Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series, composed of period dramas that tell the story of a clandestine order of assassins, is just one example. It takes the average player 135 hours to accomplish every task in “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla,” the latest installment from 2020. That makes the game more than four times longer than the original “Assassin’s Creed” released in 2007.
A scene from "Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök." (Ubisoft)
The Ubisoft has declined to answer questions regarding the increasing scale of the virtual worlds in the Assassin’s Creed games, but in a recent report to investors, the company boasted players’ “overall engagement” in “Valhalla” is up when compared to the previous game in the series. It also noted players are spending more money on the game’s additional content. The latest expansion for “Valhalla,” “Dawn of Ragnarök,” which was released March 10, reportedly has 35 hours of content to explore. That’s longer than some full-size, $70 games. Ubisoft’s addendum to “Valhalla” costs just $40.
“Valhalla” isn’t the only open-world game touting a massive update to the in-game world. The two-year-old “Cyberpunk 2077” just released an overhaul to the game intended to smooth over the title’s buggy 100 hours of total gameplay. And “Destiny 2,” the space opera that was originally released in 2017 by the creators of “Halo,” published its fourth major update, “The Witch Queen” on Feb. 22.
The developers behind titles like “Destiny,” “Fortnite” and Call of Duty’s “Warzone” are providing these games as a service — meaning players are encouraged to continue to pay for additional content, which can be anything from cosmetic items to entirely new chapters of gameplay. It’s a revenue model inspired by the structure of free-to-play mobile games like “Clash of Clans” or “Candy Crush,” which encourage players to pay small fees to help them progress through the game.
Epic Games, a $28.7 billion game developer, brought in more than $5 billion in revenue from “Fortnite” in 2018. Last year, Activision Blizzard, the creator of Call of Duty and owner of the developer behind “Candy Crush,” earned 74 percent of its revenue from in-game purchases.
Release and repeat
Further fueling the expanded scope of modern video games are advancements in software and technology that allow developers to more easily build on top of an existing virtual world. This makes it more appealing for studios to keep iterating on an existing foundation than to start over from scratch, Piscatella said. Guerrilla Games, makers of “Horizon Forbidden West,” reuses animation from the original game, for example — and they’re far from the only studio to do so. Sony, which owns Guerrilla Games, declined interview requests for the article.
Costs in game development have grown exponentially, Piscatella said. By making use of work that’s already been done, such as by expanding on games through sequels and other downloadable content, studios are finding a way to save money while still making bigger games.
“It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to make those worlds bigger than it is to make a whole new set of tools to make a different world,” Piscatella said. “Adding another 10 hours to an Assassin’s Creed game is a lot less expensive than trying to build the first 10 hours of the next one.”
In the past 15 years, there have been 12 new mainline Assassin’s Creed games. With studios based around the world, Ubisoft can essentially work around the clock building these massive adventures, Keogh said. The publisher has been able to perfect a “production line model of game development,” he added. That model can also be applied to several other Ubisoft properties, like the Far Cry franchise, another lengthy series of games set in expansive open worlds.
“Ubisoft games very much feel like Ubisoft games, regardless of what franchise variant it is,” Keogh said. “They have this model down pat that makes it easier to just go bigger.”
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