Featured Image Credit: Ubisoft
Topics: Assassins Creed, Far Cry, Ubisoft, PC, PlayStation, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Assassin's Creed Shadows, Assassins Creed Valhalla, Nintendo Switch
Topics: Assassins Creed, Far Cry, Ubisoft, PC, PlayStation, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Assassin's Creed Shadows, Assassins Creed Valhalla, Nintendo Switch
A former Ubisoft developer who worked on Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry has explained why the later games in both series have started to feel rather bloated and endless, and we get it.
Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry are two long-running series that have been going since the mid-2000s, but they look and play completely differently today compared to their debut.
For the former series in particular, once Assassin’s Creed Origins turned the games into open-world RPGs, it felt like the days of shorter experiences were done for.
Ex-Ubisoft developer Alex Hutchinson, who was the game director on Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 4, has explained why the games started to feel rather bloated over time.
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As is usually the case for situations like this, the short answer is “money”.
To elaborate on that, Hutchinson told GamesRadar that “at the time there was a lot of pressure inside Ubisoft to 'keep the disc in the tray' to essentially try to delay resale as GameStop was the only one making any money on that transaction.
“Designers were being asked to add play time which seemed like the most pro gamer solution to the problem in a franchise where multiplayer had never really worked.”
Hutchinson adds that “action-adventure games are notoriously expensive per game hour, so the cheapest and most effective way to bulk it out was to add RPG elements.”
Although Hutchinson doesn’t explicitly confirm this is the sole reason why Ubisoft decided to transform Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry into RPGs, it does give some perspective from the developers who were working on these games at the time.
“I think it's the only franchise I can think of that changed genre and kept its audience, so it was risky but it seems to have worked,” Hutchinson said. “That said I always thought it was a peculiar decision for a franchise where they also wanted to put them out as close to annually as possible.”
The most recent Assassin’s Creed game, Shadows, has an estimated playtime of around 60 hours depending on your style of play. Meanwhile, Assassin’s Creed 2, which is arguably the most popular game in the classic era of the series, is much shorter at an estimated 20-ish hours.
I mean, I’m still trying to 100% Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and I have around 170 hours of playtime. So, I’m with Hutchinson on this in preferring the action-adventure format.