are a distinctly different flavour to the Freemason and Illuminati tales popularised by novelist Dan Brown -- Turner concluded with confirmation that there will be a greater quantity of the modern day (or near future) scenes that have bookended the historical Animus adventures in previous games

All I can say about Desmond's story is you're going to experience more Desmond than you've ever had before. We're spending more time on the present than we have in past games. It's a big part of our story and I don't really want to give too many details away because I want people to experience what that is. But rest assured, you're going to see a lot of Desmond. More so than in any past game.

Assassin's Creed 3 is due on October 13st 2012 for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with a Wii-U version also expected following that console's launch.