Ubisoft Anvil
game engine developed by Ubisoft Montreal
Ubisoft Anvil (until 2009 known as Scimitar and between 2012 and 2020 as AnvilNext) is a game engine created by Ubisoft Montreal and used in the Assassin's Creed video game series as well as other Ubisoft games. The engine is used on Microsoft Windows, macOS, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Stadia. Ubisoft Anvil is one of the primary game engines used by Ubisoft along with Disrupt, Dunia, and Snowdrop.
History
The engine was originally known as Scimitar. Creative Director of Ubisoft Montreal Patrice Désilets said the engine was written from the ground up for Assassin's Creed in 2007. The engine uses Autodesk's HumanIK middleware to correctly position the character's hands and feet in climbing and pushing animations at run-time. Anvil was improved for Assassin's Creed II to include a full night and day cycle, enhanced draw distance, the same vegetation technology used in Far Cry 2, improved lighting, reflection and special effects, new cloth system, and a new AI and NPC navigation system. Assassin's Creed: Lineage short films made by Hybride Technologies (a post-production VFX studio acquired by Ubisoft) and Ubisoft Digital Arts used assets from Anvil to recreate the environment in which the live actors are filmed. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and select versions of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands run on an improved revision of Anvil. Assassin's Creed: Revelations in 2011 was the last game to have been developed on the first generation Anvil.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q282293. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2009, 2012, 2020 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ubisoft Anvil” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.