Ever since the release of Assassin’s Creed in 2007 I have been hooked on the series. Assassins Creed 2 was easily one of my favorite games from the last generation. For a while the series was going great, I didn’t have a problem with the annual releases because the games were so good. Of recent thought the series started getting stale and while the games were still good they were slowly falling into a rut. Finally they mixed up the series with AC: Black Flag which saw you take the seas as a pirate with your own ship. While a welcomed change of pace what followed for the series was not.
I don’t know what Ubisoft was thinking when they decided to release two Assassin’s Creed games in one year but I wish they hadn’t. While I will give them credit at least they split it up so it was only one Assassins Creed gamer per console. Assassin’s Creed: Unity was for the newest generation console and plays more like the Assassin’s game of old. While AC: Rogue released on 7th generation consoles and took after AC: Black Flag with a mix of naval combat and assassin play.
This put the AC series on a level even worse than the Call of Duty series which I didn’t even think was possible. At least Call of Duty knows to stay in there lane with the one game per year. Also Activision is allowing there developers a 3 year cycle to make the game instead of two which allows for more innovation gameplay wise. Ubisoft should learn from this before they completely kill the series.
There comes a point to where gamers start getting fatigue from a series and this last year is what pushed me over the edge. What they should have done is combined there resources and put them all into one game instead of dividing them into two mediocre products. Both games were low 70’s which is not up to AC standards and could easily have been avoided if one had been pushed back to the next year.
AC: Unity could have been a really good game at launch if it would have been delayed. But the problem with Ubisoft is they didn’t allow this to happen and Unity suffered for it. The game launched with bugs like quite a few other games last winter, which caused it to score and sell poorly. This caused Ubisoft to give away some of the DLC away for free to save face on the game. You would think they would have learned from this but it is already rumored that there is a new AC game in the pipeline.
Not only would releasing a AC game every other year get rid of the some of the AC fatigue it would open Ubisoft Studios to make new games. Each game is on a two year development cycle. If they left the series for one team the other team could put that time towards a new IP. Also forcing the AC game into that winter slot may give you the best sales, but can be detrimental to the brand. I have played AC Unity and if this game would have pushed back into say April it would have done this game wonders. It needed more polishing and a lot of the small things like talking animations on missions among other things to add to the overall experience. Moving it back to April would have been an easy move, because of the lack of competition in the Triple A game space for that month. With nothing to overshadow the game, it would have sold plenty while giving the developers plenty of time to fix the games problems instead of patching it after release.
Until Ubisoft heeds this warning I will probably stay away for Assasssin Creed games for a while. While I say that now I also said that about Black Flag after not liking AC 3 and thinking about taking a break from the series. Then I went out and bought it and it is now my second favorite game in the series. All in all a break from the series would be great before it starts getting hate on par with the Call of Duty series. While I will admit the COD series does sell like hot cakes after each wash and repeat title. More and more gamers are staying away from the series and I would hate for that to happen to Assassin’s Creed.