The news are as fresh as the latest game in Assassin’s Creed franchise, and will hit all the curious faces like a cool breeze on a still young and settling Sunday morning after an overnight of ‘Brotherhood-y’ fun. Ubisoft team might just be recuperating from the latest game’s success celebrations, but from what we have found, the company seems reluctant not to let the developers bask just yet as it reveals intricacies about the next one in the series.
Geoffroy Sardin, EMEA chief of marketing and sales at Ubisoft, informed MCV that the just-released Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood has a successor inline which can be expected next year. “Yes, Yves [Guillemot, Ubisoft CEO] mentioned it last week in our financials ”“ and more details will be forthcoming. But what I can say is that next year we will have another big Assassin’s Creed game.”
Surprising, because as far as the rumors go, the next Assassin’s wasn’t likely to be seen any time before 2012. But the news has streamlined all the speculations that followed Brotherhood’s release and highlighted a few concerns about the new one’s storyline and character involvement. With Ezio getting old from all the assassin-styled parkouring and struggle against the Templar Order, will the sequel see Desmond travelling centuries to relive a different character? What sort of world will the next Assassin’s Creed take place in?
“If you’ve read the comic books you will see that we took Assassin’s Creed to the USSR, or Caesar’s Rome ”“ that’s a good example of what we could do in the coming years in the next video games. We never saw this as just a franchise ”“ it is a 360 degree franchise, and touches a lot of other experiences. It’s not just a game, but an animated story, on comics, in books, and other formats too. There’s lots of scope for what we can do.” Geoffroy indicates.
That seems interesting enough to tickle our creative senses. According to Sardin, the Assassin’s Creed games have sold over twenty million copies so far and the publisher is anticipating a sales number of over thirty million by the end of 2011. Brotherhood was released only a week after Call of Duty: Black Ops, but this has reportedly not affected its retails.
Although it appears best to leave it on time to decide whether the one-game-every-year schedule will work out for Ubisoft just as well as it has for Activision, most franchise fans would like to witness this move materializing in success.