Ubisoft Believes "Taking Risks" Will Keep Brands Fresh
When it comes to franchises, especially ones that go beyond three games (which many a series or franchise does), the struggle soon becomes keeping it fresh and new, and thus keeping gamers interested. For Ubisoft, that especially applies to Assassin’s Creed. Once a series praised for creativity and uniqueness, it’s now become a struggle to maintain what the original games did in terms of great balance between story and gameplay.
This has not dissuaded Ubisoft though, who believes that taking risks is to key to keeping their franchises alive. SVP of Marketing and Sales Tony Key spoke to IGN and stated, “You have to take risks,” says Key. He added, “Sometimes it doesn’t work. We took a lot of risks with Unity, to try and move that technology and the brand forward, and some of it didn’t work out.” But Syndicate will apparently benefit from those setbacks.
Key added: “With this Assassin’s Creed [Syndicate] they’ve had the benefit of all the experience they got from the Unity development, watching that team, watching what they were focussing on, the co-op, and all the things that they did they thought were cool. What did work, what didn’t work. They got the benefit of that experience, so now they can have a much more polished experience around that technology and add a few things of their own like the carriages and stuff like that. It’s not a science, it’s an art, right? The science is finishing on time; the art is deciding what to keep and what not to keep.”
Obviously, we don’t know if Syndicate will again make things fresh for Assassin’s Creed, but at least Ubisoft appears to be trying. The game is due out on October 23 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC.