Assassin’s Creed fans “can be excited about some remakes” of the older games in the open world series, permits generous soul Yves Guillemot, via one of those odd promotional things disguised as a conversation. They’d like to “revisit some of the games we’ve created in the past and modernize them,” Ubisoft told Ubisoft about Ubisoft.
Elsewhere in the blog, Guillemot repeatedly praises what he sees as the potential for generative AI and how it “can enrich NPCs to be more intelligent, more interactive,” saying this could “potentially extend to animals in the world.” So, look forward to remake Ezio putting glue in his pizza sauce I suppose?
When asked how he “ensure(s) evolution and innovation with each new game?” Guillemot responded: “Technology is evolving at such a pace that there are limitless possibilities for evolution. In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, for example, we have a weather system that will affect its gameplay; ponds that were once swimmable might freeze, for instance.”
In terms of the series’ future, he says that “The goal is to have Assassin’s Creed games come out more regularly, but not for it to be the same experience every year. There are a lot of good things to come, including Assassin’s Creed Hexe.” More regularly, you say? Not the same experience every year, you say? To be fair Assassin’s Creed Mirage was quite the departure, I hear, at least from the creeping scale bloat that culminated in Valhalla’s exhaustingly massive world.
When asked what “dismays” and “excites” him most about the games industry right now, Guillemot says that he’s concerned about “the malicious and personal online attacks that have been directed at some of our team members and partners” – which might refer to the inane backlash against AC: Shadows. He continues that “We, at Ubisoft, condemn these hateful acts in the strongest possible terms, and I encourage the rest of the industry and players to denounce them, too,” which, you know, is fair enough. I mean, I suppose given the above remarks about “limitless” tech, he might have also said something about all the mass layoffs corporations have carried out while investing billions in generative AI, but he’s not wrong!
“If, as game makers, we can adopt and master technological advancements like generative AI and the cloud more quickly, we will be much better positioned to create new, stand-out experiences for players”. He says he’d “like it if hardware evolved even faster. The fact that games have, for a while now been compatible with both the current and previous generation of consoles is a fantastic thing for our back catalog and our players, but it’s held the industry back a bit when it comes to developing truly new experiences.” Not stagnant, safe design meant to prop up thinly disguised vehicles for unlimited spending on magic purple super trousers then? Nope, it’s the slightly older console owners that are wrong. Fantastic.
This feels like a good moment to bump Mike Cook’s article series about generative AI and its use in video games.