Asked about the development of Assassin's Creed Shadows, Marc-Alexis Côté claimed that half of the dev team is unexperienced.
During a panel at the External Development Summit 2024, Vice President and Executive Producer Marc-Alexis Côté claimed that a big part of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ development team consists of very inexperienced people. He said “half the team” working on it had never made a game before.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows already has a turbulent history with delays and controversies, and it seemed like Ubisoft just couldn’t catch a break.
Some people almost found fun in tearing apart every new information to criticize the production of the game and now a high-ranking Ubisoft developer himself added more content to the controversy.
"A game is s*** until it’s good"
Working with Ubisoft for almost 20 years, Côté has a lot of experience when it comes to the ups and downs of the development of games. Asked about the ways to communicate with internal and external devs, he said: “Building a games is hard, we need to be honest about that. A game is s*** until it’s good.”
He went on explaining that the company right now has “a lot of juniors on our teams” that lack the mentioned experience and don’t realize that a game comes together closer at the end of production.
Côté explained:
Probably half the team that’s building an Assassin’s Creed is building a game for the first time. They don’t know. You have to explain to them, even though they’re playing the game right now and they think it’s the worst thing they’ve ever seen, it’s going to be good. We’re gonna get there.
Given the fact that AC Shadows is set to be one of the biggest entries in the franchise, it is more than likely that a enormous number of devs are working on it and that next to a lot of fresh developers, there are also some of the most experienced veterans in the field.
But it is still very interesting to think about Ubisoft deciding to let so many people that never even built a game before work on an AAA title.
Sure, they have to gain experience somewhere and improve their skills by working on games – but maybe such a big game and the high expectations that come with it could be the wrong place to start the game developing journey.
Juniors might be cheaper for Ubisoft, but in the end this could come at the cost of more problems and delays for the game itself.
What are your thoughts on this issue? Do you think that a title as big as this should be the first experience for young devs?
