What to expect from Ubisoft at E3 2015: Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, Rainbow Six: Siege, and more

Ubisoft pulls into the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this year with some familiar names — and the promise of some surprises.

“The last three years in a row, at our press briefing, we’ve unveiled a major new game,” said Tony Key, the senior vice president of sales and marketing for the publishing and developing giant. “I think that people are expecting that from us now, and we know that they’re expecting that from us now, so we do our best to make sure that we have something fresh for every show, at every E3. For us, it’s a huge opportunity that we don’t want to miss.”

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Ubisoft is making its press briefing at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Los Angeles available live and on-demand on YouTube at 2:45 p.m. Pacific on Monday, June 15.

Sure things in the lineup include:

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate

This year’s Assassin’s Creed release includes a Victorian setting, a pair of assassins (one of each gender), and a new developer: Ubisoft Quebec. Quebec has been involved previous versions of the game, including as a partner with Ubisoft Montreal. That developer created last year’s Assassin’s Creed: Unity, which received mixed reviews (we liked it).

Quebec was involved in AC: Brotherhood, AC III, and Freedom Cry. The team created The Tyranny of King Washington DLC for AC III, and also did the companion gaming aspects for AC and Watch Dogs. This will be the first time the group steps out of the shows and into the limelight on a major title.

“Our goal is to innovate within this market. Syndicate has a lot to talk about, in terms of new gameplay elements,” Key said. “It also has the benefit of the experience that was Unity and that iteration of that technology, and that experience is going to make it better this time around.”

The scope of what the development team wanted to include in Unity was far broader than could be realized in that game, Key said.

“The Unity experience for us was very, very ambitious. We learned a lot about next-generation development and how our tools worked with the new hardware,” he said. “The Syndicate team could see a year before Unity came out what they would and wouldn’t keep from that product.

“You saw that in AC III when they introduced naval [settings] to the game. It became a huge aspect of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. You’ll get to see what Unity’s influence over Syndicate was, in terms of things that were small or experimental in Unity that become major game mechanics in Syndicate.”

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AC: Syndicate will be one of the games people can play at Ubisoft’s uPlay Lounge at the show. An Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Playtest Road Show will also start with a Los Angeles appearance for E3; to sign up for the June 17 visit, fans can email playtestroadshow@ubisoft.com with their name, age, and a brief summary of their AC game experience.

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate releases in fall for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

Rainbow Six: Siege

Ubisoft Montreal, meanwhile, has turned its attention to the latest in the publisher’s squad-based first person shooter series. Rainbox Six: Siege offers teams of counter-terrorist operatives from around the world. Ubisoft recently revealed the FBI-SWAT Unit, the American team.

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Key says the marketing for series like Rainbow Six has gotten more sophisticated as the market itself has fragmented.

“Everyone has a different appetite for how much they play video games,” he said. “They’re not all behaving the way they do for any consistent reason. The marketing of big, recurring brands has become very segmented. We have a lot of people talking to a lot of different groups. It’s very sophisticated.”

Players who buy every version of a series want to know the fine details about what the next chapter will include and what it will look like, he said. In some ways, the marketing team just waits for this group to reach out and ask what they want to know.

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“Marketing has become a lot about listening. They tell us what they want to know and we answer them,” Ubisoft’s Tony Key said. “People who are engaged every other year, maybe they’re hit game buyers, that’s a different communication for those people.

“We’ve gotten very good about tailoring our communications, developing tools and strategies that target specific groups like that. And then there’s the lapsed gamer that bought the first two and then stopped; maybe she had a family. If they’re still active in gaming we want them back. We need a special message for those people, too.”

Rainbow Six: Siege launches for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on Oct. 13.

The Division

Don’t be fooled by Tom Clancy’s name on the game: The Division is a new intellectual property for Ubisoft, an open-world RPG shooter from Ubisoft Massive in Sweden. The hugely ambitious title has been delayed more than once, and it’s now scheduled for first quarter 2016.

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We caught up with David Polfeldt, the managing director at Massive, earlier this year when he visited South by Southwest in Austin. Activision Blizzard (then Vivendi Universal) sold Massive Entertainment to Ubisoft in 2009.

The Division starts you off as a sleeper cell, an almost-ordinary Joe that is called up when a pandemic strikes New York City and puts the island under quarantine. You’ll obtain and upgrade items and weapons, hone your skills, meet people who can help or hinder you, and generally go from figuring out what’s going on to reinstating law and order.

“You start with almost nothing,” Polfeldt said. “But your enemies are also becoming more proficient.”

Deciding how to set up the game originally meant figuring out where there was room to do something new in the Tom Clancy universe, he said.

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“There are already a host of Clancy games – why make another one? We knew we didn’t want to have soldiers in a SWAT team.”

They were inspired by Operation Dark Winter, a 2001 bio-terrorist attack simulation designed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. It mimicked what would happen if a smallpox attack got out of control and the social breakdown that would follow.

“When things stop working, society spirals out of control in three days,” Polfeldt said. This conflict would become the basis of their new game. “You’re one of the sleeper agents. It could be anybody; it could be you. Because it’s not about being an elite soldier. You’re not there to shoot people. Suddenly, everybody with a gun is a threat. You just have to do what you can.”

Even then, Polfeldt ruefully acknowledged the delays it has seen, talking about the decisions the team’s had to make about how much realism is enough (they’ve made a host of site visits and gone through survival training) and how many features are reasonable to include.

“I think that’s one of the advantages of new intellectual property,” he said. “We don’t feel too pressured by the development calendar. It’s more, get it right. If things go well and we do our job, the adventure begins when we ship. It’s like launching a missile.”

Other Ubisoft original games

Key said Ubisoft sometimes doesn’t get enough credit for the brand-new original games they put out, either because they carry a familiar name like Clancy’s or because their launches are highly polished productions.

“Ubisoft does this better and more frequently than any other publisher,” he said, pointing to games such as Watch Dogs, The Crew, Valiant Hearts, Child of Light, and other new launches. “Yes, we do a lot of Just Dance and we do Assassin’s Creed every year. But we also bring a lot of new stuff. I think that’s not fully appreciated all the time.

“Things are so big and so mainstream and so big that people forget they are new IPs by the time they launch. So maybe that’s part of it. Maybe it’s a marketing problem with Ubisoft. We are very proud of our heritage of bringing new brands to the market, and our goal is to do that more than anybody else.”