For the past few years now, Creative Assembly has mostly focused their efforts on their best-selling Total War series, which has quite the following among the PC audience. However, I’ve also checked out their few games in between that are not Total War, because they tend to be top-notch as well. The first thing that comes to mind is Alien: Isolation, which is probably one of the best horror games of this decade.
It’s because of this unique success with IPs outside of Total War that most probably compelled Creative Assembly to get a jumpstart at hiring more key roles, as evidenced by the past year. However, the latest of these posting has also inadvertently revealed more about Creative Assembly’s next game, and what it could entail for players.
Beforehand, earlier postings have revealed this new IP to be a sci-fi first-person shooter, but if you were expecting it to be a single-player experience like Alien: Isolation, you’d be wrong. According to the posting, which is hiring for a ‘lead hero designer,’ this new game could very well be a hero shooter in the same vein of Overwatch and its many contemporaries.
“The priority will be ensuring the development of exciting playable characters, with a range of amazing thought and play provoking specialties, as well providing guidance on visual design and cosmetics,” the posting states. However, there’s also the added kicker of “a broad understanding of monetization, rewards and art production will be enormously helpful in the success of this role.”
So, it’s not only a hero shooter, but one also focused on monetized cosmetics. This is a bit baffling to me in more ways than one as Creative Assembly is looking not only to come to the hero shooter genre, but also come a few years after what can be considered its prime. Battle royales have, for the most part, taken the place that hero shooters used to hold, but I guess we should be thankful this game is not another battle royale experience in the already-crowded space.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and if the team behind Alien: Isolation, which are the ones developing this new IP, can bring something new to the genre in order to make a breakthrough this late in the hero shooter phase.
