Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the next major installment in Ubisoft’s long-running game series a series of historical open-world stab-a-thons. The massive game is coming later this year, and when it does, it will have the longest development cycle in the franchise’s nearly 20-year history.
Announced in 2022 as “Assassin’s Creed Red”, Shadows is the first main installment in the series to be set in Japan — something fans have long been waiting for — and to feature two main characters.You’ve probably heard of it as a tiny but furious part With The Internet has been shouting about it lately.) Ubisoft Quebec, the same studio behind the 2018 game. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and 2015 Consortiumstarted working on Shadows in 2020. This means that when the game launches in November, it will have been in development for four years, longer than usual.
In an interview for GamesIndustry.biz, Shadows Lead producer Karl Onnée explained that making games for such a long time is a matter of balancing “time and cost.” And that the real path to success is iteration, something that takes time.
“The more time you have, the more you can iterate,” Onnée said. “Yes, you can put more people on a project and get it done in a shorter time frame, but that doesn’t give you more time to iterate, because it takes time to get feedback from your players, your team… and then see what’s working, what’s not working, and how to improve it.”
According to the manufacturer, four years provides “the right balance between concept and production and allows for the feedback necessary to adapt.”
How Assassin’s Creed Mirage He helped Shadows
Onnée explained that one example of iteration Shadows got involved in last year’s smaller, well-received Assassin’s Creed Mirage. This game saw the series return to a more stealth-focused adventure format, something the developers are working on Shadows I took it into account and developed it.
“During production, we playtest with people from different places at different stages,” he explains. “We look at what works and what doesn’t, and we playtest with Mirage and see what people like. We knew we were headed towards stealth ShadowsSo we saw what they were doing and learned from it. We said, “Let’s use what they did and build on it,” instead of going our own way.”
The Ubisoft producer added that all teams working on different Assassin’s Creed games are “part of the brand” and it’s important for all studios to talk to each other to avoid “duplicating work.”
“Making games is hard, it takes a lot of time and passion, and you have to avoid doing the same thing but differently,” Onnée said.
“You want to build on the work and improve it. We have a lot of conversations with other teams to make sure that if we’re doing similar things, we can work together, so if they want to do something later, we can take that into account. That’s what we do in our novel Anvil process, which is to have the technical teams work together. When we build novel features, we make sure they’re available for all projects. We’re constantly building and improving them.”
Assassin’s Creed Shadows Coming to PS5, Xbox Series X/Sand PC on November 15.
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