Ubisoft: The Meaning Of Sequels Is Changing

In the latest blog post Ubisoft talked about how the meaning of sequels is changing.  Ubisoft’s Lionel Raynaud, talked about the evolution of games and the following is what he had to say in this regard:

This line gets fuzzier every year. We have bigger post-launch periods, longer lives for each of our games.

Games are getting bigger and people want more content. We have seen what happens to games that are unable to provide this. They slowly but surely become a distant memory and people get bored soon and shift to another title. Raynaud further went on to mention the following:

Even the ones that used to be solo-oriented games, like action adventures, they now have a very strong post-launch, and people are staying in our worlds for a long time. So this line is absolutely fuzzier and fuzzier. We all see a future where a game will stay {post-launch], and new experiences will come in the games. But we will have technology that will break the [current] limits of memory, for instance, because of new technologies that are arriving. We would be able to – in the same world – have several historical periods, for instance, in Assassin’s Creed, and use the Animus to travel from one to the other. Or have different areas of the world linked by travel systems, so that a Far Cry game or a Watch Dogs game could happen in different countries in the same experience, seamlessly.

Ubisoft is known for making great open world games and the Assassin’s Creed series has been praised over the years. Raynaud further went on to mention the following:

I guess the special point in our history was the release of Assassin’s Creed, because it was our first take on open worlds, and we were kind of defining an action-adventure game with this kind of technology and a new navmesh system that allowed us to have parkour. Very smooth navigation through an open world, the beginning of social stealth, all these things are together. They kind of defined the genre. And we all witnessed that from the inside, but still it created this energy that, yes, we can define a genre that other publishers will envy and will want to follow, and this has defined the culture. Creatively, how does Ubisoft decide how long to keep creating new content for a live game after launch, as opposed to moving on to a sequel? Where does that line get drawn?

Ubisoft is going to release Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on the 5th of October and it should be an experience worth the wait.