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Good news: Ubisoft's not going to run the Assassin's Creed franchise into the ground, with Kotaku sources stating that the next entry in the series will not release until 2017. Bad news: you're probably going to get a Watch Dogs sequel in place of the stealth series' – pulls out calculator – tenth mainline title. Have there really been that many?

We actually read this rumour earlier today, but it originated on 4chan so we naturally rolled our eyes and walked the other way. But font of all knowledge – and uber-accurate Kotaku scribe – Jason Schreier has followed up with his own sources, stating that the next game is codenamed Empires and is set in Egypt. Just when he was getting back on Ubisoft's Christmas card list, too.

Apparently, the French publisher witnessed the fallout from the awful Assassin's Creed Unity and decided that it needed to do something differently, so it's giving its team an extended development cycle. The brief break from the historical series won't harm the brand's very real franchise fatigue either – though it does still have to market those side-scrolling spin-offsNext week.

It sounds like Ubi's happy to give Creed a bit of a break because it's got Watch Dogs 2 lined up for Christmas, and we'll learn more about that later this year. That one's apparently set in San Francisco, and will hopefully plot the return of Aiden Pearce's iconic cap. At least you'll still get your open world checklist fix, eh?

AAA blockbusters: improving the industry one tower at a time.

[source kotaku.com]