Ubisoft has revealed their plans for 2023, which has a bit of the bad, a bit of the good, and a bit of mystery.
First, the bad news. We already know that Skull and Bones and action game that has you commanding a pirate ship in the Indian Ocean, has been delayed. On top of that, Ubisoft has cancelled three unannounced projects. In fact, there will be no new game releases until the end of the ongoing financial year, which ends on March 31, 2023.
As for the games that are still planned for release in the financial year after that (The period from April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024), these include Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is planned for release on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and PC. This game’s Assassin is Basim Ibn Ishaq, an inhabitant of Baghdad, and that makes this the first game in some time to reexplore the Fertile Crescent since, possibly the very first Assassin’s Creed? Give or take Assassin’s Creed Origins, which was set in Egypt.
We had reported that Ubisoft plans to finish this game and get it released by August 2023. This was most likely a projection for investors to set expectations, as much as internally, for developers to work with. While August isn’t a particularly key point in the year for a game release, compared to, say, the holidays, this may be the most reasonable timeframe to keep the game from going over budget, or without taking time away from the devs to make other games.
I suspect even hardcore Avatar fans have forgotten that Ubisoft made a game to come with the release of the first Avatar movie, all the way back in 2009. While that game was not received well, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora holds more promise, as it was worked at closely with James Cameron’s production team at Lightstorm Entertainment. Ubisoft Massive has been assigned to the project, and their first trailers have been demonstrating how it looks like on the Snowdrop engine.
Back in July of last year, Ubisoft reported that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora had been delayed to 2023-2024. Now we know this release window is actually for the coming financial year, meaning it won’t take longer than March 31, 2024. While Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora missed the opportunity to be released alongside Avatar: The Way of Water, Ubisoft and Lightstorm seem to expect it to be buoyed by the renewed interest in the IP.
Most interestingly, and with little details, Ubisoft has unannounced projects coming in this period as well. Ubisoft CFO Frederick Duguet describes them as “other as yet unannounced premium games,” with one game simply described as “big.”
What could that big game be? We can’t be clearly sure, but there are two names that we know that could be the game referring to here. One is Pathfinder, the codename for an upcoming project that’s supposed to replace battle royale shooter Hyper Scape. The other one is Project U, a game we only know about because of its beta having been leaked.
Pathfinder and Project U could be the same game, and in fact, they could be the game that Duguet describes as their next “big premium game”. The little we know of Project U is quite promising, so this could be a big year for Ubisoft indeed.
Source: Aroged
