Nearly every Assassin's Creed article kicks off with a good old moan about Ubisoft's exhaustive milking of their historical stabbing series - hey, even this one! - however the company show no signs of slowing down. In fact, CEO Yves Guillemot has revealed to Kotaku that there are three AC games concurrently in development - remarkably, this is to keep it feeling "appealing and fresh".
It's a safe bet to assume that one of the three games is this year's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, while the others are most likely its 2014 follow-up and perhaps even the 2015 one.
You'll be pleased to hear that Ubisoft "are making sure the teams who are creating the different iterations have enough time — two years, three years, so that they can take risks and they can change the concept enough so that it can be appealing and fresh." Although if they're developing all three games simultaneously, surely it will be hard to be too reactive to criticism, if one of those titles happens to be another AC3-style disappointment? Having said that, Black Flag certainly seems to be making the effort, despite releasing only a year after that particular shipwreck.
"Really, what we see is that we can have the capacity to regularly come with innovation," Guillemot explained to Kotaku. "That is, for me, the formula: if you can really change the game on a regular basis and bring in innovation your fans want a product very regularly. Our job is to make sure the teams have enough power, enough energy and enough time to take the necessary steps to create a high quality game."
Here's what we thought of Assassin's Creed 3. Let's hope they succeed in that goal with Black Flag.
