In recent years, Ubisoft titles have been getting bigger and bigger in terms of content and sheer game size, employing an open-world model to many of its popular franchises. The most apparent example of this is 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which has been receiving updates and expansions up until July 2019 with the last instalment of The Fate Of Atlantis DLC.

It took me more than 100 hours to complete almost everything that Odyssey had to offer, and the company is still supporting the game almost a year after its release. For gamers who wish that Ubisoft would return to its more focused action games like the older Assassin’s Creed titles, the answer is no.

Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirmed whether we’ll be seeing more linear titles like Assassin’s Creed Unity in the future? He said:

“No.

Our goal is to make sure you can have a Unity within an Odyssey.

If you want to have a story of 15 hours, you can have it, but you can also have other stories.

You live in that world and you pursue what you want to pursue.

You have an experience, many Unity-like experiences.”

Massive open-world games mean higher budgets and resources required than ever before. However, Guillemot reassures that the current model is sustainable, as “the number of players that play our games is constantly growing.”

He continued:

“New markets are opening up and games live a lot longer than before.

So at the moment, we see that we can continue to increase the investments because we know we can have a return on investment that can be quite long[-tailed].

Our teams don’t stop after launching the game.

We have huge teams that continue to create content for players to stay in those universes they love to be in.

The fact that we have some players buying items in these games is giving our teams the chance to continue creating that extra content.”

While Ubisoft titles still tend to feature invasive and exploitative microtransactions in the form of EXP boosts or cosmetics, they’re completely optional and not forced unto the player, unlike games like EA’s Star Wars Battlefront 2. I managed to play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey for a hundred hours and didn’t spend a single cent on anything but the Season Pass.