REACTION - Assassin’s Creed ramping up its release cadence will undo the benefits of letting new games cook
Don’t do it, Yves.
By Jonathan Garrett
04/07/24
We remember seeing the announcement that Ubisoft were going to let the smorgasbord of Assassin’s Creed lead devs and support studios have more time to let each title cook. The previously annual release structure was rapidly diluting the franchise, and a string of lacklustre releases (leading up to the Origins course correction) proved that there needed to be more time between releases.
Odyssey, Valhalla, Mirage, and the upcoming Shadows proved that that restraint has yielded positive results; each game had a longer tail of premium DLC and / or free updates which also gave each team space to iterate between titles in meaningful ways. Yves’ recent Ubisoft published interview, where he cites the development of remakes for previous games, as well as forging ahead with new spin offs, is a classic face palm moment of not reading the terrain.
We’re big fans of Assassin’s Creed here at tHB, having played every mainline entry in the series (and we were one of twelve people who bought a Vita for Liberation!). But this doesn’t feel like the right move for a series that has just acquired a metric ton of good will over the last five years. I realise shareholders have to be appeased, but I remain sceptical that this is the right path forward.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
