Assassin's Creed doesn't have an overall ending after all, Ubisoft admits

Last year, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag director Ashraf IsmaiI said that Ubisoft had a brief outline of the Assassin's Creed series, including an overall ending.

This year, however, Revelations and Black Flag lead writer Darby McDevitt has said that's "not exactly true," and that Ubisoft's annual blockbuster cash cow has no definitive end in sight.

"There's been a bit of confusion in that [Ismail] once said that Assassin's Creed has an ending--that's not exactly true," explained McDevitt in an interview with Edge.

The Assassin's Creed universe was likened to Doctor Who, with McDevitt saying there can be individual endings as part of an perpetually ongoing story. "Because all of history is open to us we see the universe as a Doctor Who type thing. There are so many possibilities we don't want to definitively end the universe, but we can have storylines that have endings."

Reflecting on the series so far, McDevitt spoke about how putting a firm date into Desmond-era titles created a challenge for the writers. “The problem with the Desmond trilogy was that back in 2007 they set a date with Abstergo launching a satellite that was going to control people’s minds," he said.

"That unfortunately took a back seat in ACII when they swapped the plot point for the end of the world, which was conveniently going to happen in the same month in 2012. This was a hard date we were going to hit--we realised very quickly that Assassin’s Creed is a popular franchise and we’d like to keep it going.”

As for the series after Desmond, McDevitt says "we've moved on from specifically defining when a story will end" in future titles.

Looking forward, McDevitt said that an in-game list of future settings for the Assassin's Creed series found in Black Flag--which included Shogun-era Japan, Victorian London, the Wild West, and the French Revolution, among others--was Ubisoft parodying the locations that fans most request. "So the fans generated that list, we didn’t generate that list," he added.

But is any of the fan speculation based in reality? “I will say that fans definitely think alike. We have the same goals for the series, let’s say. I’ll leave it at that. We always want to surprise," McDevitt concluded.