Ubisoft: Assassin's annual production cycle is "ideal"

Assassin's Creed: Revelations mission design director Falco Poiker has given his thoughts on the annual release cycle for Ubisoft's massive franchise, and says it's actually a positive.

"The production cycle is less than a year, which actually for me is about ideal," Poiker told Edge Online.

"But a lot of people complain about that, I mean I'm talking internally - people say there's not enough time."

Revelations is currently due for release on November 15. The last game in the series, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, was released on November 16.

"It gives an impetus to the team and we find a direction that we say we're going to run in, and there's very little of the indecision that comes with teams that spend two, three, four years developing games," explained Poiker.

"Frequently those games will restart completely from the ground-up because they're like, "We're not satisfied where we are." We don't have that luxury so the time actually kind of works in our favour. We go one direction and we go with it. If there's problems, oh well, we'll fix it along the way."

Poiker has worked in level design at Ubisoft since 2003, but joined the Assassin's team for the production of Brotherhood. He's also worked on Prince Of Persia and Avatar: The Game.