[GameSpot] - Assassin's Creed Infinity Looks To Be A "Hub" For Everything Assassin's Creed

[343iBot]

What Assassin's Creed Infinity is exactly has been unclear for awhile, but in a new Eurogamer interview, Ubisoft's Marc-Alexis Coté sketched a clearer picture of how Infinity will serve the next era of Assassin's Creed games.

Assassin's Creed Infinity is not a game. It is a "hub" and "platform" created to better "[take care] of our meta story," Coté said. Infinity will launch alongside Project Red, and according to an interview with gamesindustry.biz, signals a new phase in the Assassin's Creed franchise.

Project Red and Hexe will not launch exclusively in Infinity, but the idea is so that if players wanted to, they could choose to purchase the two games within Infinity. If players buy the standalone boxes, upon launching the games, the Infinity hub will pop up as well. Infinity will also likely have free offerings like the Crossover stories, according to Coté.

From what Coté has described, Infinity is meant to be the connective tissue between different Assassin's Creed games. For players, Infinity strengthens the franchise's identity as a whole and makes it easier to discover everything new and old about Assassin's Creed.

In a sense, Infinity is meant for players who enjoy the series' meta and want to see more crossovers, more lore, and other types of games divorced from the typical major AAA new Assassin's Creed release cycle. But Infinity is also intentionally designed so as to not alienate those who simply want to "jump into the past '' and play the newest title regardless of its relationship to lore.

"For people who love the meta story, we've never been able to give them enough. They would love an entire game based on the meta story, with gameplay, and full immersion. On the other side," Coté said. "And I think this represents a sizable part of our audience, a lot of people do not care about the meta story, and would love to jump straight back in time. We're in a situation where no one's happy with it, in the sense that people who love it never get enough and the people who don't like it will always have too much. So that's where we're trying to change the paradigm with Infinity."

On an internal level, Coté also said the Infinity hub will make it easier for other Ubisoft studios to work on Assassin's Creed games and create diverse offerings. Coté cited Ubisoft Sofia as an example. "They built Assassin's Creed Rogue, something incredible with [Valhalla expansion] Dawn of Ragnarok, and many other gems like their DLC for Origins Curse of the Pharaoh which was brilliant as well," Coté said. "So, can a studio like Sofia impress our community with a project that's not necessarily a 150-hour long product? Because when we build a 150 hour long product, there's so much that rests on it commercially, that the stakes become so high. Having Infinity will allow for more diversity in both the periods that we choose to feature and the gameplay that those games have."

There is a narrative in Assassin's Creed Infinity, though Coté remained coy on the exact details. Players will be like the present-day protagonist and are exploring "past memories"--essentially, the new and future Assassin's Creed games like Project Red--for an unrevealed purpose.

But is there an actual playable component in Infinity? Coté was even more circumspect about that. The short answer is--there could be. As of now, however, it's unknown if there will be a "gameplay" aspect in Infinity that will launch alongside Project Red.

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