Future Assassin’s Creed Games Will Not All Be 150-Hour RPGs

Future games in the Assassin’s Creed series will vary in length, and not all will follow the open-world RPG template that has defined the series since 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins.

As part of today’s Assassin’s Creed Showcase, it was announced that Assassin’s Creed Mirage - an action/adventure game similar to the first game in the series - will retail at $50 for the standard edition. In an interview with IGN, vice president executive producer of Assassin's Creed, Marc-Alexis Côté, explained that the price reflects the scale of the project.

“It is a smaller Assassin's Creed project,” said Côté. “This was conceived [and] built to celebrate the 15th anniversary. So that's why we're using our modern Valhalla engine to build a smaller game that pays tribute to our original game by focusing more on stealth, on close-quarter combat, on parkour, and a denser city that goes back to our roots in the Middle East with Baghdad as the centerpiece.”

When asked if Mirage would be similar in length to the older games in the series, which were around 15-20 hours for the main story, Côté said, “Yes, you should expect something that's closer to our original games.”

But it seems as if Mirage is not a one-off. Assassin’s Creed Infinity, an upcoming hub platform for the series, has been designed to support a variety of approaches for Ubisoft to develop around. While the first game on the platform, currently known as Codename Red, will be a large, open-world RPG set in feudal Japan, not all future games will share that formula.

“I think this Infinity approach is allowing us to have different experiences of different sizes as well,” explained Côté. “Not everything has to be a 150 hour RPG, right?”

Côté confirmed that Codename Hexe, the second game for Infinity, will not be an RPG. While he stopped short of saying what genre and what kind of length Hexe will be, it seems as though Ubisoft wants to make a variety of game types within the Assassin’s Creed universe. Côté says this will “bring more diversity to the places we choose to visit and to how we choose to represent those periods.”

The differing lengths of future games will be “priced accordingly,” which means we could see more $50 (or cheaper) games in the future.

“Sometimes you'll have free experiences as well, which I think is a great way to entice players to either come back,” said Côté. “We've had a great experience with the latest crossover stories for Assassin's Creed Odyssey. It brought so many players back into Odyssey. It made a lot of players who were interested in Odyssey interested in Valhalla, because we had seen a lot of players not crossover from Odyssey to Valhalla, and it piqued their interest and moved them across to another product and all that for free. So I think this will be top of [our] mind as we build Infinity.”

For the full details we have so far, check out our full Assassin’s Creed Infinity interview with Côté. And for more from Ubisoft Forward, take a look at the reveal of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the upcoming Codename Red and Hexe, and a mobile game set in Ancient China.

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Features Editor.