Assassin’s Creed Skipping 2016

Ubisoft announced through a blog post that they will be taking a year off from the Assassin’s Creed franchise.

Ubisoft had this to say in references to the Assassin’s Creed franchise in 2016:

This year, we also are stepping back and re-examining the Assassin’s Creed franchise. As a result, we’ve decided that there will not be a new Assassin’s Creed game in 2016. Since the release of Assassin’s Creed Unity, we’ve learned a lot based on your feedback. We’ve also updated our development processes and recommitted to making Assassin’s Creed a premier open-world franchise.

Unity was received with negative criticism when released in 2014 due to technical issues and bugs that were littered throughout the game. This disappoint affected the first week sales of the follow up title, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, which released in October of last year. Second week sales did pick up for Syndicate after discovering the issues had mostly been worked out by Ubisoft.

While a main Assassin’s Creed game won’t be seeing the light of day this year, the Chronicles trilogy is still being maintained, with the trilogy pack having been released on PC on February 9th. Ubisoft CFO, Alain Martinez, said each subsequent release will be taken on a case by case basis instead of an annual or bi-annual schedule.

Also during the hiatus, the Assassin’s Creed movie, staring Michael Fassbender, will be in production. The film is set to release December 21st, 2016.