Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that the publisher intends to release modern Assassin’s Creed games “more regularly” in the future, including remakes of older games.
Ubisoft is celebrated for its problems with remakes. The remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (which is no longer officially called a remake) has been in limbo for four years and still doesn’t seem to be close to completion. Meanwhile, the Splinter Cell remake saw even less delicate of day. It was announced in 2021, and well, that’s it: hopes that some kind of update would be rolled out during the Ubisoft Forward show earlier this month were dashed when absolutely nothing was mentioned about it.
Still, it looks like Ubisoft isn’t giving up on returning to its older games. “Players may be excited about some of the remakes that will allow us to go back to some of the games we’ve made in the past and modernize them,” Guillemot said when asked about the future of the Assassin’s Creed series in a recent release Ubisoft promotional interview“There are worlds in some of our older Assassin’s Creed games that are still incredibly rich.”
Guillemot didn’t give any hints as to which Assassin’s Creed games would get a remake, but Black Flag seems like an obvious choice – it’s a massive fan favorite. The first Assassin’s Creed would also make sense, and an update to the Ezio trilogy (Assassin’s Creed 2, Brotherhood, and Revelations) would probably work as well.
Whichever way it goes, there’s plenty to choose from. Assassin’s Creed has been out since 2007 and is one of Ubisoft’s flagship titles—a massive, successful franchise by any measure. But there have been some solemn ups and downs over the years. We said back in 2014 that Ubisoft’s insistence on annual sequels and sticking to a strict formula was doing more harm than good, and Guillemot clearly took that to heart in 2016, when he suggested that annual releases might be a thing of the past.
And so it was: after the mediocre Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Ubisoft took two years to deliver a much stronger Origins, and Odyssey, which came the following year, delivered the change we expected: “Odyssey is so much more than just another Assassin’s Creed,” we wrote in our 90% review. “It’s an RPG of unparalleled scope, complete with satisfyingly layered and deep progression systems, each playing its part in bringing ancient Greece to life.”
An even longer gap of three years led to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which was brilliant, and a year later we got Mirage, which was good but not quite up to the level of its recent predecessors. So it’s not exactly a demanding and swift rule, but you can definitely see a pattern: More time, generally speaking, equals better play.
Guillemot said in an interview that Ubisoft’s goal “is for Assassin’s Creed games to come out more regularly, but not for them to be the same experience every year.” He cited Assassin’s Creed Hexe as an example, a supernatural-themed game about which we otherwise know nothing, which “will be very different from Assassin’s Creed Shadows.”
My city in June 2023, it was reported that an Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag remake was already in the works, and while it has not been confirmed, Guillemot’s words support infuse hope that it will actually happen. But first, Assassin’s Creed Shadows: The next main game in the series is scheduled for release on November 15.
