While at the Eurogamer Expo, Assassin's Creed III Creative Director, Alex Hutchinson, sat down with a member of the European website and talked over the future of the Assassin's Creed series, which apparently indeed includes annualization.
"Our goal is to ship a game every year but never to develop a game in a year," Hutchinson told Eurogamer. "If we can't keep the quality up, that's an issue. If it's amazing then I don't have a problem with it being released yearly—because we have more than one group of people working on it," he added.
At least it sounds they won't be cranking out games on a yearly basis with the sole goal of just getting it out, like so many other publishers do with their own annual series.
We've been watching this slowly unfurl ever since Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood released a year after Assassin's Creed II, and then Revelations releasing a year after Brotherhood all but announced their plans to annualize the game. At least now there is no more speculation; Ubisoft and the Assassin's Creed development teams do plan to continue churning out more and more Assassin's Creed games year after year. Let's hope that the games do keep their previous quality with each installment and they don't become yet another series that mails it in each year.
Hutchinson did say that they wouldn't do another character series again, like they did with Ezio, but he said that if there was a huge, positive player reaction to Connor, the development teams would certainly look into bringing him back in the future.
