Assassin’s Creed multiplayer, which vanished from the series after AC Unity‘s disastrous 2014 launch, is finally coming back.
It will return in the form of an online multiplayer game spearheaded by key figures behind Ubisoft’s historical combat game For Honor. Rumours went around a while back that Ubisoft had a plan for reviving Assassin’s Creed multiplayer as a standalone product, at the time called Project Invictus. That seems to have borne out, with the company’s latest financial report (spotted by Games Radar) indicating work is already underway.
“A team, including For Honor veterans, is currently working on bringing back multiplayer to Assassin’s Creed with a standalone experience through Infinity under the project codename Invictus,” reads the report.
So that’s … tangled. It’s a standalone product, that will be released through the Assassin’s Creed Infinity platform. Because that’s what Infinity is, right? Ubisoft has not confirmed anything remotely clear about its staging ground for new AC content, but its clearly a platform, maybe with a subscription attached. But how can this new multiplayer game standalone … if it’s part of the Assassin’s Creed … platform? It’s fine. It’s fine. I understand what they mean but … no, it’s fine.
Adding to this lingual melange is Ubi’s insistence on calling this new Assassin’s Creed mulitplayer project not a game but an “experience”. This is Ubi’s new favourite word for its projects, even Assassin’s Creed Mirage was called an experience upon its announcement last month.
Sorry, I’m going to stop complaining about the corporate language used in press releases and get back to the story.
We don’t really know anything about the new multiplayer project just yet. Older Assassin’s Creed multiplayer modes were based in part on Splinter Cell‘s excellent multiplayer. They were like hide and seek for grown-ups, a game about hiding in plain sight, or lurking in concealment. In a way, they were kind of like a very, very early version of the prop hunt style multiplayer, if that’s not too much of a stretch. A huge part of the game was reading the world and trying to spot the other player as they moved through the crowd, or figuring out where they were most likely to be hiding.
Could this new multiplayer game include a lot of that older content, like maps and weapons and modes? I know I’d like to see it. I personally quite liked AC multiplayer, and I wouldn’t hate having all that content back, along with some new stuff. Of course, that’s assuming that this new game will be anything like the old modes, and, in a world of endless loot-treadmill multiplayer games, I wonder if that hope might be a naive one?
Stay your hidden blades for now, my fellow AC apologists. We’ll have to wait and see how this one pans out.
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