Assassin’s Creed Dev Denies Leaked Image To Be True, Talks About Competition with Zelda & Horizon

Mar 22, 2017 at 01:58pm EDT

Assassin's Creed is without a doubt one of the biggest IPs in the gaming industry. As you all know, for the first time in many years Ubisoft decided not to release a new installment in 2016.

However, rumors are already swirling wildly about the next game, supposedly titled Assassin's Creed Empire. A Swiss retailer listed it for release this October; a Polish website gave away the first gameplay and story tidbits; most importantly, a screenshot leak appeared on the Web in late February.

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A few hours ago, though, Ubisoft's Head of Content for Assassin's Creed Aymar Azaizia participated in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) session and denied that the leaked screenshot belongs to the new AC installment.

He also talked about many other aspects of the IP. When prompted about the strong competition posed in the open world genre by recent hits like Horizon: Zero Dawn and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Azaizia said:

Man, I started on ACII and we were released among Mass Effect 2, Uncharted 2 etc...
It's good for gamers, and it pushes us to improve even more. I mean, if you look at MGSV, Zelda, future Red Dead 2 there are so many great games to learn from (which means, I will play them and say I am doing researches).
We welcome more good games, and whenever we will release, we will be ready for the competition, so in a nutshell... BRING IT ON

Among Assassin's Creed fans, there's an ongoing debate on whether to ditch the narrative happening in the present day or not. Here's what he had to say on this topic:

Present day is an important piece of AC identity IMHO, and that's why we pushed so much to have a lot Present in transmedia at large (comics, novels, movie...).

In the game, it is hard to achieve what we would all like to see, but our team are well aware about the importance of it, so if we use modern setting, we will have to nail it, we agree on that.

Similarly, when it comes to gameplay there are some fans who would like to see multiplayer come back, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen.

Thanks a lot, I was in Annecy working on the multiplayer of Brotherhood, so a big kudos to all the team there! Well, the question is interesting, for now on, in the short term, we don't have specific plan to come back with a similar experience.

Finally, he mentioned that Ubisoft is in early talks to create a TV series (live action) based on Assassin's Creed and that he doesn't think they have a formula to make the game compatible with VR at the moment.

Would you like Ubisoft to release the new game this year or take more time to add innovative features? Let us know below.

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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