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Assassin's Creed: Unity will be the first of the series to be built exclusively for the new console generation, and the development team is taking full advantage of the more powerful hardware. This has always been a series that pushes the boundaries of visual technology, from its painstakingly realised historical settings to its dynamic crowds, but it sounds like the French Revolution based Unity will be the most impressive yet.

“It just allowed us to make much richer effects because of the memory that was allowed us and the performance capabilities of the consoles,” Jeffrey Spicer, character and FX production manager, has told industry mag Develop. “We’ve made breakthroughs in facial scanning, skin shaders, eye wetness – all of that comes together to really make much more believable and realistic characters that help draw you into the storyline and make them feel like real people and real characters with a real story to help keep you immersed in the game world,” he said.

“Instead of just modelling a single 3D unit, they model actual patterns, like how a shirt would be made with a front and a back, then they stitch that fabric together and each aspect of it has weight,” Spicer says of the clothing that characters wear in the game. “Every seam and every fold has a different weight. We’ve been able to do a lot with what we call ‘soft cloth’, where we give cloth real physics to make it feel like it’s living and breathing and it reacts to the game world.”

Assassin's Creed: Unity is out on 13 November for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. Last gen console owners get Assassin's Creed: Rogue on the same day.