The Assassin’s Creed ending has not been decided after all. There had been some confusion among the Ubisoft conspiracy theorists over conflicting statements, but according to official sources they have no intention of ending the series at a particular point.
This opens up a rather large range of stories, and with Desmond Miles officially out of the picture now, Ubisoft can have the fictional Abstergo Entertainment look into any aspect of history from anybody’s perspective. While the AC 5 location and release date have been heavily rumored to a specific time period and two generally possible points on the globe, nobody really knows where the series is going from here.
According to Ubisoft game director Ashraf Ismail , there is no planned Assassin’s Creed ending, even though there is a definite over-arcing story in mind. How long it will take to tell the story seems to be entirely up to how long they can continue to sell the series. As far back as the first Assassin’s Creed , we had been given hints that people other than Desmond Miles had been through the Templars’ genetic memory extraction before. The first clue was the screen that the first game ended with. The second big hint was the side story of Subject 16, someone who had apparently shared a few genetic memories with Desmond, even leaving clues behind for him to find.
Ashraf Ismail clarified what was said earlier after the BAFTA Game Awards 2014:
“What I was trying to say is that there is this meta-arc in the brand, in the franchise. We know what we want to do with the franchise, that’s what I meant by it, that we know where we want the metastory to head. Now, how many games fit into that and how that plays out is still to be determined by the dev teams themselves.
“There are multiple dev teams working on AC , each team is responsible for their own game. There are people working on the brand level that try to make sure things fit together nicely, but there’s no master plan. I’m not here to say in five years, yep, that’ll be the end. Not at all. But we do know where we want the brand to go and what kind of metastory we want to tell. I hope that gives you a better answer.”
Since it seems there is no Assassin’s Creed ending in sight, the series could easily last longer than the Call of Duty franchise. After all, Black Flag practically reinvented the series after it went stagnant, proving that there are ideas we haven’t even seen yet. That feudal Japan storyline may be coming eventually; we don’t know yet.
Ashraf Ismail also suggested that the next game in the series might actually be two. It’s entirely possible that Assassin’s Creed 5 will be coming to the next gen consoles, while the PS3 and Xbox 360 will get a sort of spinoff, much like AC 3 and Liberation , or AC 4 and Freedom Cry . We can bet that Ubisoft will continue to push each console’s version to the system’s limits, so there won’t be any lackluster minigame feel to it.
Ismail stated:
“I think Ubisoft as a company has already said that there’s a huge pool of players on Xbox 360 and PS3, so of course we’ll continue to support them. How is up to each team to figure out on their own. For sure though, with Assassin’s Creed we can’t let hundreds of millions of players that own older consoles miss out on AC . So for sure, we love the next-gen consoles and seeing how far we can push the content but we have to see how we also cater to our fans that have the Xbox 360 or PS3.”
Assassin’s Creed isn’t ending any time soon, and we can possibly expect two separate games by the end of the year, with AC 5 probably going to the PS4 and Xbox One and a spinoff heading to the PS3 and Xbox 360.
[images via incgamers.com , 411mania.com ]