Skip to main content

It’s Official: The next Assassin’s Creed isn’t coming out in 2016

assassins creed 2016 cancelled assassin s unity
Image used with permission by copyright holder
The Assassin’s Creed franchise take a break from its annual release schedule for the first time since 2009, publisher Ubisoft announced Thursday.

“This year, we also are stepping back and re-examining the Assassin’s Creed franchise,” Ubisoft said in a message on it’s company blog. “As a result, we’ve decided that there will not be a new Assassin’s Creed game in 2016.”

The news comes more than a month after Kotaku reported that the next game in the series would be released in 2017, and the publisher may switch the series to a biennial release cycle. The report also suggested the next game, codename “Empire,” would be set in Ancient Egypt and may be the first chapter in a new trilogy within the franchise.

According to the report, Ubisoft’s decision to slow down and re-tool the franchise was a response to the poor reception to Assassin’s Creed: Unity, the 2014 entry in the franchise, which received poor reviews and may have impacted the sales of 2015’s much-improved Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate.

Though Ubisoft’s explicit confirmation was limited to the lack of a new Assassin’s Creed this year, the language of the message lends credence to many unconfirmed elements of the report, most notably that Unity had been a wake-up call for the development team.

“Since the release of Assassin’s Creed Unity, we’ve learned a lot based on your feedback,” the message said. “We’ve also updated our development processes and recommitted to making Assassin’s Creed a premier open-world franchise. We’re taking this year to evolve the game mechanics and to make sure we’re delivering on the promise of Assassin’s Creed offering unique and memorable gameplay experiences that make history everyone’s playground.”

In the meantime, Ubisoft pointed to the upcoming Assassin’s Creed movie, which opens December 21, as a source of in-franchise fun for fans who can’t bear the thought of having to wait for the next game.

“Having already visited the set, we can’t begin to describe how surreal and exciting it is to walk the real-world halls of Abstergo, or see the intricate replicas of Assassin weaponry,” Ubisoft said. “We have an outstanding cast and crew that want to honor the rich lore of Assassin’s Creed and bring a fresh perspective to the ongoing battle between Assassins and Templars that’s fit for the big screen.”

Editors' Recommendations

Mike Epstein
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Michael is a New York-based tech and culture reporter, and a graduate of Northwestwern University’s Medill School of…
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom isn’t the only game to check out this month
may 2023 games not zelda tears of the kingdom holding

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes out this Friday, May 12. And after the disappointing launch of Redfall, it might seem like the only game that matters this month. The highly anticipated sequel will have all the open-world magic of Breath of the Wild while further deepening the playful sandbox possibilities with its Fuse and Ultrahand systems. It’ll be the talk of the game industry for a while as soon as it comes out. Still, if you don’t own a Nintendo Switch or aren’t that interested in what Tears of the Kingdom has to offer, you may feel a bit left in the dust.
You shouldn’t, though, as many exciting games are still coming out this month across all platforms. Over the past couple of weeks, quite a few titles, spanning a wide variety of genres and franchises new and old, have confirmed late-May release windows. If you aren’t too busy playing through Tears of the Kingdom, keep your eye on some of these neat-looking games.
The week after TOTK
The week following Tears of the Kingdom's launch will undoubtedly be the weirdest feeling for those who aren’t playing it. Your social media feeds will likely be dominated by impressions of the game, wacky Ultrahand builds, and other neat discoveries players are making. This may activate a bit of FOMO if you aren’t playing, but alternatives are launching the week after Tears of the Kingdom.
On the exclusives front, PlayStation players will have a console and VR exclusive game called Humanity, published by the team that developed the excellent Tetris Effect. Don’t think that building Tears of the Kingdom’s contraptions to overcome obstacles is the only way to scratch that puzzle-game itch this month.
Humanity is a puzzle game where players must overcome challenges by commanding large crowds of people as a Shibu Inu dog. Yes, this game looks as weird and trippy as that premise sounds, and it will be released for PC, PS4, PS5, and PlayStation VR2 on May 16, making it the first big post-Tears of the Kingdom release.

Continuing on the puzzle game note, Cyan, the developers behind Myst, are finally releasing Firmament on May 18, so that’s a rarity fans of the classic PC and Mac games should check out.
One other game this May is also going to let players build their own vehicles and explore an open world is going to try and follow up Tears of the Kingdom: Lego 2K Drive. As its name suggests, this is a Lego racing game where players build and collect Lego vehicles and then complete challenges throughout an open-world Forza Horizon-style.

Read more
Redfall isn’t just a fun vampire shooter. It’s a takedown of the ultra-rich
A screen capture from the Redfall gameplay reveal.

Right before I got to go hands-on for 90 minutes with Redfall, Xbox’s big spring exclusive, creative director Harvey Smith set the stage by introducing a new trailer focusing on the first-person shooter’s story. All I knew about the narrative up until then was that there was some failed experiment that turned a small Massachusetts fishing town into a vampire’s paradise. I’d soon learn that the real catalyst is much more politically charged: A group of ultra-rich elites working at a pharmaceuticals company called Aevum created the vampire disease in a selfish quest for immortality.

Redfall - Official Gameplay Deep Dive

Read more
This console generation isn’t about games or hardware. It’s about services
A character stands below a ship in Starfield.

It’s been over two years since the start of the current console generation, which launched with a rocky start at the end of 2020. You'd think it's been more than long enough to understand what it's all about, but for many, there's still confusion. That might be changing this year. As Tomas Franzese wrote earlier this month, 2023 could be the year where we finally see what games define this generation’s consoles, at least in terms of exclusives. He also noted that games could stop being cross-platform, launching on just current-gen consoles instead of simultaneously on last-gen ones.

While that'll finally give us some memorable games, it doesn't bring us closer to defining the hardware itself. Besides a few extra teraflops and new ultra-fast SSDs, there isn’t much that helps the PS5 and Xbox Series X and S stand out from their predecessors. Sure, the PS5 looks like a giant spaceship, and the Xbox Series X is built like a fridge, but we didn’t know what these devices could offer that the PS4 and Xbox One couldn’t besides some pretty lighting effects and virtually non-existent loading times.

Read more