Assassin's Creed dev champions annual release schedule

Assassin's Creed: Revelations mission design director Falco Poiker has said the short development cycle of the series is stressful, but also enabling.

"A lot of people complain about [the short development cycle], I mean I'm talking internally – people say there's not enough time," Poiker told EDGE.

"But it gives an impetus to the team and we find a direction that we say we're going to run in, and there's very little of the indecision that comes with teams that spend two, three, four years developing games.

"Frequently those games will restart completely from the ground-up because they're like, 'We're not satisfied where we are.' We don't have that luxury so the time actually kind of works in our favour. We go one direction and we go with it. If there's problems, oh well, we'll fix it along the way."

Poiker said each game has almost exactly one year in the oven, and called that period "about ideal."

Ubisoft's Alexandre Amacio said last week that the frantic Assassin's Creed release schedule was partly inspired by a story-imposed 2012 deadline.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations releases on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in November, closing the trilogy of Assassin's Creed II and paving the way for the conclusion of the franchise's current meta-story.

Thanks, Eurogamer.