Ubisoft's vice president of creative Lionel Raynaud has stuck up for the practice of releasing an Assassin's Creed every year: "We are able to offer people a new Assassin's Creed every year because they want Assassin's Creed every year" Raynaud told Edge today. "As long as this is true we would be very stupid to not satisfy this need, but it puts a lot of pressure on us to create something that will never disappoint. Source To me that reads "Ubisoft wants more of your money and is happy to ruin a games series to do so". As a gamer do you really want a new game in your favourite series every year? Personally i dont, and question if i even want a new game in a series every two years. Look at Call of Duty, the game was good, however its just been milked to death now. It's the same thing every single year and to be honest its boring now. The same with Tony Hawks, Needs for Speed and so on. The games that stand out in my memory are games where its a few years between a new games in the series.
I agree with this. A game series that has a major release every year can't fully satisfy the needs of gamers. Pressure kills creativity. Most good games produced at studio's managed by Ubisoft are from those who were allowed to spend a lot of time and had minimized intervention from above. Games like Prince of Persia SoT, Beyond Good & Evil, Rayman Origins and Legends.. Those games all had mainly in-house development and their creators could do what they want as long as they feel it's good. Most milked game series have their 'boring' parts of development, such as texturing, modelling, and quality control all handed out to cheap chinese studio's. This to minimize development time, money, and effort. To me that's not the way I'd like the industry to go! I know this from a friend who works as a trainee at Guerilla on the Killzone series (and a secret new IP).
Three stand out game series I loved for the past generation are Halo, Gears of war and Crackdown. Each one of them doesn't release games yearly and the quality shows. Fifa, COD and NFS which are yearly are just poor. I never got into Assassin's Creed so it's not a big loss to me, but I can see fans of the game will experience upcoming crap releases. Then again, after the deal with South Park's Stick of Truth European release, I've vowed to avoid anything Ubisoft if possible. They would have to do something epic to make me warrant giving them money.
I'm really tired of AC coming out each year. I would much rather them spend an extra year on it making the game as perfect as possible, than put out a crappy one each year. But, it's all for the $$$
What was wrong with the European release? Also, that's businesses for you. If something makes a lot more money than what games usually make, they're going to push them out as quick as possible. It's why there is a CoD game every year and why they push out a bunch of DLC every year. People will buy it. The quality of the game isn't a big deal because it's one of those games that people for some reason get hyped for and for the most part, the game is just copy/paste from the same game last year.