During an interview with GameIndustry.biz recently, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot spoke about how the company wanted to expand on its open-world game design, present in series such as Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs and even the recent release Starlink: Battle for Atlas.

He was asked if there was any chance a game series like Assassin's Creed would move away from the open-world Odyssey setting and return to a more focused environment previously seen in Assassin's Creed Unity. This was his response:

No, our goal is to make sure you can have a Unity within an Odyssey. If you want to have a story of 15 hours, you can have it, but you can also have other stories. You live in that world and you pursue what you want to pursue. You have an experience, many Unity-like experiences.

When queried if such a model was financially sustainable over a prolonged period of time, Guillemot said it was reflective of the times:

It is sustainable, because the world is big and the number of players that can play our games is immense. What we've seen in the last few years is the number of players that play our games is constantly growing.

New markets are opening up and games live a lot longer than before. So at the moment we see that we can continue to increase the investments because we know we can have a return on investment that can be quite long[-tailed].

As for micro-transactions, the CEO of Ubisoft says it allows the company's teams to continue creating extra content for universes that players love to be in:

We have huge teams that continue to create content for players to stay in those universes they love to be in. The fact that we have some players buying items in these games is giving our teams the chance to continue creating that extra content.

The next big open-world game from Ubisoft is the action-adventure Gods & Monsters. It's being created by the same team responsible for Assassin's Creed Odyssey and is due out on the Switch and multiple other platforms on 25th February 2020.

What do you think about Guillemot's comments? Do you play a lot of open-world games? Tell us below.