Assassin's Creed Transitioning into an RPG Format Unraveled
The transition of Assassin's Creed from simple creative vision into an unmanageable giant RPG was precipitated by matters of business, to sell or buy used game discs, as opined by a short-lived former director, Alex Hutchinson.
The Commerce of Preventing Game Used Sales
As Hutchinson told, game-selling companies used to pressure the teams to consider more game time being added on to their titles, primarily giving players the incentive to hold on to their physical copies longer so as to keep down the flow of used game sales beneficial to stores such as GameStop from which the publisher obtained no revenue.
"The designers were asked to add more game time, which seemed to be the most profitable solution for players in a franchise where multiplayer never worked properly," Hutchinson said.
Why RPG Aspects Were Consideration
Hutchinson added that from a per-hour perspective, creating high-quality action-adventure content is prohibitively expensive. The addition of RPG elements became the cheapest and most effective means to satisfy the extended gameplay expectations without incurring the enormous cost of constructing additional new story missions or environments.
Hutchinson's Doubts and the Initial Plan
Despite RPG games being commercially successful, Hutchinson stated that he doubted this approach, and was questioning the sustainability of keeping players engaged for hundreds of hours, almost every year. He did, however, state that in his opinion, the proper way to go would have been the traditional adventure format, as he personally prefers it.
In another piece of information, Hutchinson revealed that Assassin's Creed was originally meant to be developed as a trilogy, but because of its enormous success it was apparently too valuable for Ubisoft to put to rest.
