The Assassin’s Creed franchise has been the subject of much rumour-mongering and numerous leaks over recent months. From Assassin’s Creed Infinity, to the Baghdad setting of the now confirmed Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the leaks coming out of Ubisoft pertaining to the Assassin’s Creed IP had been plentiful, but today’s Ubisoft Forward live stream played host to the confirmation of both aforementioned titles, but also the next chapter in the franchise, one that fans of the franchise have been desperately calling out to Ubisoft for, for a decade – Assassin’s Creed is off to Japan at last.
The pairing of Assassin’s Creed and Japan has long seemed obvious, but while Assassin’s Creed was asleep at the wheel, others swept in and did the job that they weren’t, resulting in 2020’s Ghost Of Tsushima from PlayStation first-party studio, Sucker Punch Productions. But it seems that their work as awoken the beast, and Ubisoft have gone on to announce Assassin’s Creed: Codename Red, the Japanese edition of the franchise with a brief but beautiful teaser.
“Experience the full Shinobi fantasy in our future open world RPG title set during Feudal Japan: Assassin’s Creed Codename Red” reads the Ubisoft social media posts revealing the game.
Assassin’s Creed: Codename Red is being developed by Assassin’s Creed Odyssey developer, Ubisoft Quebec and is planned to be the next big, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla scoped game, unlike the upcoming 2023 release, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which is reportedly smaller in length, and back to the basics of the franchise. Codename Red is also marking the beginning of what Ubisoft has dubbed “Period Three” of the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
“We’ll announce the dates a bit later on, but we wanted to mark a change technologically and gameplay-wise as we’re moving to a fully next-gen – or current gen, I guess we call it – with the PS5 and the Xbox Series X” said the Assassin’s Creed overseer Marc-Alexis Cote in an interview with Video Games Chronicle.
“One of the big things that we are pushing is to have a more dynamic world, a world that evolves around you and we want everything that you have on yourself to evolve as you walk through this environment – to show the wear and tear – and to improve the fidelity of the experiences that we are building, pushing our animation systems further to make the game feel more realistic than ever. A lot has been made about like graphical fidelity. People like to compare screenshots but for me, the future of the industry is not looking at those still renders but the more complex our environment becomes, the more challenging it becomes for AI…you just don’t want to have a nice-looking tree or a bunch of different-looking trees.” Cote continued.
Assassin’s Creed: Codename Red does not yet have a release window, but with Mirage slated for 2023, you can imagine that it isn’t scheduled to arrive until 2024 at the earliest.
