A current report at Bloomberg causes a stir. Will the days of the individual Assassin’s Creed games be over soon? Allegedly, Ubisoft is working on a much larger project.
Update:
Ubisoft has meanwhile actually confirmedthat Assassin’s Creed: Infinity is an early development project in the works. In fact, the two studios in Montreal and Quebec work with an overarching structure under the direction of long-term employees of the series such as Marc-Alexis Côté (Quebec), Étienne Allonier (Montreal) and Julien Laferrière (Montreal). How exactly the new project should look like is not clear from Ubisoft’s statement, the sentence “Rather than continuing to pass the baton from game to game, we profoundly believe this is an opportunity for one of Ubisoft’s most beloved franchises to evolve in a More integrated and collaborative manner “suggests, however, that the Bloomberg report is not entirely wrong.
Original message:
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier is not an unknown journalist and is usually well informed. A new report from Schreier is now causing a stir, because it seems as if the days of individual Assassin’s Creed games, more or less in the annual rhythm, are numbered.
Allegedly, Ubisoft is working on an extensive online platform under the code name Assassin’s Creed Infinity. This is supposed to be an online universe that is constantly changing and no longer just deals with individual epochs. Infinity should encompass diverse scenarios and offer enough space to expand them by further epochs. Individual games on this platform should be linked to one another.
You don’t have to panic because of that, because the project should be years away from a possible release. A spokeswoman for Ubisoft is said to have at least confirmed the existence of the project, but without going into details. The basic idea would also correspond to the already known Ubisoft approaches to invest even more in the area of service games and free-to-play.
So far, Assassin’s Creed has published independent games more or less annually. Also successful, 155 million copies of the series’ games have now been sold. In Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, however, it can already be seen that some release speed may be reduced in favor of additional content. Valhalla is the first part of the series, which is now entering a second year and will receive additional free and paid additional content. Rainbow Six: Siege has also been running successfully as a service game for more than five years with constantly new updates and content.
The idea is of course not new, titles such as Fortnite or GTA Online have been successfully pursuing a similar concept for years. The income from such services makes up a large part of sales. Other publishers also work with similar systems. In the case of Call of Duty, the individual games are closely linked to Call of Duty: Warzone and Microsoft has also stated that Halo should become more and more of a platform in the distant future.
This will also have an impact on Ubisoft’s studios. While the Assassin’s Creed games have so far mostly been produced alternately by Ubisoft Quebec and Montreal with the involvement of other branches, the two studios were already merged in April.
So the future of Assassin’s Creed remains exciting. But as I said, should it come to that, it will certainly take a few more years.
The second story DLC comes in the summer, followed by the Discovery Tour and – for the first time in the franchise – more content in Year 2.
