The Assassin's Creed franchise evolved into the household name it is thanks to rare, or at least rare-among-AAA, support for risk-taking at Ubisoft, reckons Assassin's Creed 3 creative director Alex Hutchinson.
Speaking with FRVR, Hutchinson reflects on the dramatic shifts that Assassin's Creed has seen over the years. There's the once-central, now-sidelined modern era connection that started with Desmond Miles, for instance. "I would just delete it all in the modern ones," he says of this increasingly vague story thread.
The modern era provides a useful springboard for the idea of "the problem with franchises when the original owners have all left," as Hutchinson puts it. "They don't quite know where the special sauce comes from, so they don't take out anything."
Hutchinson may sound frustrated here, but he stresses that Ubisoft has "done a great job" maintaining Assassin's Creed, and tips his hat to the company for pulling off the herculean transition from compact stealth games to massive open-world RPGs with Assassin's Creed Origins onward.
This transition came about precisely because those owners did support taking risks, he says, whereas most of today's large gaming companies actively avoid or minimize risks like new IPs and genres because the industry is volatile, there's so much money tied up in development, proven successes are easier to greenlight, or several other reasons.
"It's sort of a forever brand right?" Hutchinson explains. "It's because you know, each [game has] a new lead in a new place in a new period with new stuff. So, it's just a framework that you can hang it on. I think it’s probably the only game franchise ever to just decide arbitrarily to change genres in the middle. I think they've done a great job, you know? And all that sort of stuff, and I hope they continue to." (I would examine this genre-changing precedent, and perhaps point to the likes of Final Fantasy or God of War, but I guess it depends how you define such a change.)
Hutchinson zeroes in on the idea that Ubisoft "valued risk," and at the time it was "the only big studio still being run by people that had founded the company."
"Whereas, say, EA, you get these awful execs and they never made games and they came from toothpaste companies, and they think if the prototype isn't amazing it can't be good," he continues. "And they don't know how to make anything creative." It's worth remembering that a fair number of AAA executives have come from non-gaming disciplines – Nintendo alum Reggie Fils-Aimé famously led marketing at Pizza Hut – but EA has certainly attracted more than its fair share of randos in the C-suite.
This, he adds, is why companies like EA – recently gobbled up by investors in a leveraged buyout – "never makes really new IPs unless something insane happens, and Ubi is very good at generating IPs." Something insane, for example, might be the shadow drop of Apex Legends, which has become one of EA's biggest live service wins.
Today, of course, Ubisoft is a bit more of a Ship of Theseus, having just entreated investors like Tencent to open a subsidiary overseeing high-profile series including Assassin's Creed. 20-year Assassin's Creed franchise head Marc-Alexis Côté also recently departed the company.
