Is ‘Assassin’s Creed’ Becoming The Next ‘Call Of Duty’?
Is Assassin’s Creed becoming the next Call of Duty? It appears Ubisoft’s flagship series has become a yearly release with varying levels of quality and success, much like Activision’s shooter.
The first release of both series was considered among the worst of them, but that’s expected. When a series begins, the developer isn’t experienced enough with it to really know where to go with it. After the second successful entry, the developer often realizes they may have a “cash cow” on their hands, and of course the publisher is pleased with the idea of having a regular income from it.
Both popular series’ latest releases, AC: Unity and CoD: Advanced Warfare, are examples of what happens when the developer has a new console to work on, and their last installment proved to be lackluster in comparison to their previous generation versions. In both cases it seems they realized the fan base was getting tired of “the same thing over and over” and decided to change things up.
Assassin’s Creed: Unity had Ubisoft working “from the ground up” to redefine the controls and introduce a drastically new concept of multiplayer co-op play. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare took the ever familiar gameplay and, instead of another generic scenario, they threw the player into a futuristic storyline with realistic high-tech weapons and body enhancements.
While Unity tried to reinvent the gameplay itself with a more intuitive control scheme, Black Flag was arguably more inventive. AC4 took the naval combat from AC3 and improved it in every way, making what was once a chore into an enjoyable mechanic which dominated the gameplay in the alleged absence of a solid story.
CoD: Ghosts turned out to be more of the same with some minor changes, while Advanced Warfare seems to have taken elements of the movie Elysium and Activision’s Titanfall and tossed them into the latest entry. It didn’t really reinvent much, instead relying on a dramatically different set of visuals and Kevin Spacey to sell the game.
Congrats, Assassin’s Creed, you’re the new Call of Duty.
— Tom J (@Daringineer) October 2, 2014
Both CoD and Assassin’s Creed have become yearly releases, though Activision has stated they won’t be releasing anything in the series next year. Instead they claim to be attempting to focus more on the quality so the steady decrease in review scores doesn’t happen again. They were consistently getting worse.
Where Call of Duty is known for its microtransactions, Ubisoft has stated that they plan on doing the same because, based on sales records, they think gamers like it.
What do you think? In spite of being different genres, is Assassin’s Creed the new Call of Duty?
[image via Game Insider, Mr Gray History]
