Assassin’s Creed 4 Director Clarifies His End-of-Franchise Comments

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag director Ashraf Ismail has moved to clarify comments he made last year which suggested Ubisoft knew how the franchise would end. 

Speaking to IGN at BAFTA game awards last night, Ismail remarked that he never meant to infer that the Assassin's Creed series had a clear finale in mind. 

"Yeah… that was my bad. What I was trying to say is that there is this meta-arc in the brand, in the franchise. We know what we want to do with the franchise, that’s what I meant by it, that we know where we want the metastory to head. Now, how many games fit into that and how that plays out is still to be determined by the dev teams themselves.

"There are multiple dev teams working on AC, each team is responsible for their own game. There are people working on the brand level that try to make sure things fit together nicely, but there’s no master plan. I’m not here to say in five years, yep, that’ll be the end. Not at all. But we do know where we want the brand to go and what kind of metastory we want to tell. I hope that gives you a better answer."

In January, series writer Darby McDevitt also denied that there is any planned ending for the series saying Ubisoft intends for Assassin's Creed to continue beyond Assassin's Creed 5.

Elsewhere in his IGN interview, Ismail said that Ubisoft would continue "to cater to our fans that have the Xbox 360 or PS3," despite the release of the Xbox One and PS4 last November. 

Ubisoft has revealed few details of Assassin's Creed 5 and while we know the game will not be set in Feudal Japan, Ismail added that the development teams choose interesting time periods for their games' settings and as such don't "bind" themselves to gameplay mechanics.