Though Ubisoft will be heading to Ancient Greece in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, it is toying with the idea of having multiple timelines within a single game. On the Ubi Blog, Ubisoft EVP Lionel Raynaud said that next-gen technology could allow for players to travel between different historical periods within the Animus.
“We would be able to – in the same world – have several historical periods, for instance, in Assassin’s Creed, and use the Animus to travel from one to the other,” he wrote.
The same could apply to Watch Dogs and Far Cry as well. “Or have different areas of the world linked by travel systems, so that a Far Cry game or a Watch Dogs game could happen in different countries in the same experience, seamlessly,” Raynaud wrote. Given that Ubisoft has been leaning more into the games-as-a-service model, it’s realized that having one single game simply end is becoming a thing of the past.
“This line gets fuzzier every year,” Raynaud continued. “We have bigger post-launch periods, longer lives for each of our games. Even the ones that used to be solo-oriented games, like action adventures, they now have a very strong post-launch, and people are staying in our worlds for a long time. So this line is absolutely fuzzier and fuzzier.
“We all see a future where a game will stay [post-launch], and new experiences will come in the games. But we will have technology that will break the [current] limits of memory, for instance, because of new technologies that are arriving.”
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from these statements is that next-gen technology, whether it’s in the form of a new PlayStation or Xbox, isn’t as far away as we think. Microsoft’s Phil Spencer announced at E3 2018 that the team behind the Xbox One X was already hard at work on the next console iteration.
Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO John Kodera famously also recently mentioned how the PS4 is beginning to wind down. With games like Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 also teasing next-gen debuts, one has to wonder what the future will hold. How do you think that will impact the future of Ubisoft’s worlds? Let us know in the comments.
