14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft has cleared a few things up concerning its massively successful Assassin’s Creed franchise, once again highlighting that, even if a new game has appeared every year for the last three ones, it takes a lot longer than 12 months to complete games of such size and scope.
While the Assassin’s Creed franchise started off with lots of promise and not a lot of gameplay back in 2007, ever since 2009, when Assassin’s Creed II appeared, the series impressed millions of gamers, and saw back to back releases both in 2010 and this year, in the form of Brotherhood and Revelations.
Now, just as a new game is now getting ready for release in 2012, Ubisoft’s Tony Key has highlighted that players shouldn’t think that the publisher is making the games throughout a 12-month period.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite, as the senior VP of sales and marketing says that studios from all around the world are contributing to the series with manpower and creative ideas.
“One of the difficulties is dealing with the perceptions that [we] didn't spend enough time developing the game,” said Key to the A List. “There's this misperception about the brand that we keep making [Assassin's Creed] once a year, and we only spend a year on it... we've got a studio in Montreal with 2,000 people working on stuff. Not all are on Assassin's Creed but many are, and so are many studios around the world. Missions made in Bucharest and there's the multiplayer from Singapore. The DNA is owned and operated by Ubisoft Montreal but it is crafted by a lot of people.”
While Ubisoft’s global teams are now working on probably Assassin’s Creed III ahead of its late 2012 release, Key notes that some groups are already thinking about what comes after that.
“We work on it a lot longer than one year and that's part of it,” Key added. “Assassin's Creed is a blueprint brand. What that means is it has a lot of resources focused onto it. We constantly have people thinking about it, so we have a lot of people working on future iterations, while these games are being made we're already thinking about the next one.”
“I hope people are getting over the idea that we rush them out; we don't make Assassin's Creed games in one year. That's something we want people to understand, and hopefully the message can get out,” he concluded.
While the next Assassin’s Creed is pretty much nailed down, Ubisoft is already asking fans to choose where they’d like to see the series go after that, offering plenty of choices in a new survey. Until the next game, however, you can still enjoy last month’s Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, both on consoles and the PC.