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[Danthrax]

HERE IS MY NEW THEORY

Watch_Dogs is obviously Assassin's Creed 5: Watch_Dogs. That much has already been proven by facts in this thread.

But what about The Division? We haven't heard about it for a while. I think The Division is really Assassin's Creed 6. And I've been thinking about it. We know the theme of the game is how money makes people sick because it carries bird flu, but in the post-money society you need to savenge for loot to sell for money, which you use to make people sick? Right? And then something about confetti? I'm not a smart guy but that's basically what I could tell from the E3 presentation. Anyway, I was thinking about how Cash Rules Everything Around Me CREAM get the money dollar dollar bill y'all

So I'm reasonably certain that Assassins Creed 6 is the Division and features Wu-Tang as playable characters.

i cant tell if youre joking

 

[John Harker]

HERE IS MY NEW THEORY

Watch_Dogs is obviously Assassin's Creed 5: Watch_Dogs. That much has already been proven by facts in this thread.

But what about The Division? We haven't heard about it for a while. I think The Division is really Assassin's Creed 6. And I've been thinking about it. We know the theme of the game is how money makes people sick because it carries bird flu, but in the post-money society you need to savenge for loot to sell for money, which you use to make people sick? Right? And then something about confetti? I'm not a smart guy but that's basically what I could tell from the E3 presentation. Anyway, I was thinking about how Cash Rules Everything Around Me CREAM get the money dollar dollar bill y'all

So I'm reasonably certain that Assassins Creed 6 is the Division and features Wu-Tang as playable characters.

I long suspected you had an uncle that lives in Montreal.
Confirmed. Someone should tell Ubisoft to fire all uncles.

 

[sangreal]

It already takes place in the AC universe and it plays like almost exactly like an AC game based on the later gameplay videos so I don't know why they wouldn't just rename it to AC which has more brand recognition

 

[Rogue_Ledr]

The HELL!?!?!?!

What could this mean? Surely they aren't cancelling the game. I would be shocked if they did that. The game looked so promising.

 

[rvy]

The game did not get canned, you crazy people. It's just gonna be the next entry in the Ass Creed franchise.

 

[XANDER CAGE]

HERE IS MY NEW THEORY

Watch_Dogs is obviously Assassin's Creed 5: Watch_Dogs. That much has already been proven by facts in this thread.

But what about The Division? We haven't heard about it for a while. I think The Division is really Assassin's Creed 6. And I've been thinking about it. We know the theme of the game is how money makes people sick because it carries bird flu, but in the post-money society you need to savenge for loot to sell for money, which you use to make people sick? Right? And then something about confetti? I'm not a smart guy but that's basically what I could tell from the E3 presentation. Anyway, I was thinking about how Cash Rules Everything Around Me CREAM get the money dollar dollar bill y'all

So I'm reasonably certain that Assassins Creed 6 is the Division and features Wu-Tang as playable characters.

Why ISN'T there a co-op next gen Wu game?

 

[kick51]

HERE IS MY NEW THEORY

Watch_Dogs is obviously Assassin's Creed 5: Watch_Dogs. That much has already been proven by facts in this thread.

But what about The Division? We haven't heard about it for a while. I think The Division is really Assassin's Creed 6. And I've been thinking about it. We know the theme of the game is how money makes people sick because it carries bird flu, but in the post-money society you need to savenge for loot to sell for money, which you use to make people sick? Right? And then something about confetti? I'm not a smart guy but that's basically what I could tell from the E3 presentation. Anyway, I was thinking about how Cash Rules Everything Around Me CREAM get the money dollar dollar bill y'all

So I'm reasonably certain that Assassins Creed 6 is the Division and features Wu-Tang as playable characters.

Rayman is what happens when the Division crew takes LSD

The Crew is how all these characters get around the USA

 

[charlequin]

My guess is they made significant changes to the story to fit in with the AC universe, and they're changing the name to AC V.

Why do people think this makes sense?

Ubisoft's business model -- and this has been true for seven or eight years now -- is built around selling games of a very specific mold. They build franchises around core gameplay concepts that they judge to be both fundamentally appealing and easily iterable: impressively rendered and distinct settings, open-world objective-based gameplay, and quasi-cinematic storytelling. They also leverage the generation transition as a key element of this strategy, by announcing a game at the tail end of a generation (when gamers are sick of their current options), relentlessly promoting it for years, and then launching the game during a window where gamers are unusually receptive to new IPs (i.e. a year to two years into a new generation.)

Ubisoft prototyped this on the PS2 with Prince of Persia, turning one well-received franchise return into four more franchise entries. They perfected this with Assassin's Creed, where the sheer force of marketing and the fundamentally appealing visual design made the series a perennial hit even though it took another two years to actually produce a good game. They've also backfitted this strategy to Far Cry and made it into its own repeatable, viable IP within the same general model.

The entire point of Watch Dogs is to repeat this strategy and expand Ubi's selection of major IPs. If you break things into a 2x2 grid with "shooter vs. third-person action-adventure" on one side and "modern/urban vs. historical/exotic" on the other, they already have three of the four quadrants covered: Tom Clancy is the modern, urban shooter, Far Cry is the exotic-locale shooter, and Assassin's Creed is the historical action-adventure. Watch Dogs fills the last spot here and lets Ubi apply the same strategy for long-term franchise strength (content tourism and bar-filling, basically) to a game with a type of appeal they're not currently covering.

Assuming Ubisoft wants to rename the game and shoehorn it into the AC franchise is nonsensical. You have to start with the idea that Ubi planned and developed this game with, essentially, no plan, and that now the important thing for them is to make a little extra money on it by tacking on a proven brand. But that ignores the whole reason the game exists. Watch Dogs doesn't have a ludicrous budget to make money back on its own; it has a ludicrous budget so they can make a big splash, then sell you annual sequels for the rest of the generation. It got a gigantic marketing-blitz for the same reason: to drill the brand (and their ideas of what potential it could have) into people's brains well in advance of the release, and thereby guarantee it a running start.

Fundamentally, AC is an extremely fertile franchise (as years of annualized performance should prove) but it's still not an infinite well. Ubi can't sell people two ACs every year, which means their ability to grow the franchise or extract profit out of it is capped. What they can do is develop other franchises that scratch similar itches, but are different enough to sell to an audience that only partially overlaps. That's why Watch Dogs exists and why it makes no sense to make it an AC game.

(This idea also feeds into the persistent fan nonsense that Ubi wants to do a modern AC game, when in fact the entire point of the AC franchise is to do historical-period tourism, and the modern element has been consistently reduced in importance since Patrice Desilets left.)

 

[Linkhero1]

Why ISN'T there a co-op next gen Wu game?

Third parties dropped all Wu support. Nintendo has already made a few co-op Mario Wu games.

 

[The perfect Dark]

The game did not get canned, you crazy people. It's just gonna be the next entry in the Ass Creed franchise.

They turned it into the "present day stuff" of AC5.

 

[FantasticMrFoxdie]

The game is nearly finished and costed a fortune to date. No way they are canning it. Maybe they'll rename it?

No way they are canning it and that would be dumb to rename it. I know a handful of Joe Schmo casual gamers that preordered PS4s mostly for this game and didn't even know it was delayed until later. The name is already out there.

EDIT: lol well I guess AssCreed5 would be a bigger name heh

 

[NotLiquid]

HERE IS MY NEW THEORY

Watch_Dogs is obviously Assassin's Creed 5: Watch_Dogs. That much has already been proven by facts in this thread.

But what about The Division? We haven't heard about it for a while. I think The Division is really Assassin's Creed 6. And I've been thinking about it. We know the theme of the game is how money makes people sick because it carries bird flu, but in the post-money society you need to savenge for loot to sell for money, which you use to make people sick? Right? And then something about confetti? I'm not a smart guy but that's basically what I could tell from the E3 presentation. Anyway, I was thinking about how Cash Rules Everything Around Me CREAM get the money dollar dollar bill y'all

So I'm reasonably certain that Assassins Creed 6 is the Division and features Wu-Tang as playable characters.

Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
(Today, 08:54 PM)

 

[oti]

The ThunderCats reboot we always wanted.

 

[March of the Crabs]

I think every Ubisoft game is Assassin's Creed. Assassin's Creed: Legends is out later this month starring a limbless Ezio jamming to Black Betty. Assassin's Creed: Watch_Dogs is the logical next step.

 

[bigmf]

The new title will be "Aiden Pearce's Wacky Smart-Phone Adventures in the Greater Chicagoland Area"

Or APWSPAITGCA for short.

 

[AHA-Lambda]

As close mechanically as they appear, it makes no sense for Ubi to replace Watch Dogs as an Assassin's Creed game, why aren't people seeing this?

Ubi is positioning Watch Dogs to be its next big IP, why throw that away for a sequel in an annualised franchise?

 

[Patryn]

Haven't people faked a lot of stuff around trademark applications and the like? I seem to recall some fake Fallout filings, anyways.

 

[rvy]

They turned it into the "present day stuff" of AC5.

Desmond is the dude from Watch_Dogs post plastic surgery.

 

[Berordn]

Ubi is positioning Watch Dogs to be its next big IP, why throw that away for a sequel in an annualised franchise?

Because the project ended up getting too big for its britches and probably wouldn't be received well, but they've spent far too much money on it and can't just abandon that much development time?

 

[sangreal]

(This idea also feeds into the persistent fan nonsense that Ubi wants to do a modern AC game, when in fact the entire point of the AC franchise is to do historical-period tourism, and the modern element has been consistently reduced in importance since Patrice Desilets left.)

But Watch Dogs is a modern AC game whether they change the name or not. It is already established in AC4 that it takes place in the same universe and the gameplay is so similar that it might as well be a mod

I really don't see why using an AC:Subtitle name would hurt their ability to make a long-running series out of it similar to what Activision originally did with CoD (WW2 and MW games)

 

[enanogrande]

Snip

Great post. I won't go as far to say that it becoming AC5 is impossible, but I agree with all your points and don't think Ubi came into this game with any intention of anything but making another yearly franchise.

 

[SkylineRKR]

As close mechanically as they appear, it makes no sense for Ubi to replace Watch Dogs as an Assassin's Creed game, why aren't people seeing this?

Ubi is positioning Watch Dogs to be its next big IP, why throw that away for a sequel in an annualised franchise?

Ofcourse, WD will fill the gap AC leaves. WD for holiday 14, Creed for holiday 15 etc. An AC every year is less viable as fatique will kick in.

Watch Dogs is already a very big name, it was the most requested launch title for next-gen until it got delayed. They're not going to change anything, besides reigniting the marketing.

 

[Breakfast at Noon]

future ass creed confirmed.

 

[TetraGenesis]

Why do people think this makes sense?

Ubisoft's business model -- and this has been true for seven or eight years now -- is built around selling games of a very specific mold. They build franchises around core gameplay concepts that they judge to be both fundamentally appealing and easily iterable: impressively rendered and distinct settings, open-world objective-based gameplay, and quasi-cinematic storytelling. They also leverage the generation transition as a key element of this strategy, by announcing a game at the tail end of a generation (when gamers are sick of their current options), relentlessly promoting it for years, and then launching the game during a window where gamers are unusually receptive to new IPs (i.e. a year to two years into a new generation.)

Ubisoft prototyped this on the PS2 with Prince of Persia, turning one well-received franchise return into four more franchise entries. They perfected this with Assassin's Creed, where the sheer force of marketing and the fundamentally appealing visual design made the series a perennial hit even though it took another two years to actually produce a good game. They've also backfitted this strategy to Far Cry and made it into its own repeatable, viable IP within the same general model.

The entire point of Watch Dogs is to repeat this strategy and expand Ubi's selection of major IPs. If you break things into a 2x2 grid with "shooter vs. third-person action-adventure" on one side and "modern/urban vs. historical/exotic" on the other, they already have three of the four quadrants covered: Tom Clancy is the modern, urban shooter, Far Cry is the exotic-locale shooter, and Assassin's Creed is the historical action-adventure. Watch Dogs fills the last spot here and lets Ubi apply the same strategy for long-term franchise strength (content tourism and bar-filling, basically) to a game with a type of appeal they're not currently covering.

Assuming Ubisoft wants to rename the game and shoehorn it into the AC franchise is nonsensical. You have to start with the idea that Ubi planned and developed this game with, essentially, no plan, and that now the important thing for them is to make a little extra money on it by tacking on a proven brand. But that ignores the whole reason the game exists. Watch Dogs doesn't have a ludicrous budget to make money back on its own; it has a ludicrous budget so they can make a big splash, then sell you annual sequels for the rest of the generation. It got a gigantic marketing-blitz for the same reason: to drill the brand (and their ideas of what potential it could have) into people's brains well in advance of the release, and thereby guarantee it a running start.

Fundamentally, AC is an extremely fertile franchise (as years of annualized performance should prove) but it's still not an infinite well. Ubi can't sell people two ACs every year, which means their ability to grow the franchise or extract profit out of it is capped. What they can do is develop other franchises that scratch similar itches, but are different enough to sell to an audience that only partially overlaps. That's why Watch Dogs exists and why it makes no sense to make it an AC game.

(This idea also feeds into the persistent fan nonsense that Ubi wants to do a modern AC game, when in fact the entire point of the AC franchise is to do historical-period tourism, and the modern element has been consistently reduced in importance since Patrice Desilets left.)

Excellent post. I hope you're right. I think rebranding it as an Assassin's Creed title is a terrible, short-sighted idea. Hope that's not even under consideration.

 

[BY2K]

Do we know if Ubi ever trademarked Watch_Dogs with the underscore?

 

[Stumpokapow]

But Watch Dogs is a modern AC game whether they change the name or not. It is already established in AC4 that it takes place in the same universe and the gameplay is so similar that it might as well be a mod

In a winky-winky way the same way Red Faction and Saints Row are the same franchise, sure.

I really don't see why using an AC:Subtitle name would hurt their ability to make a long-running series out of it similar to what Activision originally did with CoD (WW2 and MW games)

This is probably the better argument--but I don't think it's so hard to launch a brand that they need to retreat to trying to launch "sub-brands" or whatever. I see no reason Watch_Dogs can't hit the sort of 6-8 million target without the AC name.

 

[Jamie OD]

It's probably going to be called Clock_Cats from now on.

 

[HeelPower]

 

[Archpath1]

Boom. Aiden Pearce is actually an assassin hunter given a piece of advanced tech to help end the war? Idk.

 

[rvy]

future ass creed confirmed.

 

[Rösti]

Do we know if Ubi ever trademarked Watch_Dogs with the underscore?

They didn't.

 

[Dash Kappei]

It's obviously a Wii U exclusive now,

Spoiler

Ninten

Dogs

 

[Honey Bunny]

So that is Altair in the centre after all

 

[OneUh8]

So... wtf is going on here. I paid the game off on Amazon, but now I am thinking of trying to get the money pulled off the game and onto something else.

 

[rvy]

So... wtf is going on here. I paid the game off on Amazon, but now I am thinking of trying to get the money pulled off the game and onto something else.

Did you get it for the WiiU?

Yes, you should stop whatever you're doing.

 

[Aquamarine]

HERE IS MY NEW THEORY

Watch_Dogs is obviously Assassin's Creed 5: Watch_Dogs. That much has already been proven by facts in this thread.

But what about The Division? We haven't heard about it for a while. I think The Division is really Assassin's Creed 6. And I've been thinking about it. We know the theme of the game is how money makes people sick because it carries bird flu, but in the post-money society you need to savenge for loot to sell for money, which you use to make people sick? Right? And then something about confetti? I'm not a smart guy but that's basically what I could tell from the E3 presentation. Anyway, I was thinking about how Cash Rules Everything Around Me CREAM get the money dollar dollar bill y'all

So I'm reasonably certain that Assassins Creed 6 is the Division and features Wu-Tang as playable characters.

WONDERFUL THEORY

THIS IS A PERFECTLY LOGICAL POST AND I FULLY AGREE WITH THIS.

 

[Winterblink]

Desmond is the dude from Watch_Dogs post plastic surgery.

Hey, anything to liven up that out-of-the-Animus action.

 

[charlequin]

But Watch Dogs is a modern AC game whether they change the name or not. It is already established in AC4 that it takes place in the same universe and the gameplay is so similar that it might as well be a mod

Except... it isn't? It's ridiculous to generalize the AC gameplay as "open-world, bar-filling." That's every Ubisoft game. The moment-to-moment gameplay in Watch Dogs, with the centrality of the hacking and computer elements, as well as the complete lack of hidden blade and climbing, the two signature gameplay elements of Assassin's Creed, is actually pretty different. That's the whole point of why the game even exists: it's similar to AC, yet different.

This is the same way that EA is building a new brand with Titanfall instead of shoehorning it into their existing lineup as Battlefield: Big Ass Robots. On an abstract level, the gameplay in these products is extremely similar, but on the detailed level the nuanced distinctions justify a new brand, and a new brand is much better for the publisher than putting all the eggs in one basket.

Because the project ended up getting too big for its britches and probably wouldn't be received well, but they've spent far too much money on it and can't just abandon that much development time?

That definitely stopped them with Assassin's Creed -- oh wait, no it didn't, they put out an 82 Metacritic game that people still bitch about today but which nonetheless became an annualized 8m franchise.

 

[AniHawk]

aw, beyond good & evil 2 made a friend!

 

[Solid Samus]

Maybe they're planning a total rebranding (i.e. new name).

Might help bring the hype and awareness back

 

[The Lamonster]

Watch_Kids

 

[Xater]

So... wtf is going on here. I paid the game off on Amazon, but now I am thinking of trying to get the money pulled off the game and onto something else.

The real question is why you would do that for a game that is still far out?

 

[Berordn]

That definitely stopped them with Assassin's Creed -- oh wait, no it didn't, they put out an 82 Metacritic game that people still bitch about today but which nonetheless became an annualized 8m franchise.

I always thought that someone out there must've liked AC, but I guess that's fair.

 

[AHA-Lambda]

But Watch Dogs is a modern AC game whether they change the name or not. It is already established in AC4 that it takes place in the same universe and the gameplay is so similar that it might as well be a mod

I really don't see why using an AC:Subtitle name would hurt their ability to make a long-running series out of it similar to what Activision originally did with CoD (WW2 and MW games)

And nobody but obsessive fanboys will ever notice or even care about that?

 

[BakedYams]

Probably a name change. Would be nice too to spice it up.

 

[FrankCaron]

Why do people think this makes sense?

Ubisoft's business model -- and this has been true for seven or eight years now -- is built around selling games of a very specific mold. They build franchises around core gameplay concepts that they judge to be both fundamentally appealing and easily iterable: impressively rendered and distinct settings, open-world objective-based gameplay, and quasi-cinematic storytelling. They also leverage the generation transition as a key element of this strategy, by announcing a game at the tail end of a generation (when gamers are sick of their current options), relentlessly promoting it for years, and then launching the game during a window where gamers are unusually receptive to new IPs (i.e. a year to two years into a new generation.)

Ubisoft prototyped this on the PS2 with Prince of Persia, turning one well-received franchise return into four more franchise entries. They perfected this with Assassin's Creed, where the sheer force of marketing and the fundamentally appealing visual design made the series a perennial hit even though it took another two years to actually produce a good game. They've also backfitted this strategy to Far Cry and made it into its own repeatable, viable IP within the same general model.

The entire point of Watch Dogs is to repeat this strategy and expand Ubi's selection of major IPs. If you break things into a 2x2 grid with "shooter vs. third-person action-adventure" on one side and "modern/urban vs. historical/exotic" on the other, they already have three of the four quadrants covered: Tom Clancy is the modern, urban shooter, Far Cry is the exotic-locale shooter, and Assassin's Creed is the historical action-adventure. Watch Dogs fills the last spot here and lets Ubi apply the same strategy for long-term franchise strength (content tourism and bar-filling, basically) to a game with a type of appeal they're not currently covering.

Assuming Ubisoft wants to rename the game and shoehorn it into the AC franchise is nonsensical. You have to start with the idea that Ubi planned and developed this game with, essentially, no plan, and that now the important thing for them is to make a little extra money on it by tacking on a proven brand. But that ignores the whole reason the game exists. Watch Dogs doesn't have a ludicrous budget to make money back on its own; it has a ludicrous budget so they can make a big splash, then sell you annual sequels for the rest of the generation. It got a gigantic marketing-blitz for the same reason: to drill the brand (and their ideas of what potential it could have) into people's brains well in advance of the release, and thereby guarantee it a running start.

Fundamentally, AC is an extremely fertile franchise (as years of annualized performance should prove) but it's still not an infinite well. Ubi can't sell people two ACs every year, which means their ability to grow the franchise or extract profit out of it is capped. What they can do is develop other franchises that scratch similar itches, but are different enough to sell to an audience that only partially overlaps. That's why Watch Dogs exists and why it makes no sense to make it an AC game.

(This idea also feeds into the persistent fan nonsense that Ubi wants to do a modern AC game, when in fact the entire point of the AC franchise is to do historical-period tourism, and the modern element has been consistently reduced in importance since Patrice Desilets left.)

.

 

[RPGamer92]

On the plus, we should get more info soon when details on AC V inevitably leaks

 

[VanquishUK]

Watch_Doges confirmed!

 

[King Mac of Furry Frog]

Remember back when more money was spent on creating the game than marketing?

 

[Danthrax]

aw, beyond good & evil 2 made a friend!

Vicious.