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15 studios worked on Assassin's Creed: Valhalla
- Thread starter Deleted member 8196
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Assassin's Creed Ragnarok world map size will be twice that of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. It will have all of Northern Europe and a huge emphasis on boats and cities.
It's simply because some studios have specialized areas of expertise. On a Ubi project, Studio A does your photomode and PC porting (and possibly Stadia), Lead Studio does the biggest chunk of the game worldbuilding, missions, and all major gameplay systems, Studio B assists with sharing part of the word and missions mandate, Studio C might handle next-gen ports if they're not done by Lead Studio, Studio D might handle animal life and naval gameplay, Studio E might do all of your performance capture, Studio F might do your cinematics, Studio G might do Club Ubisoft integration, Studio H might handle one part of the worldwide QC mandate, and the list goes on. There are also lots of agnostic tech groups within Ubisoft that might help exclusively with one aspect of a technology pipeline.
A lot of this has to do with planning ahead, years in advance, to match up the various studios expertise to the project's mandate and scope. It allows these games to be as big as they are. Spreading out the work also means you have someone, somewhere, working on the game at all 24 hours of a day.
It's one of Ubisoft's biggest strengths though I know many like to deride Ubisoft for this approach.
Yep, Ubisoft also has a deep, deep bench of outsourcing studios they turn to for help. For instance, a lot of their concept art has traditionally not solely been done in house. They've used outside resources for countless other things too.
When you work on projects as large as Ubi's, they tend to use a lot of their partnerships.
There's a huge difference between outsourcing and co-development though. Most AAA are developed using countless outsourcing studios in Eastern Europe, Canada and Asia but those are barely (if ever) mentionned in credits. Horizon Zero Dawn was 95% outsourced according to devs. Ubisoft is actually splitting the game in chunks that will be entirely developed by other Ubisoft studios. Assassin's Creed boat gameplay was mostly developed by Singapore, multiplayer in Annecy, art props in China and so on. They tend to use freelancers and outsource concept artists for specific, one-time task but in a reaaaaally small proportion compared to other publishers. They just have an insane workforce...
Nah, Ubisoft is also using quite a few external partners on this as well. They have for every game since Black Flag.
I also know that quite a few of the AC games have had a bunch of concept art done by a separate outsourcing studio specifically designed for concept art.
I was not talking about freelancers :) I've seen some Ubi projects lean heavily on outsourcing, to the point where over 1000 non-Ubi employees have touched their games in various degrees before they comes out. So to say the game is "entirely" developed in house is never true at Ubisoft, and has not been true for years.
Edit: Also, all of the people above go uncredited for the most part. Most of the time, their studio or their leads will get a "special thanks" section but individuals won't be mentioned by name.
Exciting because it hopefully means no pared-back disappointment like Unity was. Troubling, because Odyssey was already bloated with menial busywork, and now they've almost doubled the number of studios working on the next one, which could mean an even bigger world... filled with even more menial busywork.
Given how many systems are in play in games like this, I would say having more studios leads to less overall crunch for individuals.
Funny thing about their game leaks: Their employees all take a morning public bus route to their Montreal studio (I commonly call it the Ubi-bus) and its so packed people are falling out the windows and almost everyone on it is wearing a whole bunch of Ubi swag.
Ubi has super nice employees (and a really nice building, they hold awesome roof parties at Ubi Montreal that I've been to!) who all just want to talk about the cool stuff they work on. Some of them are also trying to get work done on the bus/train/metro/other Montreal public transit, and sometimes their stuff leaks from that. Square-Enix Montreal also ran into a similar problem on the Montreal metro, it's how Tomb Raider leaked.
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It seems like a lot of people are making assumptions. Some of my favorite games have been made by massive teams and some of my favorite games have been made by maybe a few people. I think based on previous history we can assume Ubisoft will be going for a huge experience. I don't want to play those types of games all the time, but I do sometimes.
I'll save judgement until we see more and people are hands on with the game. It's not been very often that I've played what I thought was a truly great open world game that I was mad the content ended. I can see the concerns some have for sure and I haven't played Origins or Odyssey to directly compare to where the series is and where this may take it. I've had some open world games I slogged through and some I would have loved for another 25 hours of stuff.
The credits are being released with the teaser so they'll be over by launch.
Can't wait to see what's in store.
Nope, Montreal is a video game production hub with AAA studios, indies, outsourcing studios, game engine developers and a whole bunch more all over the place. These people also pretty much all know each other or know people who work at another company, so the local industry is quite small in many ways.
This is what causes people to be very chatty about what they are working on in public transport or when they are out for lunch :)
I REALLY want to see a NoClip documentary on Ubisoft and how the hell they function haha.
I knew that that often had several studios coordinate on one game, but I never would've imagined it was as high as 15.
If they have 15 studios working (at least part time) on AC Valhalla, not to mention Watch Dogs Legion, Gods & Monsters, Rainbow Six Quarantine, Roller Champions, and Far Cry 6 all coming within the next year, how many damn studios do they have total?!
I knew that that often had several studios coordinate on one game, but I never would've imagined it was as high as 15.
If they have 15 studios working (at least part time) on AC Valhalla, not to mention Watch Dogs Legion, Gods & Monsters, Rainbow Six Quarantine, Roller Champions, and Far Cry 6 all coming within the next year, how many damn studios do they have total?!
Wild, never doubted them lol. If there are two companies that can do this insane stuff, it's Ubi and Rockstar.
Yes it is different. 15 studios co-developing the game. Not just assets and marketing work. Ubisoft also utilize different contractors on top of the 15 studios.
I'm sure Ubisoft employees will be finding it hard to sleep at night without you playing their games anymore /s
It's truly a project management tour de force to be able to produce something even vaguely coherent out of a 15 studio collaboration
Pray for that skip credits button lol
Anyways, I'm guessing it will definitely be cross gen for sure. With that many teams I hope we get the size of Origins/Odyssey but with the visual fidelity of Unity.
Anyways, I'm guessing it will definitely be cross gen for sure. With that many teams I hope we get the size of Origins/Odyssey but with the visual fidelity of Unity.
did AC Black Flag end up in the ballpark of what this generation of games could look like? I'd say nope.
Aside from character models, AC Black Flag still holds up, to be honest.
It's a fine looking game, but the last two ACs put it to shame.
Its like one guy who coordinates 14 other guys, The lead on this is not zoom calling a thousand people.
Ubisoft imo is the first game dev who is using big industry workmanship. Where also thousands of people work alongside a set course of milestones and deliver on time no matter what. If you have a structure that works for the specifics of game development and you free yourself from the start up / "we crunch our way to the goal" mindset, it will work fine like this.