User blog comment:Master Sima Yi/Assassinews 08-02-'13 — Next game will be all new, plus DLC promotional material/@comment-189.176.8.250-20130228015047/@comment-3168501-20130228050047

It would be considered a prequel, but a recent interview with Ubisoft said that when Abstergo collected Desmond's body, they harvested his DNA and uploaded it to the data cloud.