Assassin's Creed Series Will Get Larger Gaps Between Releases, Says Ubisoft
Ubisoft is slowing the rate at which it releases Assassin's Creed games going forward. Following Assassin's Creed 2's immense success, Ubisoft decided that the series should release annually like Call of Duty going forward. Shockingly, this actually worked pretty well for quite some time and resulted in a compelling trilogy starring Ezio and the conclusion to Desmond Miles' story in Assassin's Creed 3. Ubisoft pumped out a new entry in the series from 2009 – 2015 before pumping the brakes after some of the later entries received mixed reviews and saw a decline in sales. Ubisoft then moved to releasing a new game every other year and filling the gap with DLC, something that has also continued to do really well for the publisher since, but things are once again changing.
Ubisoft confirmed that Assassin's Creed Mirage would release in 2023, meaning it will mark the longest gap between entries the series has seen thus far as it will be three years since Assassin's Creed Valhalla. In an interview posted on Ubisoft's website, series executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté stated this was intentional. Ubisoft announced all of its upcoming Assassin's Creed games pretty far in advance during its Ubisoft Forward event because it wants to gauge feedback from fans and incorporate it into the game's development. The team is also taking more time to make the games so it can build more off the back of the prior entries.
"We're also shifting our development model to make it more sustainable for our teams, as previously we used to average about three years for each development cycle on Assassin's Creed," says Côté. "So we're moving to longer dev cycles to make them more sustainable from a human and technological point of view, so that we can truly build on the shoulders of one another and then support our games for a longer period of time."
As of right now, it remains to be seen how long we'll be waiting for the newly announced titles Assassin's Creed Codename Red and Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe. Given they don't even have proper names and we barely saw anything from either game, it seems like they're pretty far off. As for how different they'll be from each other, Ubisoft has already stated it plans for Hexe to be vastly different from both Red and other games in the franchise.
What do you think about Ubisoft taking more time to develop Assassin's Creed games? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.