During a recent Ubisoft livestream (transcribed by Eurogamer), Community Team members Gabriel Graziani and Andrien Gbinigie sat down with Darby McDevitt, who has been the Lead Writer on several Assassin’s Creed titles.
When it comes to the lore of the Assassin’s Creed universe, McDevitt said he’s been working with the other writers for two years on “getting a great document together on the First Civilization,” the ancient species from the games.
In fact, they’ve created “500, 600, 700 years worth of history that we hope to start teasing out for the next 10, 20 years or however long we’re around,” which suggests Ubisoft is planning to keep the franchise alive for another decade or two.
The reason McDevitt and the other writers have been working on this side-project is so that “every future writer can say ‘I want to reference Juno again, or Minerva’ and see where she was at a specific date… and how far along was the First Civ-human war going.”
As for the upcoming Assassin’s Creed games, McDevitt said that Brotherhood’s town of Monteriggioni may inspire present day sections of future entries:
That only came about because [we] were able to reuse Monteriggioni from AC2. So the future – and this is the plan – is to smartly reuse things so we can have a more robust modern day.
He added that they “always plan to have more modern day but we have to be really smart about how we do it.” For Unity, while it didn’t actually happen, there was a plan early on to have a little modern day.
Noting how that particular content in Unity was only planned and not cut, McDevitt explained:
The thing with Unity was that it was a completely fresh game on a completely fresh generation. So creating any kind of modern day is a pretty huge ask. To create a city, for instance, or even part of a city, would require six months of work by many, many artists, designers, modellers. And then you’d need gameplay systems that didn’t feel like you were just fencing.
While Ubisoft hasn’t officially confirmed it’s releasing this year, Assassin’s Creed Victory led by Ubisoft Quebec is expected to be the next big game in the franchise.
