A new Assassin’s Creed game is always something to celebrate, and the holiday season this year will bring not one, but two new major installments to the storied franchise. Both games, Assassin’s Creed Rogue and Assassin’s Creed Unity will hit North American shelves on November 11th, the former for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and the latter for the PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

Fans already have a laundry list of reasons to be psyched for Unity, from the gorgeously rendered Paris setting to an intriguing story concept that revolves around the French Revolution. Another reason to be excited is that Alex Amancio, the Creative Director for 2011’s great Assassin’s Creed Revelations, is back at Ubisoft Montreal to spearhead the project.

Amancio got with Game Informer to chat about his return to the Assassin’s Creed franchise, his role in making Revelations what it was (on a tight deadline, no less), and what players can expect from Assassin’s Creed Unity.

According to the interview, Unity, with its French Revolution-based storyline, was the project that Amancio was originally brought aboard with the Assassin’s Creed brand to develop, all the way back in 2010. When leaders of the franchise decided that they wanted a conclusion to Ezio’s story within the AC world, Amancio was funneled into that project instead. He helped an Ubisoft team build the resulting game, Revelations, in a whirlwind period of 10 months, and afterward, burnt out, left the company to work for an advertising agency.

Assassins Creed Unity Hero Arno Dorian

Amancio’s departure was only temporary: he returned to the company in mid-2012 and shortly afterward, it became clear that Ubisoft’s plans to make an AC game based around the French Revolution were still percolating, and Amancio was given the task. So, what can players expect from this game that has, evidently, been in the pipeline for more than four years? Certainly not a mirror version of Revelations, if Amancio is to be believed. Instead, the developer said that the differences between the Revelations project and the Unity project are quite pronounced.

“The challenge of Revelations was all about shipping a really high quality game, that ended the trilogy of arguably one of our most iconic heroes, in a very short time,” Amancio explained. “This is a completely different challenge. You have a lot of time, we have a lot of people that have worked on the brand for a very long time, but what we need is to create something that we’ve sort of never done before: what is the next generation of Assassin’s Creed?”

As far as actual deviations from the Assassin’s Creed formula go, Amancio was relatively coy, speaking more about his processfor leading a creative video game team than about what makes Assassin Creed Unity a groundbreaking new entry in the storied series. Fans, of course, already know that Unity will be based around a love story, a first for the AC series. But based on Amancio’s statements, the new game will have at least a few other secrets and surprises up its sleeve, and we can’t wait to discover them for ourselves.

Assassin’s Creed Unity releases November 11, 2014, for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

Source: Game Informer