Despite a lot of mystery around the project, the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Infinity is set to be a complete game-changer for the popular Ubisoft franchise, for better orworse. The launch of Infinity will see the series join many other massively influential gaming franchises in moving towards one-stop franchise hubs that will host and deliver all future content, including major releases.
While the Assassin’s Creed franchise will have a lot of company when it comes to making the sweeping and ambitious change over to a dedicated series hub, there are some lingering criticisms about this form of content delivery that Infinity runs a risk of drawing to itself. The launch of Call of Duty HQ is a good example of another hugely influential gaming IP adopting a singular content hub, with CoD HQ being one of the most divisive elements of the franchise ever since it launched in 2022. Of all the issues Call of Duty HQ has, one runs a serious risk of being repeated by Assassin’s Creed Infinity, and this concerns a complete lack of PlayStation Platinum Trophies for future releases.
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Ubisoft Can Learn a Lot From Call of Duty HQ’s Shortcomings For AC Infinity
Call of Duty HQ was first introduced in 2022 alongside the rebooted Modern Warfare 2, with the longstanding FPS giant using this HQ as the main access hub for its annual releases ever since. It seems as if subsequent CoD titles will be added to this hub for the foreseeable future, offering a massive change to the previous release formula that gave each Call of Duty project its own separate release removed from the wider franchise.
While many fans argue that this move towards Call of Duty HQ has only served to dampen the individual identities of recent releases, a one-stop hub for the IP seemed inevitable due to its rapid release schedule and the existence of Warzone alongside its yearly releases. Call of Duty HQ has also infamously exacerbated complaints around the always-online nature of modern CoD titles, but one other quality-of-life issue has been more pressing for a certain subset of fans.
With Modern Warfare 2, MW3, and Black Ops 6 now falling under the singular CoD HQ, none of these games have Platinum Trophies available to them on PlayStation 5, with CoD HQ instead featuring a bloated and extensive singular trophy list covering all three titles. This has even caused issues with achievement hunting on Xbox, yet the lack of Platinum CoD Trophies on modern PS hardware has been a point of real contention ever since Call of Duty HQ was released.
Assassin’s Creed Infinity Can Still Maintain Individuality Across its Projects
Assassin’s Creed Infinity was announced in 2022, around the time of CoD HQ’s launch, with it seeming quite likely that this live-service content hub for AC will roll out alongside the release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows in February 2025. Shadows seems as if it will be the first of a wide range of near-future AC projects to be available through the Infinity hub, with other titles like Assassin’s Creed Hexe also being in the works at Ubisoft.
It seems that AC Infinity will be largely justified by the franchise having to support its own multiplayer game, Assassin’s Creed Invictus, much in the same way CoD HQ helps streamline the accessibility of Warzone. With so many projects seemingly coming to the AC franchise after the launch of Infinity, Ubisoft cannot allow their identities and user experiences to merge into one, and ensuring multiple achievement and trophy lists across different platforms for each release will be a perfect way to differentiate Infinity from comparable industry hubs like CoD HQ.
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