New Ubisoft Tech Promises Even Bigger Open Worlds With The Same Five Missions

Just in case you weren’t already swamped with a pile of massive games, Ubisoft have announced that they’re ready to throw even more at us. On Friday, ahead of this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC), they unveiled some new cloud-based technology dubbed Ubisoft Scalar, which is apparently going to be a brand new threat to anyone with an already overflowing backlog. Please, have mercy.

As reported by GamesIndustry.biz and VentureBeat, Scalar runs components of Ubisoft’s game engines, like the physics, AI and audio, all as individual systems in the cloud. By spreading the work across “a potentially unlimited number of machines”, the tech will apparently be able to harness a “virtually infinite amount of computing power.”

Assassin's Creed Valhalla is already a massive Ubisoft game even without this latest tech, and more importantly, you can also ride a lynx in it - check it out below.

So, what does this mean for those of us actually playing the games? Apparently, as well as enabling devs to roll out updates without players actually needing to download patches, games will be able to handle higher numbers of concurrent players, and the worlds will be able to be bigger than ever before. 

“How do you reimagine what games should be and what they could be in the future, and then start to build towards that to create new experiences?” said Patrick Bach, managing director of Ubisoft Stockholm. “Because in general, games are usually an iteration of what it has done before. We want to break free of that and build something big. […] We can now build even bigger worlds for players to play.”

As Kotaku points out, the fact that this implies that very chunky games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla aren’t already plenty big enough is frankly a bit terrifying - need I remind you that that specific 2020 release takes on average around 60 hours to complete, when you’re just focusing on the main stuff. Still a very good game, of course, but when there’s so many huge games coming out all the time, it becomes very tricky to actually play any of them. No doubt we’ll be seeing just how this tech will impact Ubisoft’s releases in the coming years.