E3 2014: Assassin's Creed Unity Early Impressions

During E3, I got the chance to take in an early, behind-closed-doors presentation of Ubisoft’s upcoming installment of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Assassin’s Creed: Unity. Unity brings the franchise to a time period that’s absolutely perfect and a no brainer for Assassin’s Creed, the era of the French Revolution. In addition, Assassin’s Creed: Unity introduces co-op gameplay for the first time in franchise history.

The Ubisoft developers ran us through two separate gameplay videos, one of which was the debut video shown at last week’s E3 Xbox Media Briefing. The first video showcased the incredible environment of France in the 18th Century. The video highlighted the new controlled descent, a new feature to this game that allows you make a fun, dynamic trip down large heights without having to jump into a giant haystack. This looks like a great new added feature to the controls and gameplay mechanics for Unity.

One of the most exciting features of the presentation was the introduction of a cover system to the series. The assassins can now take cover behind objects. This will make the assassins harder to detect. Another new feature is crouching. In Unity, players will finally be able to crouch and walk. It is a bit surprising that it took so long to incorporate the crouching feature into the Assassin’s Creed games, but it is great to finally see this mechanic in the games.

The Paris setting looks extraordinary and massive. The open-world sandbox in the game was built to be in 1:1 scale to the size of Paris, France during the French Revolution. It looks like there will be a great number of side missions to explore. If the main assassin character, Arno, veers off the main path, he can go on a murder-mystery mission and hunt down a murderer. Other missions include tracking down petty thieves, treasure hunts, assassin contracts, and quelling violent oppression in the streets. The mission in this video is for Arno to track down and kill an executioner named Xavier. Xavier also happens to be a Templar agent. Arno makes his way through a social club and kills some of the guards there. He finds out that Xavier is in the square and about to execute some civilians. The video also showcased the game’s new combat mechanics, which focus on parrying, dodging and thrusting. Later, Arno stalks Xavier across the rooftops as Xavier executes prisoners in a guillotine. The assassin then makes a public spectacle of Xavier’s death, launching off the top of the guillotine and killing Xavier with the hidden blade.

The next video highlighted the co-op aspect of the game. Four developers played on four separate screens, so we could see the Xbox Media Briefing presentation from four separate points of view. Each assassin has his own separate look and style and personalized weapon. Co-op for the game looks very interesting, but it looks like it might be difficult to do properly if all members of your team are not on the same page. However, the stealth co-op gameplay does look impressive.