In an interview with Ubisoft CEO, Mr. Yves Guillemot, he reflects on 30 years of Ubisoft and what’s coming next, including shedding light on the Assassin’s Creed franchise:
A few years ago you released two mainline Assassin’s Creed games in a single cycle, which led to talk about Ubisoft overreaching and the series quality dipping. You’ve since said Assassin’s Creed could use a break. What’s going on there?
First, in 2014 we were still transitioning between older and next generation consoles, and we thought it would decrease the quality of the next-gen experience if we designed it for both. So we had two teams on two different Assassin’s Creeds just to make sure we could create the best games possible. Assassin’s Creed Unity (read TIME’s review here) was probably the most ambitious product we’ve worked on, but we were trying to do too many things at the same time. We were next-gen. We were open world. Montreal was bringing cooperative and multiplayer. And all of that was happening simultaneously.
Then, when Unity arrived, it wasn’t polished enough. We continued to polish if after launch for a long time, but it was, for us, a big surprise—that in having too many things to do at the same time, we weren’t able to bring the game to our desired level of quality. And so we said, “Okay, we have another game that’s coming next year [Assassin’s Creed Syndicate], and it’s well on the way and it’s working fine. But we don’t want to be in that situation again, so we’re going to give a lot more time to polish these games and really deliver the ambition.”
The reason you’re seeing these games appear more regularly is that we have different teams with enough time, normally, to create different products. So it’s not “Do you release a new game every year?” It’s really “Do you have enough time to realize your ambitions?” That’s why we’re now saying, “Okay, we have to make sure we have the time we need to achieve the level of quality that we want to bring.”
