2011 será un año de descanso para Assassin's Creed

Like most new IPs, Assassin's Creed has seen an (almost) annual release cycle, but Ubisoft Montreal's Jean-Francois Boivin intends to give the series a breather after Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood releases on November 16.

"Honestly, I think for the benefit of everybody — and business can come back and override everything I say because at the end of the day it's about selling games — I believe that this license needs a breather," Boivin explained. "You can't plough a field every year. Once every three years — or once every something — you have to let it breathe. You have to let the minerals back in. I think it's the same thing with any license, really."

Boivin used music games as an example to prove his point. "We can see a lot of the music games that are releasing year after year — the interest is a lot less than it used to be," dijo. "The excitement is a lot less than it used to be. You want to keep people excited. You gotta make people miss it a bit."

But Boivin doesn't have the final say on how much this "breather" would last, if it gets approved at all by Ubisoft higher-ups. Ultimately, it'll come down to "creative people" saying "we need this much time to do something new and refreshing, just scope wise" and "business people" putting a release date on the next game.

"If we skip a year, I think we're good. But yeah, I think we could do something really true to the license if we skip a year and release it in 2012 or 2013," Boivin concluded.