Ubisoft Announces Working on New Live Service Assassin's Creed Game

Assassin’s Creed is the next franchise to make the leap into live service, or “games as a service,” territory. The upcoming game, code-named Infinity, is currently in development as a joint project between Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Quebec. It even has two creative directors, namely Clint Hocking and Jonathan Dumont. Other than that, we just know it’s “an important upcoming, early-in-development project” and that they’re looking to stop passing the baton from game to game. The latter clearly implies Ubisoft wants to move away from the annual/biennial model and into something even closer to a live service.

Ubisoft Confirms Early-in-Development Assassin’s Creed “Infinity”

Now, I know what some of you are saying: “Joe, Assassin’s Creed has already turned into a live service.” You’re not completely wrong; several games in the series have had events that come and go, vendors that travel around each week, etc. However, according to Jason Schreier’s report for Bloomberg, the new game is going way further than that, moving closer to the likes of Fortnite and GTA V.

Mere hours after Schreier’s article came out, Ubisoft put out a lengthy blog post that says very little about the game, but dresses it up in a bunch of corporate speak, even including a complete non-sequitur about diversity and the pandemic. The gist is – there’s a new Assassin’s Creed, it’s early in development, and it will most likely be a live service, ending the tradition of a new installment every one or two years.

What the post doesn’t mention at all are the sexual harassment allegations, over which two high-level employees had to leave the company. I assume they’re hoping to just ride it out until people forget, kinda like Blizzard did with the whole Hong Kong fiasco. Even an official apology in passing would be nice, but it doesn’t seem they’re even gonna do that much. However, that’s a whole different matter.