Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ 4-Year Development Strikes the Perfect Balance, Says Dev

Ubisoft allowed lead developer Ubisoft Quebec four years to make Assassin's Creed Shadows, a one-year increase over previous franchise installments like Valhalla. Speaking to GamesIndustry, Lead Producer Karl Onnée said this is just the right amount of time.

It's great to work on a game that comes after something with the pedigree of Valhalla. But obviously, there are great expectations. We always want to go better, which is what we're trying to do with Shadows. We are pushing the limits of what we can do.

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It's always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate. Yes, you can put more people on a project and do it in a shorter time, but that doesn't give you more time to iterate, because it takes time to get the feedback from your players, your team… and then see what works and what doesn't and how to improve it. Four years, I think, is the right balance to go from conception to production and get the feedback necessary to adapt.

Onnée also admitted that Assassin's Creed Shadows borrowed the stealth mechanics from Mirage. Overall, the various Ubisoft teams working on the franchise collaborate a lot.

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 we were going in the direction of stealth with Assassin's Creed Shadows, and so we saw what they were doing and learned from that. We said, let's use what they've done and build on top of it rather than going our own way. We are all part of the brand, so it is important that we all discuss with each other. You want to avoid redoing work.

Making games is difficult. It takes a lot of time and passion, and you want to avoid doing the same things but differently. You want to build on top of work and improve on it. We have a lot of discussions