14 DAY TRIAL // The team at Ubisoft working on the Assassin’s Creed franchise says that it is already thinking about a full next-gen version of the game and that one of its main features will be more detailed game worlds that players will be able to share with friends.
Jean-Sebastien Decant, the lead game designer who created the recently launched Black Flag, tells Gamereactor that his team has used powerful PCs in order to simulate the kind of experience that the series could deliver on the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.
He states, “I think we're going toward a gaming place where the open world will be shared with other players. More and more. Socially speaking, but also maybe multiplayer stuff. And we will have to consider the open world much more like a platform that we could sustain for years.”
Some fans might believe that the developer is speaking about an MMO, but he then goes on to say that much inspiration has been drawn from Watch Dogs, another Ubisoft project that focuses on a single-player story.
The move to more powerful consoles will not change the core nature of Assassin’s Creed, according to Decant, because the team will continue to focus on improving those mechanics that have created the franchise’s fan base and have impressed in the previous four core titles.
The lead designer adds, “There is this idea of having the parkour - you can jump around - and then the notion of freedom that combines everything. These are the roots of Assassin's Creed. We will try and work and build upon them.”
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag has versions for the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, but most of the development process has been done on current-gen consoles and that means there’s plenty more power to unlock for future installments in the series.