Ubisoft Quebec creative director Marc-Alexis Cote spoke to GameSpot about Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate being a single-player only experience, lacking both co-op and competitive multiplayer. According to Cote, this was due the studio wanting to focus on the core single-player story of Jacob and Evie, with every activity and event advancing the narrative. A multiplayer mode would apparently not gel with this approach.
“The reason we are doing this is to really focus on the roots of the franchise/ That’s why all nine studios are focused on delivering this single-player experience.”
Executive producer Francois Pelland also noted that the new melee combat and vehicles that could be hijacked wouldn’t work for online play. “We felt like, especially with the type of fight that we have, a very hand-to-hand, very close combat fight, that we needed to have very high responsiveness on the system.
“That’s one thing. It’s navigation as well. When we decided two years and a half ago, we said, let’s do London of 1868. You cannot have vehicles that are just cosmetic. You cannot have vehicles that are just there to look good. Players would have said, I want to drive those things. That adds complexity to the thing. It’s more technical reasons [for leaving out multiplayer.]”
Of course, there’s also the matter of Assassin’s Creed: Unity and the utter failure of its co-op at launch. Perhaps Ubisoft is looking to avoid another potential snafu with Syndicate? Regardless, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is out on October 23rd for Xbox One and PS4 with a PC release in Autumn 2015.