If Ubisoft did make a mistake, we have to ask: how could they have overlooked the error when the French publisher announced in August that there would be a show on September 10?
If we look at Ubisoft Forward‘s coverage, before the presentation of Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, we saw an AO rating from the ESRB, the US age rating board, for the game. There will be violence and blood in this game, so in this case, it could have gone for the lower M (Mature) rating, but it seemed that the AO rating was given because of the gambling. Doubts are reasonable, as the franchise has already pushed the boundaries with microtransactions.
“Following the Assassin’s Creed Mirage announcement during Ubisoft Forward, some store pages mistakenly displayed the game for pre-orders with an Adults Only ESRB rating and are being fixed. While Assassin’s Creed Mirage is still pending rating, Ubisoft wants to reassure players that no real gambling or loot boxes are present in the game,” Ubisoft said in a statement to Gamesindustry. There must be something behind the scenes, as no AO-rated game has been released since the highly divisive Hatred, which was released in 2015.
The gap in time between Assassin’s Creed games will be more significant than ever, as Ubisoft wants to announce games early to get feedback from fans. In the meantime, developers will have time to develop projects. This means that there will not be a new release every two years. Ubisoft has posted this on its website:
“Announcing new games early is a great way to gather player feedback, but lengthening the development cycle for future Assassin’s Creed games allows development teams to listen to fans, improve their tech, and release more polished games in the future. The extra time allows the development teams to improve their Anvil engine to deliver a more polished experience. Just because RED and HEXE were announced simultaneously doesn’t mean you should necessarily expect them to launch in sequential years. [The longer development cycles will also be more] sustainable from a human and technical point of view.”
Assassin’s Creed: Mirage (coming next year for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PC [Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Store], PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Google Stadia and Amazon Luna) will be the last cross-gen game, and from then on, they’ll be leaving the PS4/X1 pair behind. And what comes from longer cycles is that Assassin’s Creed: Infinity, for example, could slip to the next console generation…
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