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Assassin's Creed series ending existence "not exactly true"

AC4 ship technology may be repurposed for future games.

The existence of an ending for Ubisoft's annual Assassin's Creed series is "not exactly true", one of the franchise's lead writers has said.

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag director Ashraf Ismail told Eurogamer last year that the developer had "an idea of where the end is, what the end is", despite the mega-selling franchise having no end in sight.

Speaking to Edge, Assassin's Creed Revelations and Black Flag scribe Darby McDevitt has now said that while the current story arc may have a conclusion, the series could still continue.

"There's been a bit of confusion in that [Ismail] once said that Assassin's Creed has an ending - that's not exactly true," he explained. "This storyline has an ending, but because all of history is open to us we see the universe as a Doctor Who type thing. There are so many possibilities we don't want to definitively end the universe, but we can have storylines that have endings."

McDevitt described last year's piratey adventure Black Flag as a "crossfade between the old series and a new one," which saw the final plot points of the series' Desmond era tied up once and for all.

"The end of the Desmond trilogy changed slightly but it was always intended to end that way. And then about two years ago we planned for another story... [But] we've moved on from specifically defining when a story will end," he continued, referencing the end of Assassin's Creed 3 which had to take place before a certain time-frame.

Speaking briefly on future installments, McDevitt mentioned the list of possible Assassin's Creed 5 locations included within the Black Flag's modern day section - a document he wrote "parodying the ones that the fans had asked for", the troll.

And while future games may not include Black Flag's enjoyable naval battles, the technology developed for it may still resurface.

"Nothing ever gets set aside," he teased. "There's often ways to creatively use old technology for new things. One of the things that made AC3's naval combat possible - and then of course AC4 - is that we were able to have characters climb and walk around on dynamically moving objects... This technology, it might appear in future games - it might just not be on boats. It might appear in a completely different way."