During the Ubisoft Forward event, Assassin’s Creed fans learned much about the franchise’s future. It begins with The Last Chapter free DLC quest coming to Valhalla in the next few months, where Eivor will be shown tying up some of the storylines from the main game while meeting key characters. Then, the wait will begin for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, previously known as Assassin’s Creed Rift. The game scheduled for 2023 features a comeback to series roots, focusing more on stealth and assassinations rather than the RPG formula that debuted with Assassin’s Creed Origins.
Mirage will be the last cross-generation installment in the series. Speaking to the Ubisoft Blog, Vice President Executive Producer of the Assassin’s Creed brand Marc-Alexis Côté teased some of the tech advancements that the developers are preparing for the Anvil engine going forward.
I don’t want to spoil too much of what our creative teams are working on. However, from a technological point of view, these are games that will benefit from a tremendous increase in fidelity with all the improvements that we’re working on with this new iteration of the Anvil pipeline, so you can just imagine it being a very next-generation approach to RPGs, at least from a graphical-fidelity point of view. But it will take all the learnings that we’ve had from Odyssey and Valhalla to epitomize the best of what we can do at Ubisoft in terms of RPGs.
Côté also said that Ubisoft’s approach to game announcements and game development will change. Games (such as Assassin’s Creed Codename Red and Hexe) will be announced earlier to gather feedback from the community, and the developers will be able to take advantage of longer, more sustainable cycles.
The industry is changing around us. I don’t think we can or should announce projects like we’ve done in the past on a very short cycle, where we announce and in six months it’s on the shelves. We want to engage in a different conversation with our fans so that we can listen to their feedback earlier, take it into account, and keep improving our games and what we want to create with respect to the feedback that they’re giving us.
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. 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.
After Mirage, Codename Red could appear at some point in 2024. Given this statement, it’s fair to assume Hexe might be at least around a couple of years beyond it, though Assassin’s Creed aficionados should have plenty to enjoy in the meantime.
