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Ubisoft wants you to be able to play Unity inside Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

Your 15-hour stories now only come inside of 80-hour epics

Ubisoft has been focused on making big open-world games with hefty narratives for years, and those games have only got bigger. A game like Assassin’s Creed Unity, with a roughly 15-hour long story, might’ve seemed huge a few years ago, but now Odyssey ranges from 40 hours to complete up into the triple digits. Ubisoft says there’s still room for those shorter stories – they’ll just reside within the bigger games.

“Our goal is to make sure you can have a Unity within an Odyssey,” Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot tells GamesIndustry.biz. “If you want to have a story of 15 hours, you can have it, but you can also have other stories. You live in that world and you pursue what you want to pursue. You have an experience, many Unity-like experiences.”

Guillemot flatly says “no” to the possibility of a return to more focused stories. The company’s noted average playtime for AC Odyssey is around 60 hours, and Guillemot says this proves “players got a lot from their investment in the game, a lot more than they got before.”

The expansion of the gaming market also makes this expanded development sustainable, since “the number of players that can play our games is immense.” So don’t expect upcoming titles like Watch Dogs Legion or Gods & Monsters to be any smaller.

Ubisoft’s next big release builds on the Tom Clancy legacy, and what we know of the Ghost Recon Breakpoint endgame suggests that it’ll remain true to the publisher’s modern mantra of constant and consistent post-launch updates. Terrific value, for sure, but we’ll see how long the formula stays fresh.