French gaming giant Ubisoft has announced that the next instalment in its mega popular Assassin’s Creed franchise is on its way and that the next game will not follow on from the recently released US civil war era-based Assassin’s Creed 3.
The news was announced by Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot, who stated that the next game will take place in a new setting and will have a new hero as well, all of which takes away from the previous lifetimes from the older Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed 2 franchises.
The next instalment will be released before April 2014, which means a whole new game will be made and launched just 18 months on from the last one. However, there is no news on whether the next game Guillemot is talking about will be game number 4 in the official number sequencing.
The news is pretty big as the last instalment of the AC franchise was only just released in October, with a whole update to the game (now including tree running and sea based naval battles), set in Civil War era USA. If history is any judge then what Ubisoft normally does with the AC games is to continue on with a protagonist in a series of shorter or expanded games after the main instalment.
After Assassin’s Creed 2 Ubisoft released 2 further games continuing the story of Ezio AuDitore with Assassins Creed: Brotherhood and Revelations, both of which were well received and sold very well, so the move to a new character and setting is away from the game’s history.
However, Ubisoft was keen to tout the success of Assassin’s Creed III by saying that the game had sold 12 million units worldwide since its release in October.
Either way a new AC game is always welcome and we can hope to see more information regarding the game at the E3 gaming expo in LA this June.