The creative director of Assassin’s Creed Unity and Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Alexandre Amancio, hasn’t been shy about his belief that AAA game development is broken. Although Amancio has since left Ubisoft to serve as a senior vice president at FunPlus, he does have ideas about the future of AAA games and he believes that smaller dev teams are the way to go.
Amancio told GamesIndustry.biz that a lot of AAA studios “think that you can solve a problem by throwing people at it. But adding people to a problem stagnates the people that were already being efficient on it. It just creates a lot of variable noise … So I think the future lies in smaller teams.”
As an example of how smaller teams can collaborate on bigger projects, Amancio used Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag as a hypothetical example.
“Let’s say you’re working on the naval system on Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag,” said Amancio. “That’s an amazing feature you can give to a co-dev studio because it’s self-contained: with good direction, you can give the co-dev studio autonomy over making it as fun as possible, as long as all of the points where it connects with the main game remain stable.”
Amancio went on to say that “constraints are the secret behind any good art. And whether they’re artificial or they’re real constraints, they have to be imposed. Our brains are all pretty much structured the same, so given the same inputs, we’ll output similar ideas … I think ideas are important, don’t get me wrong … It’s constraints that force you not to use that first idea. Sometimes it’s financial or it’s technical, but that forces you to find something different, and mastery and excellence exists in those decisions.”
Ubisoft has yet to announce which Assassin’s Creed game will be released next, but the cast of the Netflix TV series is starting to come together. There have been several reports that a remake of Black Flag is in the works, and it’s reportedly called Resynced. Additionally, a mobile game called Assassin’s Creed Jade is in development, as well as Assassin’s Creed Codename Hexe, and a multiplayer game that may be called Assassin’s Creed Invictus.
