Assassin’s Creed 3 Director Claims Ubisoft Pressured Devs to Add ‘Play Time’ and RPG ‘Bulk’ to Delay Resales
Starting with Assassin’s Creed Origins, the series began to include more role-playing elements. At the same time, the game worlds became larger and filled with side activities. The result is that the time needed to complete each title 100% has increased, often exceeding a hundred hours of gameplay.
It’s gotten so widespread that it became known as the “Ubisoft open world bloat” of game design.
As it turns out, it’s not the developers who wanted this, but the publisher, and it’s driven purely because of commercial reasons.
Assassin’s Creed Got More RPG Elements Because Ubisoft Wanted to Stop Resales
According to Alex Hutchinson, a former Ubisoft veteran and director of Assassin’s Creed 3 and 4, this change was partly driven by internal company pressure. Ubisoft wanted to increase the longevity of its games to delay the resale of physical copies, since resold games generate no profit for publishers.
“At the time there was a lot of pressure inside Ubisoft to ‘keep the disc in the tray’ to essentially try to delay resale as GameStop was the only one making any money on that transaction,” Hutchinson said in an interview with GamesRadar. “Designers were being asked to add play time which seemed like the most pro gamer solution to the problem in a franchise where multiplayer had never really worked.”
Hutchinson added that the action/adventure genre is one of those with the worst cost-to-hours ratio, so “the cheapest and most effective way to bulk it out was to add RPG elements.” As the interviewer pointed out, Hutchinson did not say this was the only reason for the changes in the series. Still, in his view, the strategy, while debatable, was successful.
He further explained, “I think it’s the only franchise I can think of that changed genre and kept its audience, so it was risky but it seems to have worked. That said I always thought it was a peculiar decision for a franchise where they also wanted to put them out as close to annually as possible.”
He concluded by saying, “I was worried that if you had 200 hours of AC you just played then would you really be in the mood for more a year later? I think luckily the radical change in setting and often protagonist means it feels more fresh than most franchises so they get away with it, but my heart is in the action adventure space, not stat juggling, so I miss the old days.”
The latest Assassin’s Creed game is AC Shadows, which has proven to be fruitful for the publisher, Our review of it mentions that even if it has faults, “Shadows captures the franchise’s spirit in fresh and exciting ways that I’m sure any diehard fan will come to appreciate.”
In other news, Netflix is turning the Assassin’s Creed franchise into a TV show, with people behind Sons of Anarchy, Halo tasked to head production.
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