Assassin's Creed III's Annual Release Schedule May Work In Its Favor

Ubisoft is carefully riding the wave of excitement that's been sloshing through the minds of gamers for Assassins Creed III, and trying to keep its momentum as we head into a potentially news-heavy GDC. The developer recently spoke a bit to Game Informer about their desire to push the tech behind the graphical engine, called  'AnvilNext',  as far as they could on console hardware which is certainly starting to look its age.

"It's a scary thing to say, but I think the goal was to look next-gen on current-gen," said creative director Alex Hutchinson, "We have this goal to do something completely new, but still remain true to the franchise...People want that familiarity, but also something radically new. So we have the familiar pillars of fighting, navigation, and social stealth, but brand new environments and brand new ways to use them and extend them."

The goal itself, while lofty, also comes on the back of necessity as well.  As talk of a new console generation in 2013 become's louder, Ubisoft had to make a choice whether to continue development into the next cycle, thus making Assassins Creed III a launch title for the next generation of consoles but neglecting their new annual release model in the process, or push the game out now, and try to push the tech of the current generation as far as they can.

And this is not even taking into account that a next console generation in 2013 is far from certain. With a staggered release we could possibly see one of the big three hit the market in 2013 while the others push out even farther. Of course this would be completely unacceptable to EA, who have now rounded up developers into an annual release expectation that would make most Mafia contracts look like a gentleman's handshake.

Admittedly, being put into this precarious situation might be one of the few times when enforcing an annual release might actually be beneficial to a title.  Ubisoft, and EA, know that when the next consoles hit -which are rumored to be 8-10x the power of the current gen- they will want to produce a title which will be able to ride over the hump of technology that the next jump will create. They'll want a title which is, in a sense, timeless -as all developers do- and the only way to do that now is to squeeze every last bit of juice out of the current consoles like an engorged genitalia after a lofty orgasm.

But can they do it? Can they truly pull that much power from the current machines? Only the hardcore engineers working on the backend tech know for sure, but I'm always fascinated by how much processing power has been squeezed from the Xbox 360 already. For a machine with only 512mb of RAM -even your cheapest computer comes with at least 2gigs now- impressive visuals are rampant in our current orgy of gaming.  If Ubisoft can extend that orgy a few more nights, they have my full support.