Ubisoft’s two yearly franchises, Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed, will probably be skipping release next year. The publisher says that it wants to reinvent both franchises so players don’t have to slog through the same old experience every single time as they have in past releases.
Both titles have been highly criticized by gamers for having pointless collectibles and an assortment of towers for players to climb and claim. In fact, claiming towers has been something of a staple of Ubisoft’s open world games—present even in their racing game, The Crew.
Speaking to IGN, Ubisoft VP Tommy Francois says that both titles may be on a release hiatus as the developers spend more time on them. “I’ll tell you what. We believe alpha for these games needs to be one year before release,” François said to IGN.
“We’re trying to achieve that. That’s super f****** blunt, I don’t even know if I’m allowed to say this. This is the goal we’re going for: alpha one year before, more quality, more polish.
“So if this means biting the [bullet] and not having an Assassin’s game, or a Far Cry [in 2017], f*** it.”
He clarified that he was referring to internal alphas, rather than any alphas the studio might release to the public.
“I mean it from that perspective. We still need to have an Alpha, and we need it available as early as we possibly can, because the more time we have for this the more polish we have, the more time we can change, refine, swap systems. You just can’t take shortcuts,” he elaborated.
The Ubisoft exec says that any notion that they were delaying the games’ releases because of declining sales was false, because the numbers have only been going up with each release.
