Assassin's Creed Shadows and Mirage were both "quadruple-A games," says Ubisoft for some reason

You’d think that after the abject failure that was Skull and Bones, Ubisoft’s first so-called quadruple-A game, its developers would realize that gassing up its games in such exaggerated tones could only lead to disappointment from fans. Despite this, one developer has listed both Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Assassin’s Creed Mirage as quadruple-A games on her LinkedIn profile. While they were certainly ambitious open-world games in their own rights, Mirage especially was smaller in scope and (presumably) budget.

An 11-year odyssey to create a gargantuan pirate RPG? I can see why you’d call that quadruple-A, especially when trying to encourage sales and recuperate some of the spiralled development costs. But Assassin’s Creed Mirage? The game specifically intended to be made quickly and cheaply to see if there was an appetite for classic AC gameplay with modern audiences? In what world could that be considered a quadruple-A game?

The scale of Assassin’s Creed Shadows lends itself better to the term, if not the execution. But then you compare it to Ghost of Yotei, which is better in nearly every aspect, and yet considers itself a triple-A game. Before we get into the full discussion, we need some context.

The claims come from an Assassin’s Creed producer’s LinkedIn page, discovered by prolific LinkedIn lurker and notable leaker ‘Timur222.’ The producer starts by listing herself as having “13+ years of experience across AAAA [quadruple-A] development,” and continues to specify that Mirage was “the first AAAA title natively released on iPhone and iPad,” and Shadows was “the first next-gen AAAA title to launch natively on macOS.”

It’s worth noting that this is a LinkedIn profile, not official communication. Perhaps the scale of these games was exaggerated in order to find work or make better connections on the profile? PCGamesN was also unable to verify the screenshot provided by Timur222, as the producer has now edited her profile and it doesn’t appear on the Wayback Machine.

This also leads to discussions about what quadruple-A actually means. It doesn’t describe the quality of a game, otherwise Balatro, Ball x Pit, or Disco Elysium could be considered quadruple-A. So surely it’s the resources used; the budget and length of development cycle. While these still don’t accurately put Mirage in quadruple-A realms, it could reasonably describe Shadows.

The alternative is that it’s an internal Ubisoft thing. The developer seems to be the one pushing the quadruple-A label, even when the likes of Rockstar shy away from the term, so perhaps it uses quadruple-A as a way of motivating developers to do their best work yet, improving on the host of triple-A titles Ubisoft has produced before.

Many people will have different ideas of what quadruple-A actually means, but Ubisoft clearly continues to believe its games are a step above the competition in some metric. I’m sure most players don’t actually care whether a game is triple-A, quadruple-A, or even septuple-A. They just want them to be good.