Assassin's Creed 2's Plourde On Why 'Fail Early, Fail Often' Is The Wrong Approach

Patrick Plourde, the lead designer on Assassin's Creed 2 at Ubisoft Montreal, isn't a big fan of that whole "fail early, fail often" thing, ubiquitous as it may be among game design talks.

"Oftentimes I visit sites like Gamasutra or go to talks like GDC, and one thing they always say, this recent trend -- it's interesting but it doesn't relate to me," Plourde said during a session at the Montreal International Game Summit today, referring to the "fail early, fail often" principle of design.

"There's a stage in the game design process where you need to experiment and not be fearful of failure," he acknowledged, "but at the same time, it leads to a lot of fail."