Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

I don't think so, man. Honestly, I think for the benefit of everybody - and business can come back and override everything I say because at the end of the day it's about selling games - personally I believe that this licence needs a breather. You can't plough a field every year. Once every three years - or once every something - you have to let it breathe. You have to let the minerals back in. I think it's the same thing with any licence, really.

We see a lot of the music games that are releasing year after year - the interest is a lot less than it used to be. The excitement is a lot less than it used to be. You want to keep people excited. You gotta make people miss it a bit. It's like, "Oh man! I'm so happy it's back!" But if you keep force-feeding it to people then people are like, "Yeah, enough of your Assassin's Creed."

I don't think there's going to be an Assassin's Creed in 2011. We're going to let it breathe a bit and focus on bringing something new and exciting for the next time around. This [Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood] is the end of Ezio's story. This is it.

I can't tell you that.

We know exactly where we're going. It would lack vision and blunt intelligence to wing it episode after episode. We have to have some vision with the story. We very much do.

We know all that stuff.

I'll nibble on your hook. I can't directly answer your question. Of course you understand that. But what I can say is you have to remain true to what the licence is. It's the story of Desmond Miles, and it's the story of a machine called The Animus that reads genetic memories from your ancestors. It has to stay in there.

If it doesn't, then there's this whole justification that needs to happen. I go back to treating players with respect and doing it smart. It's important in a game filled with finesse on a storytelling side and a content side. If you don't do it then it becomes cheap. It becomes popcorn. It becomes Big Macs and cheeseburgers and bloody fries. It doesn't have any content to it. It doesn't have any meat to it.

I really don't know. Bottom line, it's not for me to say. We have some business people that will eventually put a date and say, "This needs to come out." We have our creative people, who are also pushing on their end, saying, "We need this much time to do something new and refreshing, just scope-wise." So I don't know how much time we'll need.

If we skip a year, I think we're good. But yeah, I think we could do something true to the licence if we skip a year and release it in 2012 or 2013. We need to keep it fresh though; we need to keep it relatively close by, because we have to keep the interest there. I don't think we do a service to this licence if we pull a Duke Nukem on people, you know what I'm saying? It's hard to answer.