Ubisoft shifts to four-year development timeline for mainline Assassin’s Creed games

Much like major sports games, or the annual Call of Duty cycle, Assassin's Creed also used to be a yearly franchise. That changed with Assassin's Creed Origins, with Ubisoft taking more time to create even bigger open worlds with more RPG mechanics. Now, ahead of the launch of Assassin's Creed Shadows, Ubisoft says it may take even more time between releases in the future.

Assassin's Creed Shadows is due to launch later this year and is the first mainline game in the series since 2020's Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Ubisoft has released a smaller-scale game in the meantime, Assassin's Creed Mirage, which offered a return to the classic Assassin's Creed formula with more stealth-focused gameplay and instant assassinations.

Speaking with GI.biz, Ubisoft producer, Karl Onnée, explained that a four year cycle for major Assassin's Creed games seems to be “the right balance” moving forward:

“It's always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate. Yes, you can put more people on a project and do it in a shorter time, but that doesn't give you more time to iterate, because it takes time to get the feedback from your players, your team… and then see what works and what doesn't and how to improve it. Four years, I think, is the right balance to go from conception to production and get the feedback necessary to adapt.”

This is a sign of growing game development timelines observed across the industry. After soft-rebooting the series with Assassin's Creed Origins, Ubisoft aimed for around two years between major Assassin's Creed titles, but that has grown to four years in the time between Valhalla and Shadows. Moving forward, it seems that this will be Ubisoft's strategy, although it will have other studios working on smaller-scale Assassin's Creed games, like Mirage, to pad out the release schedule in-between the major titles.

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KitGuru Says: I don't want to clown on Ubisoft too much but it is always a little funny to see Ubisoft talking about innovation and iteration when most of the company's major releases have largely followed the same gameplay formula for the past ten years, albeit with some minor deviations here and there.

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