Assassin's Creed Updated Hands-On
There's more to Ubisoft Montreal's ambitious action adventure than you might expect. We explored a nearly finished version of the game to find the details.
Assassin's Creed is basically finished. After a four-year development cycle that began right after Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time shipped to retail, the Assassin's team at Ubisoft's renowned Montreal studio is now putting the last touches on the first submission build of the game before it goes into rigorous testing. Sure, bugs will come back from Sony and Microsoft's approval teams, and the developers will have a precious handful of weeks to fix those bugs, optimize the frame rate, and apply that last, vital coat of polish. But the game's feature set, level design, and mission structure are now set in stone. We were pleasantly surprised at the breadth and diversity of the gameplay when we had a chance to sit down with that nearly finished build for an extended tour of Acre, one of Assassin's three primary cities, with a little guidance from creative director Patrice Désilets.
So far, Ubisoft has publicly presented only the core gameplay conceit of Assassin's Creed: You infiltrate the environment, kill your target, and get out--stealthily if you can, but in a hail of arrows if necessary. However, while exploring Acre, we came to realize that you'll be doing much more than simply slaying your way through the Crusades-weary holy land of the late 12th century. The game's three cities--Acre, Jerusalem, and Damascus--will be populated with thousands of citizens going about their business. You'll often have the opportunity to embroil yourself in that business--to your own ends, of course--even when it isn't directly involved with your quest to kill your current target.
First, we'll give you an idea of the general flow of Assassin's Creed. Early in the game, master assassin and main character Altaïr will commit some kind of dire mistake, though the nature of that mistake is unclear. Consequently, his esteem will diminish in the eyes of his assassin's guild and result in the loss of most of his equipment and abilities. It's more than a little reminiscent of that now-classic Metroid design archetype: Start out with everything, lose it all, and spend the rest of the game getting it back. Altaïr's acquisition of new abilities and gear--such as throwing knives for taking out enemies silently at range, or a ledge-grab move that will let you secure a handhold while falling--will correspond to the elimination of his targets. These targets will include notable figures of the Crusades spread out across all three cities, and you'll have the freedom not only to move between those cities at will in an open-world fashion, but also to pursue those targets in any order, within the limits of the storyline.
Ubisoft has been pushing the liveliness of Assassin's Creed's cities, with their vast, teeming citizenry, as one of the game's unique selling points, but we've wondered if this throng would really matter once you're playing the game. We came to find out over the course of our demo that some of those citizens will serve as more than passive obstacles that get in your way when you're fleeing from pursuit. In fact, some of them will act as jumping-off points for optional side missions that you can undertake in-between tracking down and offing your marks. For instance, in each city you'll encounter a number of women being harassed by the city guard. If you choose to step in and help one of these ladies by killing the officers giving her trouble, you'll win the gratitude of her husband...and the vigilante group he happens to belong to. These vigilantes will then remain loyal to you for the rest of the game, so if you get into a scuff in their part of town at any time later, they'll emerge from the crowd and come to your aid to fight against the guards.
Other members of the populace will provide some peripheral benefits as well. Our demo began at the guarded gates of Acre, which we couldn't exactly waltz through unobstructed. We had the unappealing option of simply fighting all the guards at the entrance to get in, or we could use Altaïr's acrobatic abilities to climb up a side wall and get in unnoticed. But we had a third option: We could help out a monk nearby who was in a spat with some other guards a few feet from the gate. We dealt with the guards, which convinced the monk to let us walk slowly through the gates among him and his brethren, whose hooded white robes bore a striking resemblance to Altaïr's own costume. Similar groups of monks can be seen roaming around each city, and you'll be able to immerse yourself in them from time to time to use them as a makeshift hiding place.
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- Release: Nov 13, 2007 »
- ESRB: Mature
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