Assassin's Creed Unity Goes Back To AC1 Roots, Will Have Harder Combat...

**FiDeLiTo** · 08-10-2014

Assassin's Creed Unity Goes Back To AC1 Roots, Will Have Harder Combat And Improved Stealth

There’s a lot of hype surrounding Assassin’s Creed Unity, the first chapter in the series that Ubisoft is making exclusively for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (while Assassin’s Creed Rogue will appear on PS3 & 360).

Obviously the biggest new feature is the addition of coop, allowing up to four concurrent players to be in the same session, but the team is hard at work to improve core gameplay elements of Unity over the predecessors. In a video interview with GameInformer, a few developers detailed improvements to stealth, combat and the overall approach for assassination.

I always found weird how the previous games didn’t allow for proper, crouched stealth, since the main characters are assassins. This is going to change now, and apparently even player detection from NPCs has been overhauled:

We’ve added a stealth mode. Now if you actually want to have finesse, you get into that crouched mode and we know that’s what you want to do, so we’re not guessing [like in the past], which means that we don’t get it wrong.

Ever since AC1, this is always what we’ve been striving for. Sometimes we’ve been doing it better, sometimes not as well because we’ve been trying different things. What we’ve really worked on for Assassin’s Creed Unity is redesigning stealth in a way where you can have that control back. What happens if you get detected? How can you vanish? We completely overhauled the way we do detection. Now, when guards spot you we generate a last known position; the guards will come to investigate, they will talk and will just accuse people sometimes. They will go off on tangents and try to find you.

It looks like the target presentation in AC1-style is back, and more importantly, it will be possible to approach every assassination in many different ways.

One thing that was really cool in AC1 was how we presented each target. The game is Assassin’s Creed, you’re an assassin and in this game Arnaux is actually sanctioned by the assassins. That presentation that we used to do in AC1, that we lost a bit along the way, I think it’s a really cool thing because you really get to see who your target is. We also wanted players to have more agency, rather than very scripted missions. To achieve this, we created two systems: AMM (adaptive mission mechanics), which are ways in which we can bend the rules. A tail becomes a chase, whatever; and then we have our black box design. Black boxes are huge tridimensional setups within a map, so we give you either a monument or a location in the city and we tell you, this is your sandbox, your playground, now kill a target in there.

Philosophically it’s a lot more like AC1, although it lacked a lot of the variety at the microlevel to not make it repetive. This is something we’ve addressed, so hopefully we have a perfect hybrid of both.

Finally, combat has been improved as well. I always thought it was too easy and not deep enough, and the developers seem to have addressed this problem as well (mainly by removing the counter move, which was a bit overpowered).

If we want players to play stealthily, we have to give them reasons to do it. In terms of combat, we made it more difficult, more challenging, because Assassin’s Creed is not a combat game, it’s a stealth game. Combat should be a failstate. I mean, combat should be something that happens when you get spotted, and when you resolve combat you should re-disappear and restart the stealth mechanic all over again. Our combat system is not harder because it’s frustrating, but because it’s deeper in its mechanics.

So far, it looks like Assassin’s Creed Unity is hitting all the right spots, at least conceptually. Look forward to more news next week from Gamescom, while the release is scheduled for 28th October.