Assassin’s Creed was initially conceived by Ubisoft to be a trilogy of games that would presumably finish during this generation of consoles. However, with the success the series has wrought, it will continue as a franchise for the foreseeable future and Assassin’s Creed III creative director Alex Hutchinson has a general idea for how it will go down.
“We know the beats. There was an ending planned, but the success of the series affected that a lot. You can get screwed by too much success or too much failure,” said Hutchinson. “If you’re successful then you want to keep going. But if you come up with this big epic story with a great ending and you don’t succeed to start then you don’t get to make that ending.”
Hutchinson described the series in terms of Star Trek in how it will perpetuate itself. “What we’re really trying to do now is start and end narrative arcs. The way I pitch it to people is that this is Star Trek: The Next Generation,“ he said. “Someone is going to make Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and that’s fine. But we need to have a satisfying conclusion to this storyline and this part of it.”
There’s a delicate balance between expanding on a franchise and running it into the ground and Hutchinson acknowledges this issue. “So we ended Ezio’s storyline. And I think we’re getting better at beginning and ending other parts of the game. As we move on you’ll see new storylines come up, other storylines end. I hope we get to do these games for a long time, but we’re trying not to draw things out for too long anymore,” Hutchinson said.
Source: The Financial Post
