This weekend, Ubisoft said that there will be 900 to 1,000 Assassin’s Creed games. The publisher had big plans for the franchise over the next few years, and Assassin’s Creed Mirage showed what those plans were. The game took place in feudal Japan, medieval Baghdad, and dark, scary woods. Other big publishers must have felt like they were watching the end of a game of Civilization.
The game with the most secrets was Assassin’s Creed Infinity. Marc-Alexis Coté: It isn’t a game. It’s a place where the meta-story happens in “premium flagship” single-player AssCreed games.
Coté at UbiForward said, “ That will unite all our different experiences and our players together in meaningful ways.” This hub is where multiplayer games will happen, but it is not a game in and of itself. We’re not going to play.
Why? Eurogamer talks to Coté about what Infinity is, but he doesn’t say much. When things aren’t clear, we make up theories.
Clarity
In 2021, Quartz Digits was made public. Ghost Recon Breakpoint was where the company’s first NFTs were found. They were unique player items.
To use a term from review aggregators, this announcement got mostly bad reviews. Four months after production began, in March 2022, neither the press nor the players were very interested.
Ubisoft’s first attempts to use blockchain failed. In January 2022, Nicolas Pouard, VP of the publisher’s Strategic Innovations Lab, said Gamers don’t know what a digital secondary market can do for them. Because of the situation and context of NFTs right now, gamers think it’s destroying the planet and a tool for speculation.
Ubisoft looks at the big picture first. The end game lets players resell their items when they’re done with them or the game. This is why. Helpful. They don’t understand yet.”
When Breakpoint’s NFT content ended, Quartz said stay tuned for platform updates and future game drops.
Ubisoft’s long-term plan for NFTs extends beyond Ghost Recon Breakpoint, a low-profile IP and low-damage test site for its initial experiment.
NFT creation and exchange may be part of Assassin’s Creed Infinity’s context.
Coté talked about getting along. He says Infinity could make crossovers easier. Because the Origins pipeline hadn’t been completely shut down and archived because of the pandemic, the popular crossover stories in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (which you can get for free) and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla happened by accident. What if all of the AssCreeds used the same platform? It’s a chance to tell more stories that cross over and bring back games from older console generations.
This means taking items from one game and putting them in another. You can use this unique Mirage sword to fight against witch-hunters from the Holy Roman Empire in Hexe. It is stored on the Infinity blockchain.
Right now, that’s the best case for NFTs in games. It fits the theme of Animus. Putting together old things into a modern sci-fi building. Playing as old characters in new places. Edward Kenways and Ezio Auditore could be in Victorian London or France during the Revolution.
Back in the hood
Infinity will use the Animus to tell deeper stories in the present day, but they won’t be playable. So what? Player-curated? Something like F1 22’s F1 Life mode, in which a player-made environment can be changed in different ways?
Infinity will be a place to do business. Coté told Eurogamer that if you are playing Red and Hexe comes out, you can buy it from the Infinity hub.
There won’t be a market in Infinity either. Coté’s comments about multiplayer, that online experiences will be available without being tied to single-player content, make sense and show a real practical benefit to a centralized platform. Having a platform that focuses on the meta story, which some people want to be explored in more depth and detail, while others just have to deal with it.
Ubisoft hasn’t given up on NFTs, and the fact that it’s being careful with Infinity suggests that Quartz will have a soft relaunch. UbiForward said a few words about Infinity. A mobile game announcement mentioned the idea of “our own Animus.” I’d bring back Ubisoft’s NFT initiative with a low-key announcement that focused on the benefits of the IP rather than the details of each platform.
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