These Video Game Images Of Paris Look So Vivid, We Mistook Them For The Real Thing

The beauty of Ubisoft's open-world "Assassin's Creed" series isn't necessarily the gameplay or the characters. 

It's how amazingly real the settings look. 

The games are historically accurate and so full of rich detail, you almost feel like you're visiting the locations in real life. 

Previous games have taken place in 15th-century Florence, Venice, and most recently, America during the Revolution, and on the high seas during the 18th century. But with the next next iteration, called "Assassin's Creed: Unity," Ubisoft decided to go back to the franchise's roots and set the game back in a densely populated European city: Paris. 

"When we started 'Unity,' we knew that this was going to be the first fully 'next-gen' title of 'Assassin's Creed,'" Ubisoft Montreal creative director Alexandre Amancio told Business Insider.

"Because we knew this, we also knew this was probably a good time to go back to the roots. Any franchise, be it video game or movie, especially those that rely on rich narratives, tend to start becoming bogged down by the weight of their own mythology. So we knew that this was going to be a sort of new start."

When the first "Assassin's Creed" game came out in 2007, it introduced something called "social stealth," where you could blend in with the crowds.

The idea of interactive crowds was new to the video game industry at the time. And back then, Ubisoft boasted that there were 200 nonplayable characters loaded at once.

With "Unity," that number has been boosted to thousands. 

The team looked at several different timelines in Paris' history and landed on setting it during the French Revolution.

"It's a period where not only is there political upheaval and a lot of interesting and famous historical characters, but there's huge crowds. And the crowds are not happy,"Amancio said. "It offered the proper fuel for our new narrative."

And much like in the games before it, the imagery is stunning. 

Here's Notre Dame in the game. It took the artist who created it close to a year to model it inside and out.

"Sometimes we actually do intentionally slip in some inconsistencies. For example the famous spire in the back of Notre Dame wasn't built until almost 100 years later," Amancio says. "We felt that when people saw Notre Dame, if that wasn't there, it wouldn't feel like Notre Dame. It's not done out of a mistake. Sometimes what feels real and what is real are two very different things."

This is what Notre Dame looks like in real life.