If we are to believe a fair amount of fresh rumours, 2016 will be the first fall since 2009 without a new Assassin's Creed game. On Monday, rumours about the next game in the Assassin's Creed series started to appear on 4chan (summarized by NeoGAF here). An anonymous Ubisoft developer has said that we will not be getting the our annual fix of acrobatic parkour-assassination until 2017.

The next addition to the series is set to take place in Egypt, and the main protagonist will be an escaped slave which will bear some resemblance to the main character of the very first game, Altaïr. The game will be made by the same team that was behind the development of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

Kotaku has later been able to confirm many of the same details from their own sources, along with the code name for the project: Empire. According to their sources, it is the massive negative feedback in regards to Assassin's Creed Unity which is causing this delay, as the publisher wants to make sure that their developers can have the game as polished as possible by launch day.

It is interesting to note that Kotaku previously has reported that Rome has been mentioned as a possible location. The 4chan user claims that the initial plan was for parts of the game to take place in Greece, and that there has been talks of a new trilogy with one character and that Greece or Rome may be on the agenda for the next game.

The game is going for a Witcher feel, with player progression, freeform combat system. Horse is back, and boats too.

To summarize, everything we've heard about Assassin's Creed Empire so far is resembling a different Ubisoft project that we assumed was buried long ago. In 2012 some mysterious concept art of an unknown project surfaced, and in 2013 an image and a video appeared referencing a project only known as the codename Osiris. At the time it seemed to be a new game in the Prince of Persia series which was set to Egypt, had a dark-skinned protagonist and was developed by the team behind Assassin's Creed. It is now easy to see the resemblance between the two projects, but it's hard to say for sure if Assassin's Creed Empire is based on the remnants of what was once known as Osiris.