Ubisoft details Assassin's Creed Black Flag webtoon sequel, Shao Jun books, Netflix projects

There’s no big new Assassin’s Creed game this year – instead, Valhalla instead lives on through expansions set in Ireland and France – but that doesn’t mean Ubisoft’s biggest franchise is taking a breather. Quite the opposite, in fact.

For fans, 2021 will see the series’ broadest collection yet of books, manga, webtoons and audios arrive from a wide range of creative partners across the world, expanding the franchise further via characters old and new. And beyond that? Well, there’s under-wraps plans at Netflix for an animated series and live-action show, too.

This week, Ubisoft will detail eight projects to be published this year – more on all those below – and a new system of categorising future stories published under the Assassin’s Creed umbrella; Classics are direct adaptations of video games, Chronicles feature new stories with returning Assassins, while Originals offer all-new protagonists and time periods.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Post Launch & Season Pass Trailer | Ubisoft [NA] Watch on YouTube

Today I sat down for a video call with two of the loremasters in charge of all that and much more: publishing content manager Etienne Bouvier and transmedia director Aymar Azaïzia, who together act as the brains behind the Assassin’s Creed stories that aren’t video games. Our chat reveals new details on a webtoon series set to feature Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag star Edward Kenway, discusses whether fan favourite Shao Jun is off the table for her own big game in the future, and touches on learnings from that Michael Fassbender film.

Fair warning, the third question lightly references a story point introduced at the end of Valhalla – so if you are yet to finish that game, it may be worth skipping past this. Enjoy!

Let’s start off with the projects you’ve got coming this year and the new Classics/Chronicles/Originals branding you’re introducing – what’s the thinking behind all this?

Bouvier: This year will be especially dense so for us it was important to make it more understandable for fans, readers, listeners the kind of stories they’ll get.

And here’s a question which you’ll probably hate: are these all ? Fans care! (I care.)

Azaïzia: [Laughs] It’s my job to label them as canon or not, which is super important for fans. It’s not the category which will make the project canon – and most of what we’re producing is canon. It’s more how the project has been developed and if, for example, a super famous artist has given their own take on something, we’ll give them carte blanche but it may not be canon as we want them to be able to express themselves. But most of the time, and most of this year, everything will be canon.

It’s one of the big takes we have on Assassin’s Creed – and I’m old, I started out 12 years ago now on Assassin’s Creed – we always try to maintain consistency, so everything we we are producing is part of an eco-system, part of a world we are building. And as much as possible, we want to avoid becoming a cross-media franchise like DC or Marvel with a multiverse or multiple existences with multiple versions of Bruce Wayne, or whoever is Batman, where if you’re watching Gotham or playing the Arkham series you’re not playing the same character.

What we’re doing – and it’s super hard with so many things going on at the same time! – is that we always acknowledge what has been said already with retconning at absolute minimum.

You mentioned a multiverse and I have to ask here about the ending of Valhalla – spoiler warning! Fans have theorised the Yggdrasil machine might open up the franchise to exploring multi-universe stories, or making some non-canon stuff canon… what’s your view on all that?

Azaïzia: Well, as you’ve said it’s something we’ve created and I won’t shy away from it because it exists! It’s something we’ve created! But it’s kind of the other way around. We started thinking about something like that very early on, and there are traces of it in earlier games. If you ask yourself, how were Minerva or Juno able to leave messages for Desmond in the present knowing that centuries after he would be the one to receive it? There had to be some kind of device so they would be able to anticipate what was coming. So what we said from the get-go was that the Animus was based on Isu tech – it’s a simulation machine – and that probably the Isu have used tons of simulations to consider what might happen and left a few messages hoping the chances are someone like Desmond will see them.

So it’s more we’re playing with that. It could be a way for us to make previous non-canon things canonical – we could say it was in another universe, in a simulation. We haven’t done that yet and I don’t know if we’ll ever do it. But at least it gives information on events which happened in the past that weren’t ever really explained before.

As the Assassin’s Creed franchise gets bigger and more complex, fans have called for a loremaster to look after everything, and on Valhalla, narrative director Darby McDevitt often popped up to answer queries. What’re your thoughts on that?

Azaïzia: In the past we had a former team which I was part of – and I was kind of the gatekeeper for the Assassin’s Creedverse. That was super fun but super tough with all the projects and everyone involved. And then it separated into me doing everything that’s happening on the transmedia [non-game] side, which is massive. It’s the projects, the TV series, the movie which I worked on… There’s always so much to do.

For the game, we usually let the narrative and creative director run the show and we’re talking with them so we know everything we’re going to do we’re going to do together. So when Darby pitched us along with Ashraf Ismail for Valhalla what happened next was we worked together telling them what kind of projects we could do around that. And then with Darby we worked on the Dark Horse prequel comics which are canon and telling what happens before Valhalla, we worked on the novel with Matt Kirby so we could have some recurring characters, all of that stuff we built together.

So there’s not a single entity dealing with everything – one single person handling the whole thing. It’s more a group of people who have been there more than a decade handling the Assassin’s Creed franchise and that’s part of Ubisoft’s strategy to have people stick around on the portfolio for a long time to handle this kind of franchise and be able to have this kind of super nerdy conversation and know what we’re talking about.

Do you feel the need to have a prominent lore master for fans? Darby was that for Valhalla but only specifically for Valhalla.

Azaïzia: Yeah, so usually internally we have our community manager and community developer handling the community and working with The Mentor’s Guild, which we created a few years ago. It started as a couple of guys from all branches of the community – people making cosplay, writing short stories, artists – and we now have 12-20 new people joining each year. We talk directly to these people, they have access to the game before it’s released, we fly them to Montreal and get feedback, we send them proof samples of narrative things we’re working on… And this is how you end up with an incredible Assassin’s Creed wiki as they know in detail everything we’re doing!