Thanks to the near-annual frequency of the series’ launches, it’s hard to remember that Assassin’s Creed as a franchise is now old enough to buy its M-rated, 17-and-older self.
Because the campaign-based story shifts locations and main characters, each release, like last year’s Mirage, or this coming November’s Shadows, seems to reset the franchise as a new idea despite the fact it all pivots on the same sci-fi, time-traveling/memory-hunting concept established by Patrice Désilets in 2007.
If remarks from Ubisoft president Yves Guillemot are any guide, though, fans might start thinking of Assassin’s Creed’s own history in a more relevant way. That’s because the French publisher is pursuing remakes of some of the game’s foundational hits, stopping just short of confirming a report last year that an updated Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013) was on deck.
“Players can be excited about some remakes, which will allow us to revisit some of the games we’ve created in the past and modernize them,” Guillemot said in an interview posted to Ubisoft’s official website. “There are worlds in some of our older Assassin’s Creed games that are still extremely rich.”
Guillemot has the right instinct that Assassin’s Creed comprises distinct worlds and eras fans would love to dive back into. You saw some of that in last year’s launch of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which took the series back to its origins as an adventure set in Persia during the Islamic Golden Age, like the original game. Subsequent entries embraced the Italian Renaissance, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, Victorian England, and then ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Vikings’ height of power in Northern Europe.
The series has seen collected re-releases before, but these were anthologies of existing games rather than remasters or remakes. The most recent was Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag plus its companion, Assassin’s Creed Rogue, for Nintendo Switch in 2019. Before that was Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection, spanning the three Renaissance-era games from 2009 to 2011.
Why is Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag so popular?
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag was a launch title for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Along with Assassin’s Creed: Rogue (originally launched for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) it was a fork off the American Revolution chapter introduced the year before, and took advantage of an historical New World timeframe to give players a full-blown, open world pirate fantasy in the Caribbean Sea. Black Flag’s naval combat systems later became the basis for Skull and Bones, which launched in February after repeated delays.
In addition to Assassin’s Creed Shadows, set in Japan’s feudal era (specifically the 16th century), Ubisoft is developing a new chapter currently codenamed Assassin’s Creed Hexe, whose story will coincide with the witchcraft trials and persecutions of the Holy Roman Empire in the late 1500s. Hexe “is going to be a very different game from Assassin’s Creed Shadows. We’re going to surprise people, I think,” Guillemot said.
