Jeff Grubb, the fountain of insider knowledge that just keeps on giving, has given a little bit of context to the long rumoured Assassin’s Creed Infinity this morning during a Q&A portion of his GiantBomb Twitch morning show ‘Game Mess Mornings’.
A viewer of the show had reached out to highlight a recent comment made by fellow insider Tom Henderson on Twitter, where he referred to a Project Red, being a Japanese portion of the heavily rumoured Assassin’s Creed live service franchise entry, which prompted Grubb to comment with his own understandings.
“I don’t think I said previously that that was called Project Red, but that is definitely the internal project name for that, so to me this feels like, okay, we’re getting some more details about this. Rift is the next [Assassin’s Creed] game that’s coming out, that is the one with Basim, and is going to be that stand-alone one, and then they’re gonna do Infinity, and that’s gonna have Red, Project Red, which is set in Japan, and then a whole other one, which has a really cool setting that I haven’t talked about yet, because I think they’re gonna reveal it next month, and I’m like, it’ll be better, because it’s not something that people have been asking for, but it’s something that could be very cool”. You can check that link out here starting at 1:07:00
The game featuring Basim that Grubb refers to is another heavily rumored Assassin’s Creed game, one that will star Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s Basim and will be supposedly set in Baghdad, and will supposedly be much smaller in scope. Infinity is, however, much the opposite, seemingly poised to be the biggest Assassin’s Creed title that we’ve seen to date, leveraging qualities of several other live service games such as Destiny, and The Division. The game, in development at both of Ubisoft’s Montreal and Quebec studios won’t be contained to a single time period as per other Assassin’s Creed titles. “Infinity will contain multiple settings with room to expand to others in the months and years following its debut.” said a Bloomberg report in July.
Players have been pleading with Ubisoft for many years to take the Assassin’s Creed franchise to Japan, but ultimately they were beaten to the punch when Sony’s Sucker Punch developed Ghost of Tsushima, a game that evoked many primary qualities of the Assassin’s Creed franchise and itself was set in Japan, specifically the islands of Tsushima, followed by Iki in it’s DLC expansion. The nature of Infinity may lend itself well to taking on the Japanese setting as it would then form just one part of a larger experience, taking some stress off the developers to compare especially favorably to a game that was nominated (and in some cases won) numerous Game of the Year awards in 2020.