Future Assassin's Creed games will have greater focus on modern timeline

Ubisoft plans to focus more on modern timelines in future Assassin's Creed games, the company suggested during its latest community livestream.

During the Twitch stream, one of the lead writers for the Assassin's Creed series, Darby McDevitt, said the modern timeline for Brotherhood's town of Monteriggioni could inspire future development.

"That only came about because [we] were able to reuse Monteriggioni from AC2," he said per Eurogamer. "So the plan,is to smartly reuse things so we can have a more robust modern day.

"We always plan to have more modern day but we have to be really smart about how we do it. There was a plan for a little more modern day in Unity [and] nothing that was actually cut.

"The thing with Unity was that it was a completely fresh game on a completely fresh generation. So creating any kind of modern day is a pretty huge ask. To create a city, for instance, or even part of a city, would require six months of work by many, many artists, designers, modellers. And then you'd need gameplay systems that didn't feel like you were just fencing."

Unity didn't include any modern day sessions which were playable, unlike previous entries in the series which contained larger areas to explore and puzzles.

McDevitt also said he and the other writers have been working on compiling a complete history of the franchise's First Civilization, noting the team has wrote 500-700 years worth of "history that we hope to start teasing out."

"So as a side-project [we're making] sure all future projects have this cool timeline to go from, creating this huge First Civ history," he said. "With all the big moments and a ton of small moments you've never thought of - so every future writer can say 'I want to reference Juno again, or Minerva' and see where she was at a specific date... and how far along was the First Civ-human war going."

The next title in the series, Assassin’s Creed: Victory, has a projected release for the fall and is set in Victorian-era London.