According to the game’s executive producer, the fact that they had more than three years to create the new Assassin’s Creed (the same amount of time it took to create the previous installment, Valhalla) was a big help.

Karl Onnée, executive producer of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, told Gamesindustry in an interview that the four years they had was just enough time: “It’s great to work on a game that comes after something with the pedigree of Valhalla. But of course there are high expectations. We always want to get better, and that’s what we’re trying to do with Shadows. We push the limits of what we can do. It’s always a balance between time and cost, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate. Yes, you can put more people on a project and do it in less time, but that doesn’t give you more time to iterate because it takes time to get feedback from your players, your team… and then see what works and what doesn’t and how to improve it. I think four years is the right balance to go from concept to production and get the feedback you need to adjust.

During production, we do playtests with people from different places at different stages. We look at what works and what doesn’t, and we also look at the playtests with Mirage and see what people like. We knew with Assassin’s Creed Shadows that we were going in the direction of stealth, so we looked at what they were doing and learned from that. We said let’s use what they’ve done and build on it instead of going our own way. We are all part of the brand, so it is important that we all talk to each other. You want to avoid redoing the work.

Making games is hard. It takes a lot of time and passion, and you want to avoid doing the same thing differently. You want to build on the work and make it better. We have a lot of discussions with other teams to make sure that if we’re doing similar things, we can collaborate, and if they want to do something later, we can take that into account. That’s what we’re doing with our new Anvil pipeline, which is the engineering teams working together. When we build new features, we make sure that those features are available to all projects. We are constantly building and improving,” said Onnée.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be released on November 15th for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and PC.

Source: WCCFTech, Gamesindustry