Ubi "working hard" on Assassin's Creed 2

Ubisoft refused to give even a vague release date for a sequel for Assassin's Creed 2 yesterday - but confirmed the title was in development.

During a conference call with investors, an analyst asked if the game would be released in the company's fiscal 2010. Ubi chief Yves Guillemot didn't rise to the bait, according to GameSpot.

"We're not answering that question," Guillemot said. "What we just can say is that we are working hard on the product."

It seems, however, that Ubisoft has been a little more loose-lipped when talking to another analyst - Wedbush Morgan's quote machine Michael Pachter, friend to videogame news writers everywhere.

According to GameSpot's Rumour Control blog, Pachter has let slip that Assassin''s Creed 2 will be set "several hundred years" after the first game's medieval Crusades backdrop. He pinned it down to a century: "sometime in the 1700s".

Pachter then speculated that this could mean a French Revolution setting for the game, and the pieces certainly do fit: a famous and bloody conflict in a city, with large helpings of political intrigue.

The science-fiction framing for Assassin's Creed's historical stealth action may have jarred somewhat in the original, but it does mean that Ubisoft can set its sequel whenever it likes.

Incidentally, Guillemot also told investors that the publisher's operating income in the first half of its fiscal year (the six months up to September) was nearly double that of the same time period last year, so things have clearly been going well at the house of Ubi.

Of course, this doesn't include the critical end-of-year sales period when Ubisoft releases its biggest titles of the year - the likes of Far Cry 2 and Tom Clancy's EndWar, not to mention next week's return of Prince of Persia.

Edge reports that Guillemot told investors he was looking forward to high marks for that game.

"Already, there's a number of good marks. We have 8s, some 9s and one 10," he said, although he knows better than us, or Metacritic.

"But we're still waiting for a lot of marks to come. So altogether, at the moment [scores are around] high 8s. We hope it can be in the 9s, but [we expect] it to be 8.5 and 9.2 or 3." He said.

Look out for our review soon.