Assassin’s Creed producer Jean-Francois Boivin says that he wants the series to take a breather, so that people don’t get bored of it.
It’s not often that people compare videogames to crop rotation, but that’s the metaphor that Ubisoft Montreal’s Jean-Francois Boivin used to illustrate his belief that the Assassin’s Creed series should take a break after the release of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood later this year.
“You can’t plough a field every year. Once every three years – or once every something – you have to let it breathe. You have to let the minerals back in,” he said. “You gotta make people miss it a bit. It’s like, ‘Oh man! I’m so happy it’s back!’ But if you keep force-feeding to people then people are like, ‘Yeah, enough of your Assassin’s Creed‘.”
Boiviin said that it was hard to estimate exactly how long a break the series should take, but that he was conscious of taking too long: “If we skip a year, I think we’re good. But yeah, I think we could do something really true to the license if we skip a year and release it in 2012 or 2013,” he said. “We need to keep it fresh though; we need to keep it relatively close by, because we have to keep the interest there. I don’t think we do a service to this license if we pull a Duke Nukem on people, you know what I’m saying?”
While Boivin might not know exactly how long it will be until the next Assassin’s Creed game, he does know where it will be set:”We know exactly where we’re going,” he said. “It would lack vision and blunt intelligence to wing it episode after episode. We have to have some vision with the story. We very much do; we know all that stuff.”
“I can’t directly answer [the] question,” he said. “But what I can say is you have to remain true to what the license is. It’s the story of Desmond Miles, and it’s the story of a machine called an Animus that reads genetic memories from your ancestors. It has to stay in there. If it doesn’t, then there’s this whole justification that needs to happen.”
“We need to keep doing that for the duration of this license. We need to keep treating players with respect and treating players with the smarts they have. That’s why they will keep coming back, if we continue to keep doing that. That’s the way I’m going to answer [the] question,” he added.
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is due to be released on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 on November 19th.
Source: Eurogamer
