Tie-in title Assassin’s Creed: Utopia, coming to Android and iOS devices, will not link or affect your Assassin’s Creed game proper.
The lack of linkage means that completist gamers who only own Assassin’s Creed 3, and not the iOS/Android title.
Ubisoft and GREE have decided to make the game tie into Assassin’s Creed 3 in terms of narrative only.
“There are no links between the games,” Assassin’s Creed producer Andreane Meunier explained at E3. “But the narrative will lead into the AC3 narrative, since it’s a kind of pre-era to the Assassin’s Creed 3 era.”
Apparently there’s a significant amount of people buying Assassin’s Creed media who don’t play the HD console editions of the game.
“One of the things we do check a lot is how people consume our product. So, who is our consumer?” Meunier asked.
“And of course our main consumer is on the HD [console] market. But you’d be surprised to hear that some consumers of the Assassin’s Creed brand have never touched the HD game. We actually have a lot of people who are mostly into the narrative that have read the novels and things like that.
“We do feel like the product we’re offering actually answers a need that the community has expressed,” she said.
“There are a lot of different types of Assassin’s Creed gamers. Often we hear, ‘Oh, I’ve never played an Assassin’s Creed game, but I’ve seen my boyfriend/friend/brother play it, and I’m super-interested in the narrative but the gameplay is maybe not for me.’
“We’ve done a lot of recollection. We’ve done stuff on Facebook and people respond very well to it. People that are really into the narrative will really enjoy this game. It’s going to appeal to a broader audience than if it’s just the HD games.”
Assassin’s Creed: Utopia is focused on the start of the American colonization, Meunier said. The name’s a reference to the hope and feelings of those that headed to the Americas from mainland Europe.
“In our narrative, Abstergo is building a program called Utopia in order to revisit and reconstruct eras like this,” she added. “The colonies were getting built while Abstergo’s revisiting the same kind of process through the simulator.”
There’s not much in the way of detail with what the game will entail, Meunier has simply hinted: “I can tell you it’s not card game, but we’re not going to tell you right now what the game content is.”
There’s also no news on date or price, but perhaps it’ll be somewhere near the October 31st release date of Assassin’s Creed 3.
Assassin’s Creed: Utopia is an effort by both Ubisoft and GREE, which begs the question: Why isn’t Ubisoft using Gameloft, the mobile publisher and developer created by its parent company the Guillemots?
“It’s a great opportunity for us to partner with such a big partner,” explained Meunier, “and they have a lot of experience doing larger-scale games, so that’s really what we wanted to experience.”
