Assassin’s Creed Infinity Will Separate the Modern-Day and Historical Stories

There’s plenty to break down with Assassin’s Creed Infinity, which isn’t a game so much as a “hub” connecting all past and present experiences. This includes upcoming titles like Assassin’s Creed Codename RED and HEXE along with Invictus, a standalone multiplayer experience. One big change is that the modern-day setting is decoupled from the upcoming titles and instead confined to Infinity.

Project leader Marc-Alexis Côté told IGN, “People who love just immersing themselves in the past will be able to jump right in there and never be interrupted or need to know who Desmond and Layla are.” This means you can enjoy the historical settings as their own stories, though whether all main games will take place in the past alone remains to be seen.

As for how the modern-day story will play out in Infinity, and whether there would be a protagonist, Côté said, “The way we tell the story will evolve with time. It’s something that we’re doing for the long term, not for the short term. But the abstraction that we want people to have is [Infinity] is your Animus. It is your DNA explorer on your desktop. You are the main story character.”

Elements like codex entries will thus move over to Infinity. “We used to have an encyclopedia in our games. But to make it feel coherent, like something that always grows through time as you explore the past, [the encyclopedia] would be something that would be in the Infinity hub.”

The approach is good news for fans complaining about the modern-day story stalling since the Desmond Miles arc. How Assassin’s Creed Infinity connects everything while still presenting its narrative remains to be seen. As such, we’ll have to wait a while to see it – no release date is confirmed and the first title, RED, is reportedly out in 2024.