80%
Probable
According to the French website Origami, Ubisoft has canceled a secret Assassin's Creed co-op game codenamed AC League. Origami, which has a solid track record, claims to have verified the information with six current Ubisoft employees before publishing the story.
First and foremost, it should be clarified that this is not Assassin's Creed Invictus, the arcade Fall Guys-inspired PvP multiplayer game that was previously leaked to be in development. AC League was originally meant to be the rumored Assassin's Creed Shadows co-op mode, which later morphed into a standalone title. It was in development at Ubisoft Annecy, the studio that led development on Steep and Riders Republic, and also contributed to several Assassin's Creed games, including the multiplayer modes featured in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Revelations, AC III, AC IV: Black Flag, and AC Unity.
According to the report, over the last year, the developer began questioning whether to keep League as a Shadows expansion: the DLC was seen as too long and costly to produce for the quality bar they wanted. They had two options on the table: either attach the co‑op framework onto another, more traditional Assassin's Creed game already in development elsewhere in the group, or shrink AC League's narrative and scope and pitch it as a small, standalone co‑op Assassin's Creed game built from the base of Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Ubisoft Annecy pursued the second option, aiming to kick off invite‑only alpha sessions around May to test the game, refine it, and then get a formal greenlight. In the game, parties of up to four assassins would tackle missions together, presumably in a similar fashion to Assassin's Creed Unity, the last title to support online cooperative multiplayer.
As to the circumstances of the game's cancellation, Origami reports that executives from the newly created Vantage Studios subsidiary have been carefully reviewing each and every internal project (and canceling plenty of them). Just last week, after an internal play session, the project leads behind AC League were informed that the decision had been made to shut down the project. Annecy had put around 85 of its roughly 270 employees on this project.
While AC League is effectively dead, the co-op tech base developed by Ubisoft Annecy is reportedly being salvaged for potential new pitches to be attached to future Assassin's Creed games. Those co-op modes will have to be much cheaper to make than AC League was shaping up to be, though, which led to its cancellation.
Do you miss co-op Assassin's Creed? Let us know in the comments.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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