Assassin's Creed: Utopia won't link with AC3 beyond story

The Assassin's Creed: Utopia smartphone game won't link to or affect your Assassin's Creed 3 game, Eurogamer has discovered.

Phew - you can sleep easily now.

Other publishers have liberally used mobile-to-console links to promote and sell iOS and Android games. Mass Effect's Datapad app had an enthralling strategy mini-game that contributed to your Galaxy at War rating, for example.

But Ubisoft and GREE - the huge smartphone gaming portal Utopia will be exclusive to - reckon narrative ties will be enough.

"There are no links between the games," Assassin's Creed producer Andreane Meunier told Eurogamer at E3. "But the narrative will lead into the AC3 narrative, since it's a kind of pre-era to the Assassin's Creed 3 era."

Will that be enough to entice people in? Well, apparently there are plenty of people only consume Assassin's Creed through comics or novels, she said. These people don't even want to play the console Assassin's Creed games.

"One of the things we do check a lot is how people consume our product. So, who is our consumer?" Meunier asked.

"We do feel like the product we're offering actually answers a need that the community has expressed."

Andreane Meunier, producer, Ubisoft

"And of course our main consumer is on the HD [console] market. But you'd be surprised to hear that some consumers of the Assassin's Creed brand have never touched the HD game. We actually have a lot of people who are mostly into the narrative that have read the novels and things like that.

"We do feel like the product we're offering actually answers a need that the community has expressed," she said.

"There are a lot of different types of Assassin's Creed gamers. Often we hear, 'Oh, I've never played an Assassin's Creed game, but I've seen my boyfriend/friend/brother play it, and I'm super-interested in the narrative but the gameplay is maybe not for me.'

"We've done a lot of recollection. We've done stuff on Facebook and people respond very well to it. People that are really into the narrative will really enjoy this game. It's going to appeal to a broader audience than if it's just the HD games."

The story of Assassin's Creed: Utopia concerns the beginning of the American colonisation, Meunier told us. The name Utopia refers to the utopianism or optimism of the people leaving mainland Europe for the new world.

"In our narrative, Abstergo is building a program called Utopia in order to revisit and reconstruct eras like this," she detailed. "The colonies were getting built while Abstergo's revisiting the same kind of process through the simulator."

Meunier couldn't tell us what kind of game Utopia will be. "I can tell you it's not card game," she said, "but we're not going to tell you right now what the game content is."

She also couldn't say anything about date nor price. But when the GREE Assassin's Creed project was first uncovered, a December date for the Japanese language version was touted. GREE originated in Japan, hence the regional preference.

Note, however, that Assassin's Creed 3 launches on 31st October. And presumably Ubisoft won't want Utopia to be too far behind.

Assassin's Creed: Utopia's development is a collaboration between Ubisoft and GREE. But this raises another question: why didn't Ubisoft have Gameloft - the mobile publisher and developer created by Ubisoft's owners and founders, the Guillemots - make the game?

"It's a great opportunity for us to partner with such a big partner," said Meunier, presumably daydreaming about the 230 million users GREE has attracted worldwide (it launched in Europe in May). "And they have a lot of experience doing larger-scale games, so that's really what we wanted to experience."