With Assassin's Creed Shadows set to spring out of the bushes on the unwary in November, Ubisoft says that dev cycles between titles must be longer to find the "right balance". At four years in the oven, Shadows has had the most development time of any title in the series to date, including massive open-world epics Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and it seems that's the magic number.
In fact, according to Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz), the latest AC game got a full 25% longer than Valhalla, which he says is essential to maintain the quality the series is known for: "It's always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate. Yes, you can put more people on a project and do it in a shorter time, but that doesn't give you more time to iterate."
Onnée says this as much down to aesthetics and immersion as it is quashing bugs and polishing pixels, as the development team needs time to learn the particulars of each new historical setting: "We are trying to create a game that is as authentic as possible. It's something we take pride in, and that is also a very long process. When we build a Japanese house from feudal Japan, it is very different from, say, a French medieval house or an English one. So you have to learn as artists where things go inside a feudal Japanese house… maybe the food doesn't go there. You have to get everything you need to know and learn it. And that process is long."