Oh, come on. This is Ubisoft; you knew there’d be a collector’s edition forĀ Assassin’s Creed: Unity announced. Fortunately, the new screens are a bit more interesting, and the Q&A answers a lot of lingering questions about the game.
The screens can be seen below, but what of the Q&A? Welp, it gives a fair few details on how Assassin’s Creed: Unity has been rebuilt, how much co-op there is, which historical characters will turn up, and the like.
So! The co-op campaign – called the “shared experience” – is expected to take about a third of your time with the game. The missions can be played solo or with up to three friends (most of which will have drop-in drop-out functionality, unless the sudden appearance of a friend might screw things up) and they’re designed for replayability through multiple approaches and paths to completion. The plot focuses on protagonist Arno’s quest for redemption (as he perceives his adopted father’s death as being his fault), via joining the Assassins and trying to eradicate a particularly radical branch of Templars who are pulling the strings of the French Revolution.
You’ll be bumping into Robespierre, Napoleon, Mirabeau, and the Marquis de Sade, amongst others, and a lot of Paris has been recreated to a 1:1 scale which means that buildings like Notre Dame are going to be massive. The number of entities wandering around have been bumped up, too; crowds of over 1000 are promised, and you’ll see a lot of little interactions and events that happen without you – factions will fight without your intervention, merchants will set up shop, etc.
Fortunately,Ā Assassin’s Creed: Unity isn’t just a bigger and prettier Assassin’s Creed – everything, from navigation and stealth through to the combat, has apparently been rebuilt from scratch. In terms of stealth there’s a cover system, a “stealth mode” activated with a button press which makes all of your actions slower and sneakier, and lots of huge crowds you can use to lose your pursuers. Stealth is apparently a pretty big focus of Assassin’s Creed: Unity, for reasons made clear below.
Navigation has been opened up more, with the ability to free-run up and down buildings meaning you’re not constrained to just the predetermined paths or haystacks. The idea is that you’ll be able to navigate Paris a lot more easily and with a lot more freedom than in past games.
ThenĀ Assassin’s Creed: Unity‘s combat, which Ubi are keen to tell us has been simultaneously made tougher, but easier to learn. It’s no longer based on waiting around for people to attack so that you can counter them. It’s apparently focused more on fighting each opponent individually rather than on swiftly murdering entire groups – you’ll still have to deal with multiple enemies on most occasions, but you’ll have to focus a lot more on being proactive and attacking rather than just standing around and parrying. Indeed, the trickiness of the combat is a reason for the renewed emphasis on stealth. I suspect this’ll be given a lot more detail in the coming months, because these are still very broad strokes.
Oh yes, and the collector’s edition was announced. (I say the collector’s edition, but it’ll probably be the first of 19.) Expect a collector’s box, a 16-inch Arno figurine, an art book, a soundtrack, a music box, and a pair of in-game missions offering an estimated 45 minutes of gameplay. No pricing yet, but I fully expect it to be completely ridiculous.
The utterly massive screens (4480 x 2520) and a look at the collector’s edition contents are below. Assassin’s Creed: Unity is due out on 28 October, and I have no doubt we’ll be covering it a lot more up to its launch.
