Speculation ran rampant this morning about the future of Assassin’s Creed, tentatively titled “Infinity”. Thankfully, Ubisoft has now issued a formal statement which provides some clarity.
Going forward, Assassin’s Creed will be managed by a cross-studio collaboration between Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Quebec. Leading the studios will be Marc-Alexis Côté who has a long history with the series including Brotherhood, Syndicate, Odyssey. He will be joined by Brand Director Étienne Allonier who has held the role for over ten years now. Production efforts will be lead by Ubisoft Montreal’s Julien Laferrière who has been named senior producer, overseeing production at both studios.
Ubisoft makes it clear that this new model will provide the franchise with more continuity and benefit of shared leadership, partially born out of the COVID pandemic.
Rather than continuing to pass the baton from game to game, we profoundly believe this is an opportunity for one of Ubisoft’s most beloved franchises to evolve in a more integrated and collaborative manner that’s less centered on studios and more focused on talent and leadership, no matter where they are within Ubisoft. Most importantly, Assassin’s Creed has always been developed by multicultural teams with various backgrounds and perspectives that have influenced the depiction of its characters, locations, and cultures. While we know there’s always room for improvement, we believe this new structure allows us to ensure that diversity and representation within our teams continues to grow and match that of our players.
Our Take
While there are a lot of opinions of what this will mean in reality, specifics are few and far between just yet. What we do know is that moving Assassin’s Creed to a unified development team with broader resources sounds like a good move, and will allow more of a focus on each iteration/expansion, rather than having multiple studios working in parallel. We’ll see how this develops in time, but this seems to be very positive news for one of the biggest franchises in gaming.
