Challenge

Following the release of the CGI trailer for Assassin's Creed Shadows, which kicked off the game's comms campaign, Ubisoft wanted to offer AC fans a unique, engaging and immersive experience of the game's universe as a prelude to the Ubisoft Forward announcement - while also offering content creators a standalone experience worth publishing.

Idea

Make the community the hero of the adventure What better way to immerse fans in the game's universe than to ask them to directly help the future protagonists, Naoe and Yasuke? From June 3 to 4, the “First Mission” took place. The objective: identify who, where and how the future targets of our two heroes will be assassinated, via a series of riddles and challenges organized on Discord. The experience reveals a wealth of never-before-seen information about the game, and fans will be able to see their heroes carry out the mission they helped plan during the gameplay reveal broadcast at Ubisoft Forward one week later.

A 3 step activation for community and content creators to cooperate - Step 1: 75 content creators worldwide received a mysterious, embargoed box. It was impossible to open without the clues found by the community. - Step 2: June 3rd. The community is invited to join a dedicated custom Discord server in which multiple narrative bots, custom puzzles and riddles lead them to clues. - Step 3: June 4th. Content creators open the box live and answer the new riddles inside, based on clues found by the community the day before. Whether that took the form of a letter splattered with (fake) blood, with stains that disappear in the heat, a card to be folded in a certain way to reveal a keyword, or re-watching the announcement trailer following the instructions from a bot to find a hidden message... more than a dozen mini-puzzles were developed to bring this new adventure in the Assassin's Creed universe to life.

Pushing Discord’s boundaries through narrative copywriting and game design All of the above was thanks to the combined efforts of multiple skills (copywriting, art direction, game design, development), as well as extensive research into Discord functionalities and coordination with Ubisoft's com dev and content creator teams.

Results

By offering a cooperative experience between community and content creators, with a common goal and a mechanic that encourages interaction, we managed to engage with fans not only over time, but also to develop positive sentiment towards the game. -> Fans completed the quest in 8 hours (vs the 24h anticipated) -> More than 10K messages sent on Discord alone -> 100+ posts made by participating content creators -> 40K+ hours of content watched on Twitch, TikTok and YouTube