Assassin's Creed 4 dev says a game with "multiple worlds" unlikely, even for 900 people

The Assassin's Creed series has always had a knack for putting its imagined, simulated history at the center of its experience.

series has always had a knack for putting its imagined, simulated history at the center of its experience. It's taken us to the Near East, Italy, colonial America, and in the upcoming Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, to Blackbeard's Caribbean. But as we learn from an interview with AC4's game director Ashraf Ismail at Examiner, it now takes a small army of developers to craft just one of those game worlds.

Addressing the possibility of creating an entry in the series some day that would include multiple, globe-spanning locales for the conflict between Assassins and the Knights Templar, all Ismail had to do to put that idea to rest was point out the size of his team.

"From a pure production standpoint, it would be very, very difficult to do something like that," Ismail said. "On this game, we've had over 900 people working on it. With the Assassin's Creed machine and being the game director, even I am sometimes amazed. It takes 900 people to create the content for this game, so to try to do multiple worlds that are all big and fleshed out with unique characters in them, I'm not sure it would bring that much to the player."

While Ismail did hint that future games might include the ability to play as multiple assassins in the same general setting, he said putting together some sort of Abstergo reunion of "America with Connor, Ezio in Italy, and the Caribbean with Edward" isn't feasible given the dev resources that are now needed to realize a single, "high quality" game universe.

For more on piracy, assassins, and the obviously massive project that is an Assassin's Creed game, check out our recent in-depth interviewwith Ismail. AC4 releases for PCNovember 19 in North America.