The Assassin's Creed series is taking a little lie-down in 2019
Games a a service? It's all Greek to me.
Ubisoft are giving their studios a moment to catch their breath after the launch of Assassin's Creed Odyssey in October. After debuting a new Odyssey trailer (below) at Gamescom, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot stated that there's no sequels, spinoffs or side-games due in 2019, as reported by Gamespot. Their focus for next year will be live support for Odyssey. Probably for the best, as according to Odyssey director Scott Phillips (in a video interview with Game Informer), the new game will be "much longer" than the already massive Assassin's Creed Origins.
Of course, not releasing any new games doesn't mean that there won't be anything for fans of historical man-stabbery to chew on. Assassin's Creed: Origins was a mechanical reboot for the series, and followed up by a historical tour mode, a sandbox cheat-mode and plenty more smaller updates. Those who got the gold version or season pass also received a smaller bit of DLC, followed up by a much larger expansion that dropped all pretence of historical accuracy in favour of diving into the afterlife to hunt down an undead pharaoh, adding another 15 or so hours to the game.
There are rumours abound (take this with a pinch of salt, but Eurogamer think so too), that a similarly ahistorical expansion is on the cards for Odyssey, taking players to Atlantis. Potentially sunken cities or not, you're probably not going to be short of things to do. According to Guillemot, "when you get [Odyssey] this year, you're going to get in for a couple of years". It all sounds like far too much sneaking around, jumping off buildings and stabbing people than I'll ever have the time for, but it does seem to be a solid illustration of what 'games as a service' looks like in action.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey will be launching on October 5th for £50/€60/$60, or a hefty £84/€100/$100 for the Gold edition. You can find it on Steam, Humble and Ubisoft's own store.