It’s official: the next Assassin’s Creed is called Syndicate, and it will be out for PS4 and Xbox One on October 23, with a PC release coming later in the year.
If you read Kotaku, you already know a lot about Syndicate — it’s set in Victorian London, it will have both male and female protagonists, and it puts a lot of emphasis on carriages and grappling hooks — but now it’s all Official. Syndicate takes place in London during 1868, and will star the brother/sister duo of Jacob and Evie Frye, who run their own criminal gang.
Here’s the introductory CGI trailer:
There’s footage of pre-alpha gameplay, which is looking pretty rough:
And a trailer showing off Jacob’s weapons:
GameSpot’s got a mega-preview of the game that Kotaku boss and Assassin’s Creed superfan Stephen Totilo combed for salient details, which we’ll list here:
- As we reported yesterday, there’s no multiplayer.
- The game won’t just have a playable female assassin, but, in what is a bit of a turn for the franchise, will have numerous female enemies, down to the grunt level.
- As is series’ tradition, the game will feature historical figures. So far, the developers have confirmed that Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens will appear in the game.
- You can hijack, ride, and fight on top of carriages, as we covered back in December when we first posted about the game (then called Victory).
- Assassin’s Creed games have never been as great at stealth gameplay as we’d hope. The stealth systems have been tweaked again for this one, though it’s unclear how it will all work. The GameSpot preview notes that “the hard [cover] snap is gone, and you won’t be spending your time painstakingly trying to meld into groups of people” and will instead be crawling, crouching, and manipulating the environment to sneak around. Syndicate is bringing back the whistle, a tool of distraction that worked well in prior AC games but was inexplicably omitted from Unity.
- Syndicate features some sort of recruitment system that allows the player to amass gang members and get into big street brawls, a possible variation on older AC games’ systems for recruiting and summoning ally assassins — something that was missing in Unity.
And a few more details via Game Informer’s interview with the game’s creative director, Marc-Alexis Côté:
- The development team is bringing back the day-night cycle, which had been missing from Unity.
- As always, for initial AC reveals, they’re barely talking about the game’s modern-day story but did say “we are following in the footsteps of Unity” with more to be revealed in coming weeks. Note that Unity had far less of a modern-day story than prior AC games.
Comments
42 responses to “Ubisoft Announces Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate”
When will the teats from this beast run dry? Milking the crap out of it. Who buys these anyway?
I know right! It looks the same as the first 10 that came out last week, and the next 10 due out by mid june.
I’ve got Unity, but only because it came with my Xbone. I think I’ve played about half an hour of it so far.
Its AC, it’ll sell well….in fact, no matter how bad the last game was, or even how bad the reviews of this one are (though, lets face it, its an automatic 8+ on GameSpot, IGN and the major sites) it’ll still sell well.
Thats the thing about the gaming community. we’re suckers
Skipped Unity, but I’ve always said I’d love a Victorian/Edwardian Ass Creed, so I’m in 🙂
Ditto. Skipped Unity, will check out Rogue if it gets a current-gen console port. Will probably check this out if it doesn’t review like ass and does progress the modern-day storyline.
GODDAMN IT… just when I was out… JUST when I was out…
This setting looks good 🙁
Goddamn it Ubisoft…
If it’s any consolation, looking good is about all the AC franchise has going for it any more.
Shouldn’t these guys have French accents?
As said before I love Victorian England. I’ll be holding out from a day one purchase though after the complete mess of Unity. There’ll probably be more than a handful of collectors editions to pick up for cheap from EB Games a few months after release
Ubisoft, please don’t fuck this up.
I really, REALLY hope they dont fuck up the Victorian England one. So far looks good though.
Oh yeah. It’d be nice to be in a “pissing myself with excitement” frame of mind, but for now I will remain cautiously optimistic…
Can’t wait for the outcry over a male protagonist attacking female enemies.
As long as it’s equal opportunity attacking then it should be OK. More interesting will be whether the game puts the player in the position of being *forced* to attack women. Removal of player agency in making the choice would be an interesting discussion point.
Or you know, just don’t make an issue of it.
Ha ha, I believe that something can be discussed from an intellectual point of view without ‘making an issue of it’. Unfortunately it seems that the internet exists for the sole purpose of making issues of things and people are all too willing to do so. Perhaps it is easier for people to feel personally invested in a standpoint rather than discuss it dispassionately. Yes, people have accused me of arguing for argument’s sake. I’m a bit of an amateur Hegelian dialectic. Every argument first passes through a negative in the search for the concrete. I enjoy it, and never get upset about what other people say in rebuttal. It’s interesting to hear other points of view and arguments because it’s not merely dialectical, it provides insight into the passions which drive people to support the ideas that they do, allowing an analysis of passions versus logic.
I agree it can be discussed, absolutely. I guess it’s a case of feeling jaded, as most of these issues degrade down to:
“You’re sexist!”
“You’re a white knight for calling me sexist!”
“You’re a gamergate supporter for calling me a white knight!”
“FUCK YOU you’re a nazi for calling me a gamergater!”
“Fuck YOU godwinner, you’re a pedophile for calling me a nazi!”
“Fuck YOU you piece of shit I’m swatting you now…”
I wish that was an overreaction :\
I know. Sometimes I shake my head. Someone on twitter once called me out for comments I made on Alastair Pinsoff’s dismissal from Destructoid. It turned out she was upset about a perceived support for anti-LGBT standpoints. I find that by remaining polite and showing that you understand someone’s viewpoints, you can usually find common ground. What makes me sad is that by flying into heated and personal attacks at the drop of a hat, we are potentially cutting ourselves off from exploring and questioning what we think we know. As the old saying goes, there are two sides to every story. Why must we settle for one when we could have both?
As they will be used as grunts, then yes, you can’t choose to white knight it and refuse to attack a female enemy.
It would be interesting if they were just grunts that were in the open world, meaning that potentially you could bypass them. I guess the difficulty (if you chose to play that way) would be in missions where you needed to kill those grunts in order to proceed. Having both a male and female playable protagonist adds to the discussion because (assuming that the player character is doing the killing rather than the player) it becomes a situation where a man in Victorian England is going around killing (or incapacitating) women, something which would have instantly placed Jacob into the ‘villainous scoundrel’ category rather than the ‘dashing hero’ category. I’d also be interested to find out why Ubi decided to put female enemies in at all, considering Victorian ladies (or even working class women) would not generally be going toe-to-toe with men. I think there were some examples of female bare-knuckle MMA-style fighting, even female against male due to lack of female opponents, but the idea of having common female enemies in an AC game is an unusual one I think. Was it because Ubi got so much flack after the lack of female assassins in AC Unity? If so, why didn’t they just go with the Jacob/Evie combo and leave it at that? Will female enemies only appear when playing as Evie? All this and more to discover and discuss! 🙂
Could be waiting a while. Considering there are already games with female enemies (Mass Effect for example), I don’t think it’s going to be an issue. And fighting games have had male/female equal opportunity violence for quite some time.
Right, and yet GTAV got picked on.
Maybe because of the way women were handled by the game? I love GTA, but even I’ll admit they didn’t exactly get any major starring roles. And you couldn’t use male prostitutes for sex, then kill them and get your money back. Or get a lap dance from male strippers. Not my sort of thing, but it is a double standard.
They’re even returning the series staple of the PC release being delayed!
Thank you based Ubisoft!
/s
If it’s all “Shine ya shoes Guvna?”, then I’m keen
Now I’m wishing for a Victorian era Blackadder series. It would be amazing if they could get the all-star cast from Blackadder Goes Forth back together.
OMG, they so should get Rowan to voice a cameo.
ohhh i love that they have taken out multilayer. Hopefully they put everything into the campaign and make it super awesome. I love great single player games, they are few and far between these days
The Indian assassin, “Henry”? i think they said his name was, i wonder if he’ll be the assassin in the Chronicles2?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t this franchise supposed to progress from distant past to present future? What happened? I guess somewhere along the line Ubisoft decided the money grab was more important than an ongoing storyline. Personally the idea of present day Assassins VS. Templars delving into past memories in an attempt to locate a relic before the other, was pretty cool. It’s a shame they bastardised the franchise because there’s been some genuinely good ideas that have gone in to these productions…
The dropped the desmond storyline for god knows reason why :\ just dropped it like a hot stone :\
As someone who played the first AC and a bit of AC2, then skipped to Black Flag, I was wondering this too. First the story was all about the machine and Desmond and extracting secrets from the past, then suddenly it’s a company using frankly ridiculous technology to make video games? I have no idea what’s going on in that series any more.
I think they wrote themselves into a corner to be honest.
It got to the point where they stupidly killed one of the main characters for no apparent reason (Revelations) then in AC 3 they kill off Desmond after revealing one of the aliens will end up destroying the world. Seems its all been dropped oddly? Dunno why. It was actually becoming interesting.It seems like they might have originally planned to end it after AC3 but long before that realised they could keep cranking out games and people would buy them.
Presumably what’s going on in the “modern” world is the fallout from the decision made by Desmond at the end of AC3 but they’ve not reintroduced a real modern-day story arc to carry it. Presumably (as in Black Flag) we’re just some johnny nobody dicking around in the Animus as am employee of Abstergo.Actually looking forward to it, am really glad to hear they’re dropping multi as I’ve always thought it was a waste of effort that could be better used in the SP. I’m a fan of the game, so more is good for me, but then… i used to like call of duty too lol
When he tosses a throwing knife at the guard the other two civilians just stare at the body in awe. For a series that was supposed to centre around crowds it feels so disjointed. We need to take out the lookout so he won’t be alarmed? What about the two guys standing right behind him? Nah, they’re not technically enemies, they won’t shout or nothin’. 😛
From the gameplay footage, the traversal already looks quite smooth and I like the idea of some of the new mechanics. The female AI and what looks like improved hand to hand combat should make things interesting as well. At the moment my biggest problem with the series is the missions types, such as clear out strongholds, and free people. I wish there were more large scale combat fights, and less stealth. Also I really hope the story is good. I have always struggled with them a bit.
Seriously.
If you preorder this game, especially if reviews are embargoed, and it turns out to be as much a snorefest buggy disasterpiece as Unity, you have *absolutely* no one to blame but yourself. Ubisoft have lost all credibility on this franchise.
I’d put money that there will still be a crapload of preordering and outraged complaining on day 1 anyway when this turns out to be Ass Creed Unity Part Deux.
What will win the annual shit game award this year, BOIII or AC?
Haha damn that’s a close one. Both are very deserving of that title.
Massive Ubisoft marketing, huge pre order bonuses, a poor series entry last year, and 5 special editions?
Sounds like a hit 😀