During an interview with GameIndustry.biz recently, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot spoke about how the company wanted to expand on its open-world game design, present in series such as Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs and even the recent release Starlink: Battle for Atlas.
He was asked if there was any chance a game series like Assassin's Creed would move away from the open-world Odyssey setting and return to a more focused environment previously seen in Assassin's Creed Unity. This was his response:
No, our goal is to make sure you can have a Unity within an Odyssey. If you want to have a story of 15 hours, you can have it, but you can also have other stories. You live in that world and you pursue what you want to pursue. You have an experience, many Unity-like experiences.
When queried if such a model was financially sustainable over a prolonged period of time, Guillemot said it was reflective of the times:
It is sustainable, because the world is big and the number of players that can play our games is immense. What we've seen in the last few years is the number of players that play our games is constantly growing.
New markets are opening up and games live a lot longer than before. So at the moment we see that we can continue to increase the investments because we know we can have a return on investment that can be quite long[-tailed].
As for micro-transactions, the CEO of Ubisoft says it allows the company's teams to continue creating extra content for universes that players love to be in:
We have huge teams that continue to create content for players to stay in those universes they love to be in. The fact that we have some players buying items in these games is giving our teams the chance to continue creating that extra content.
The next big open-world game from Ubisoft is the action-adventure Gods & Monsters. It's being created by the same team responsible for Assassin's Creed Odyssey and is due out on the Switch and multiple other platforms on 25th February 2020.
What do you think about Guillemot's comments? Do you play a lot of open-world games? Tell us below.
[source gamesindustry.biz]
Comments 58
Unity-like experience??
As in an Assassin's Creed Unity-like experience?
No thanks.
Welp, there goes my hopes of Red Steel or Brothers In Arms ever being revived...
I spent a out 6 months playing AC Odyssey. I'm ok with this
I kinda hope they'll remake the Ezio trilogy properly, but as one game - put Venice, Florence, Rome etc all on one giant map like Origins/Odyssey (with some obvious limitations - all cities are miles apart in reality), then include Constantinople as a separate area. Have Ezio age gradually as you complete certain missions. That'd be sweet!
I love open-world games so this is nice to know!
"The fact that we have some players buying items in these games is giving our teams the chance to continue creating that extra content."
LOL.
I love Ubi’s open-world games! Especially Far Cry, both 4 and 5 are some of my favourite games from current generation. Haven’t played New Dawn yet, but looking forward to it
I hope Switch will get some Far Cry games too.
Hmm 🤔 is this news or did we already know ubisoft was gonna do the same thing thing they’ve been doing that makes them tons of money....
My Ubisoft, that’s a lot of eggs you have in your basket....
So basically Ubisoft will continue to make Ubisoft-games. They seem to continue to sell but I wonder how long they will last? Also it does make them ripe for monetisation so guess it all works in their favour. Then again, the last game of their’s I truly enjoyed was......damn I honestly can’t remember! They basically share the same spot as EA in my gaming world. They exist, but I honestly don’t care what they do as I never have any interest in their games.
Not surprising. They certainly have the open world format down. I tend to enjoy every Ubi game I play so this is good news
PLEASE PUT ORIGINS ON SWITCH that’s all I want. I’m interested in this new game coming early next year.
I usually enjoy their games but there is always a line where I just get tired of liberating the same outpost for the one hundred time. Repetitiveness kills their games.
I hope it's less like Odyssey and more like their previous open world style games, but it's obviously not going to be the case. Odyssey's world is just too big with a lot of elements in the world looking the exact same, side quests are repetitive, raiding forts and killing mercenaries stops being fun quick, and the animation quality took a huge turn for the worse to make way for the unnecessary dialogue system.
I've never been opposed to Ubisoft's open worlds and would continue to enjoy them, but Odyssey (and Origins to a lesser extent) really crossed the boundaries for me.
@JoakimZ
that's my wet dream i really want farcry 4 on switch i loved that game better than 3 because i found it more free in the gameplay area with the tons of possibility , i don't' understand why they are not bothering with it i can understand the last ones the primal,5 and the remake of 3 they are made for the ps4/one in mind and will never be able to run properly, but the 4 was a cross gen , i will be satisfied even with a strait port from the old gen.
Just Dance open world. That'll be interesting.
Welp there goes my hope for a prince of persia revival.
It’s not a surprising statement by Ubisoft, but the market is already crowded with open world games that are starting to feel more like bloated Hollywood movies than new satisfying gameplay experiences. I only felt like completing 2 of the 4 Assassin’s Creed games I played.
I’m interested in Gods & Monsters but I’ll be disappointed if it is just AC with a different skin.
Open world games can be amazing, but every game does not need to be open world. A well structured but divided world in a game opens more creative options. Look at Xenoblade 2, you'd be hard pressed reworking that entire game to be one single open world.
I hope this doesn’t come at an expense of their other genres... Rayman, in particular, comes to mind, which pretty much comes as close as it can get to the best platformer out there. Would love a sequel.
@JR150 If they found a way to affiliate those series with Tom Clancy, then you might have yourself the next killer app for your smartphone. 😂
@Olliemar28 I keep wishing they’d remake the first game. Altaîr gets a rough time. They could add in swimming, a huge holy land to traverse and finally give him a decent voice. The smaller cities would work in its favour.
Sounds good to me. Though I love their open world games, I really wish we could get the Prince if Persia Sands of Time series remastered on Switch. It’d be easy money for them. And where the hell is Beyond Good and Evil 2???
I love their games. Im a big fan of Ghost recon wildlands (4player CO-OP) openworld it feels so alive people working in the fields, on the streets, when someone (villager) dies you see someone crying of their dead corps, people responding to the action or weapons etc. So yeah i cant wait for the sequel!
But i would love to have more interaction (talking to people to gather info etc)
But even without that, great quality games.
This is good and bad news to me.
Good,because I absolutely love their open world games.
Bad,because their open world games are so huge I know I won't ever have the time to play them all.
That said I am absolutely hyped for Gods And Monsters and I'm really surprised we haven't seen more of it.
I'm confused why they cited Unity specifically.
I like all of this except for the microstransactions bit, though I'm admittedly not sure to what level Ubisoft utilizes them these days. As long as the items being bought are cosmetic, it doesn't really bother me.
I love open world games, when done right, but they can still grow stale.
My takeaway from this is that now I know why we don’t have a new Splinter Cell. Ubisoft wants to figure out how to turn it into an open world RPG-lite experience. Ugh
Even more depressing is the fact I’ll likely never see another Prince of Persia game and never get closure for PoP 2008. 😡
So they will continue to make games that rinse and repeat all throughout them. After all that is all a open world game does, same thing over and over again throughout the whole game. Ohh but you can buy some stuff with real money to make it look different.
Yeaaa no thanks. Open world games are a regurgitation of the same crap again and again not only throughout the game but game from game. Come up with some new ideas.
@Orpheus79V @westman98 I feel like Unity is a great game to reference for a few reasons... It had a wonderful mission system and was always really fun to play. It got so much flack because it launched with some ridiculous game breaking and immersion breaking glitches. It was 99% patched out and ended up being a wonderful game
I just hope they don’t get complacent with it. All these big arse companies are getting so complacent because they feel (whether justified or not) they have a built-in audience that’s never gonna leave them no matter what. Loved Far Cry 4, hated Far Cry 5 and New Dawn. I definitely see a downward trend to their worlds. I liked Starlink a lot, but it could have been so much more in my opinion.
Meh. I miss the old PoP games. Ubisofts open world games bore me.
Not surprising, especially with BotW's success and the announcement of the BotW 2. With even Nintendo being successful in the open world space, this kind of situation from other developers will stay around for a long time.
@JR150 Brothers in Arms could work in an open world setting, just make a big open battlefield environment that you need to control.
Open World is good but they have to remember it also comes with Support, Updates, Patches. You don't create and that is done. So they should be careful what they wish for as well.
In other breaking news: videogames won't be moving away from requiring controllers any time soon.
Eh.
I kinda prefer games with less freedom.
Hmm Ubisoft! Shocker....
Less is more in some cases.
That’s fine but I really hope they make Mario+Rabbids 2!
@JayJ
I just want the trilogy ported in HD on Switch. Not a Battlefield clone, but that's just me.
I hope so - Assassin's Creed Odyssey is such an amazing game. Kass and exploring the world just kept you going (143hrs for me).
And now using the world for the "Discovery Tool" is just fantastic as a learning tool. I didn't spend a dime at the in-game store. The game just kept showering you with items and gear.
Found The Ghost Recon: Breakpoint open world overwhelming in the BETA. But GR has never been My thing -Open world or Not.
"do you guys want to go back to a model that didn't work for you and caused your franchize to do poorly, or you going to continue using the model that's made some of the best games you ever released"
Did anyone really expect them to go "gee I dunno, we don't like money so maybe we'll move back to the non working model again"?
@FX102A Tho at least EA's selection of games have a little more variety, not much more, but some.. Been enjoying the new plants vs zombies game hell of a lot, and the new NFS looks like it might actually be good
But yeah, as much as EA sucks, I'd go as far to say Ubisoft are worse, all their games just feel the same to me.. Wether im playing Farcry, Assasin Creed.. Just feels like the same game but with a different skin.
@JR150 Yeah that would be cool. I have all 3 installed on my PC, I consider it an essential series.
I can't really imagine going back to non-open world. It's just night and day for me.
It sucks about microtransactions, but I will say that there wasn't anything even remotely enticing about microtransactions in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I took one look at the microtransaction shop and didn't even understand why I would even want anything in it.
Open world games are so samey to me. Of course Ubisoft won't be going back because it's much easier to push microtransactions in a numbers-based game like Odyssey than one of their previous AC games.
More and more, I lose my desire to play non-Nintendo titles (with a few exceptions).
This is good and bad at the same time for me as i do like Ubisoft's open-world games more than most other company's but i really prefer linear game design to a vast open world, and i hate how linear games are now seen as a negative thing.
I also really want a return for Rayman, Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell, i don't see why they can't produce smaller, more linear games at the same time as these huge open-world epics, sooner or later i think the open-world bubble will burst and we'll hopefully see linear games making a resurgence as i will always prefer that style of game to an open world.
Ok fine whatevs but when is the next Rayman game happening?
Some may have burnt out on Ubisoft's open worlds and their activity routines (I'm fully aware that it's considered such a taboo to admit in fandoms that most prefer to make up complaints and "criticisms" instead), but they're a relatively new experience to me and I've been enjoying what I've played so far - across the titles from Starlink and Watch Dogs to The Crew and Assassin's Creed (YES, the first one), plus a few 'free weekend' events in others. Plenty of amusing territory to wander about, the aforesaid routines sit pretty well with some aspects of the portable gaming reality (I mean, I'm the guy who genuinely likes BotW's bite-sized shrine format, too), a wide variety of settings and stories, many driving games come with the cockpit view (how many entries did GTA take to grow one, again?)... need I say more? Already enough that I'm keeping an eye out for next year's Gods & Monsters as well.
And I'm pleased to hear that they're sticking to the model. Certainly more pleased that they might be to know that my contribution to helping their teams create content is limited - I tend to buy the majority of DLCs on sales and rarely even feel tempted to invest in MTX which mostly constitute a chance to skip... some loot/experience/skill grinding. As in, some of the aspects I buy and play RPG games for. Guess one can be a nightmare for the industry even without acting asinine in social media towards it.😆
Since there's no chance of Beyond Good & Evil 2 coming to Switch, they should do us a solid and port the HD first one to it.
I hope we get a Starlink sequel. Exploring all those planets so seamlessly is such a magical feeling.
@Doktor-Mandrake My concern is both PvsZ & NFS are just ripe for monetisation. It’s true, EA offers a little more game variety but then it uses similar monetisation methods in almost all; make a grind out of progression and offer a fast track option. Perhaps with a little bit of randomisation through “Surprise Mechanics! Hee! Hee! Hoo! Hoo!”
Anti news, I suppose. Quos?
I haven't played any Ubisoft open world games. Outside of Breath of the Wild, that is BA-DUM TSCH. Frankly they don't appeal to me very much.
If they made them a bit prettier, and toned down the thematic machismo a bit, maybe they could reel me in.
Company best known for defining the current open world game format says they're going to keep making open world games.
I'm in disbelief.
@SinnohGeek I loved Starlink at first, but it quickly became really repetitive and kind of thin on content in a way a lot more "simplified" yet at the same way "disorganized" more than most Ubi open world games. It was a total flop on other platforms, but I'd love for them to do a Nintendo-affiliated game with it that's a bit more organized and complete feeling. It's a good template but the first game fell a little short.
@FX102A That's true, and monotisation is probably one of the biggest reasons EA is one of the most hated companies
the new PvZ hasn't got any monotisation yet, but it's not in "full release" atm anyway and they have plenty of time to add microtransactions.
Yeah the "surprise mechanics" line from one of the people at EA was hilarious, I sure hope one day we can crack down on loot boxes and such in video games, they just don't belong in AAA gaming, they belong in F2P and mobile phone games.
@NEStalgia That's why I think they could benefit from a sequel of some sort. What's there was nice before it got repetitive, so all it needs is to build on the good parts and iron out the flaws like a sequel would.
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