Since 2009, Ubisoft has released at least one new mainline Assassin’s Creed game every year. That tradition will be broken this year as the next big Assassin’s Creed game won’t be launched until 2017.
Initial rumours of the delay originated from the 4chan boards when an anonymous poster claimed to be a developer at Ubisoft and started dropping details about the next Assassin’s Creed game. The poster — whose posts are conveniently compiled here on NeoGAF — stated that aside from a few teases or maybe an announcement in 2016, the game won’t be released until 2017. Supposedly codenamed “Empire” and being developed by the Black Flag team, the next game will be set in ancient Egypt, there will be “a lot more story” and a lot more colour than all the previous entries in the franchise, and the protagonist will be a slave or an ex-slave with a pet eagle that can be controlled by players. The poster further claimed that the new Egyptian setting was chosen to give the developers more creative freedom and that the game will be a “complete revamp of the series” featuring a “Witcher feel, with player progression” and a “free-form combat system”.
These 4chan posts were later confirmed when Kotaku released a report that corroborated some of those rumoured details. Kotaku’s report also states that the franchise could shift to a bi-annual schedule in order to avoid the technical issues that plagued the launches of Unity and Syndicate, and that Ubisoft’s now-empty 2016 Fall release spot could be taken over by Watch Dogs 2.
Whilst you’ll have to wait a bit for the next mainline Assassin’s Creed game, 2016 will see the release of Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India and Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: Russia in January and February respectively, followed by the Assassin’s Creed movie in December. We’ll keep you posted on any new details and announcements regarding the new game so stay tuned.
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