Interview with Serge Hascoët, Chief Creative Officer at Ubisoft France discussing the future of Ubisoft games including the next Assassin’s Creed installment:
Ubisoft is building open worlds that allow players to choose and follow the path they decided. Ubisoft thinks that the player has a long-term goal but it’s up to him/her to find a way to reach it in the big open world they’re preparing.
The game becomes less important. What interests me is making worlds that would be interesting to me, even as a tourist. If I make a game in San Francisco (i.e. Watch Dogs 2), even my mother must be able to have fun, go boating, helicopter, motorcycle. Then, just let the player have fun. He is left with the means to become a private detective, an assassin, a hacker … He has a job in this world, his problems, and it is up to him to become more powerful“.
There will be less and less narrative in future games, because in the past, narrative often slipped as it happened like in Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry. The same reasoning will be applied to cutscenes.
Hascoët added: “My ability to express myself is taken away. During this time, I cannot do what I want to do, and I mean I cannot evolve in the world. I do not want to be told a story, I want to have ten thousand stories, I want that each character is one story, and I can go and question him if I want, without being imposed to do it.”
For the next Assassin’s Creed, game designers are creating a system where the player’s actions “make sense not only in this moment, but also on the long run. The player’s actions, then, are going to change the world.” This revolution will be present in the next Assassin’s Creed game even if, being this a franchise with a history and with games that undergo many years of development, they are not going to turn everything upside down.
For the original article in French, click here.
