AAA games are fading, Assassin’s Creed III to offer an entirely new experience, says Ubisoft

By: Muhammad Qasim Hassan

  |   September 7th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

Video game industry is undergoing some significant changes, keeping the gamers in a bit of suspense as to what they will be offered within a couple of year’s time.

It seems that some game makers are not feeling too optimistic about the coming days, with Ubisoft’s Alex Hutchinson being one of them.

The creative director of highly-anticipated Assassin’s Creed III sounds seems convinced that the AAA blockbusters are dying fast and that Ubisoft’s critically acclaimed stealth-action game is “last of the dinosaurs.”

Speaking his mind during an interview with Edge, Hutchinson stated that the trend in gaming industry is changing fast. While the publishers and developers were happy to invest both the time and money in high-budget projects, they are gradually shifting focus and instead beginning to concentrate on games that are not as hardcore as before.

According to him, game makers are no longer looking to channel their energies and efforts into coming up with new intellectual properties with high production and development value.

Hutchinson asserted that Ubisoft is one of the few publishers left in the industry who is still committed to bringing out AAA games and keeping them from dying completely.

“We’re the last of the dinosaurs,” Hutchinson said. “We’re still the monster triple-A game with very large teams [and] multiple studios helping out on different bits. There are fewer and fewer of these games being made, especially as the middle has fallen out.”

While Hutchinson may have a good enough reason to state what he did, people keeping their eyes on the list of games that are currently in the pipeline and due to release within the next 18 months would definitely find it hard to agree with the point that he is trying to make. Before the end of this year, Resident Evil 6, Halo 4 and Hitman Absolution are expected to hit the shelves, whereas the next year will see the release of BioShock Infinite, Crysis 3, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Gears of War: Judgement, Watch Dogs and The Last of Us. Therefore, there are plenty of AAA games in store for the hardcore gamers.

Commenting on the upcoming Assassin’s Creed game, the lead design technical director Marc-Antoine Lussier told Edge that unlike the last couple of titles in the series, the team has been asked to completely reinvent the game this time around.

He admitted that the titles that followed the original Assassin’s Creed were not as unique as some of the fans would have liked, explaining that Ubisoft had decided to focus on building on the existing foundation and improving the gameplay by polishing it and making it a bit faster.

“[The Brotherhood team's] guideline was, ‘don’t reinvent too much, use everything we know, and use the fact that we know how it works to make it even better, but faster,” stated Lussier.

However, the latest game in the series is being rebuilt from scratch, with a brand new engine AnvilNext being used in its development. The game is due to release for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on October 30, 2012, with the PC version of the game to arrive three weeks later.