Anvil
Anvil is the engine Ubisoft Montreal wrote from scratch for the first Assassin’s Creed in 2007, when it was called Scimitar. The main Assassin’s Creed games have run on it ever since, under four names: Scimitar, Anvil, AnvilNext and, from 2020, Ubisoft Anvil.
History
Scimitar became Anvil with Assassin’s Creed II (2009), which added a day-night cycle, a new cloth system and new AI and navigation for non-player characters. AnvilNext arrived with Assassin’s Creed III in 2012, bringing global illumination, weather and a rewritten renderer. Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014) introduced AnvilNext 2.0, which Wikipedia says was rebuilt from the ground up for that game. From Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020) Ubisoft calls the engine Ubisoft Anvil.
Ubisoft’s own account of the engine’s branches differs from Wikipedia’s. Wikipedia lists Rainbow Six Siege, For Honor and Ghost Recon Wildlands as AnvilNext 2.0 games. In a 2025 talk at the Rendering Engine Architecture Conference, Ubisoft engineers described those games as forks of the Scimitar line: Blacksmith, behind Rainbow Six Siege and For Honor, and Silex, behind Ghost Recon. The same talk describes today’s Anvil as one code repository shared by many games, brands and genres.
Games made with Anvil
17 games, oldest first. Each game links to the article that names its engine.
| Game | Year | Developer | Engine version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assassin’s Creed | 2007 | Ubisoft Montreal | Scimitar |
| Assassin’s Creed II | 2009 | Ubisoft Montreal | Anvil |
| Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands | 2010 | Ubisoft Montreal (co-developed) | Anvil |
| Assassin’s Creed III | 2012 | Ubisoft Montreal | AnvilNext |
| Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag | 2013 | Ubisoft Montreal | AnvilNext |
| Assassin’s Creed Rogue | 2014 | Ubisoft Sofia | AnvilNext |
| Assassin’s Creed Unity | 2014 | Ubisoft Montreal | AnvilNext 2.0 |
| Assassin’s Creed Syndicate | 2015 | Ubisoft Quebec | AnvilNext 2.0 |
| Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege | 2015 | Ubisoft Montreal | AnvilNext 2.0 |
| Steep | 2016 | Ubisoft Annecy | AnvilNext 2.0 |
| Assassin’s Creed Origins | 2017 | Ubisoft Montreal | AnvilNext 2.0 |
| For Honor | 2017 | Ubisoft Montreal | AnvilNext 2.0 |
| Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands | 2017 | Ubisoft Paris, Ubisoft Milan | AnvilNext 2.0 |
| Assassin’s Creed Odyssey | 2018 | Ubisoft Quebec | AnvilNext 2.0 |
| Assassin’s Creed Valhalla | 2020 | Ubisoft Montreal | Ubisoft Anvil |
| Immortals Fenyx Rising | 2020 | Ubisoft Quebec | Ubisoft Anvil |
| Assassin’s Creed Shadows | 2025 | Ubisoft Quebec | Ubisoft Anvil |
At a glance
- Developer
- Ubisoft Montreal; now shared across Ubisoft studios
- First game
- Assassin's Creed (2007)
- Names
- Scimitar, Anvil, AnvilNext, AnvilNext 2.0, Ubisoft Anvil
- Forks
- Blacksmith, Silex
- Licence
- In-house, Ubisoft only
- Status
- Active
Sources
Checked .
- Ubisoft Anvil — Wikipedia
- REAC 2025 - Anvil Rendering Architecture (Nicolas Lopez, Michel Bouchard) — Rendering Engine Architecture Conference
- Technology & Innovation — Ubisoft
Image credits
- Anvil logo — Ubisoft. Trademark of Ubisoft. Placed on a white square and converted to WebP
