This year marks the first time since 2009 that a brand new Assassin’s Creed game will not be launching on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3; while last year’s Assassin’s Creed Unity was the first fully next generation game in the series, it was also accompanied by the simultaneous launch of Assassin’s Creed Rogue, which was made for the older consoles. No such concessions to the older machines have been made this year- if you want to play Assassin’s Creed now, you will need a PS4, an Xbox One, or a high level PC.
This was always planned, according to Scott Phillips, director for the title at Ubisoft Quebec, to MCV UK.“I can only speak for us and, because of the power of the consoles and the engine that was built for Unity as the first next-gen only Assassin’s Creed, Syndicate was always planned for Xbox One, PS4 and PC,” Phillips said.
“For us, that was always the plan. There were never any past-gen considerations. Syndicate is the only project I can speak to – I can’t speak for what else might’ve been planned. It’s mainly about delivering the quality experience: the visual quality, the accuracy, the speed of streaming, the size of the disc and so on,” he detailed.
“Our games tend to fill up the Blu-ray and we always have to be a little bit concerned about whether we’re a little bit over budget: generally, for most of the project, we are over disc size. Then we need to find some optimisations or trim some things or figure out how we’re going to fit on the disc.
“Next-gen always brings your fidelity much higher.”
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate launches later this month on the Xbox one and the PlayStation 4; the PC version’s release will follow shortly afterwards.