Interestingly, when this update was first announced, Ubisoft had only mentioned a frame rate increase. Checking the title’s update history on PS5 confirms that it has also seen a resolution upgrade.

Assassin’s Creed Unity was originally released on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, and introduces a new protagonist – Arno Dorian. Taking place during the French Revolution in 1789, the main story revolves around the fall of the Ancien Régime and the Reign of Terror. Arno is a young orphan who was raised in the home of François de la Serre, growing up alongside childhood friend Élise de la Serre. When the French Revolution kicks off, Arno and Élise find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict, with one side led by the Assassins and the other by the Templars.

A wonderfully detailed version of Paris awaits players, but that’s not all. It’s also the first game in the franchise to bring in drop-in co-op gameplay for up to four players, with there even being special Brotherhood missions for this purpose.

The 60 FPS update for Assassin’s Creed Unity was announced earlier this week as part of a lengthy post where Ubisoft discussed the future of the franchise. Among other things, the company also confirmed that post-launch support for last year’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows had reached its “final phase”. While this means that updates for the title are going to slow down, there are apparently still a few surprises planned.

Among the games Ubisoft is working on in the Assassin’s Creed franchise at Vantage Studios is Assassin’s Creed Codename Hexe. Head of content Jean Guesdon mentioned the title in the recent post, promising “a unique, darker, narrative-driven Assassin’s Creed experience, set during a pivotal moment in history.” He also noted that it is being worked on by “our veteran team here at Ubisoft Montreal.”

Development on a remake of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag was also finally confirmed, with Guesdon posting concept art that revealed the official title – Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced – and the game’s logo. However, there was no confirmation on its release date.

Finally, Guesdon provided a quick update on the long-in-development multiplayer title Assassin’s Creed Invictus. He noted that the studio is figuring out how to get the community involved in development, since a major part will revolve around getting solid player feedback.

“We understand there’s a lot of curiosity around this project: yes, it’s a new approach to multiplayer in the franchise, but it isn’t quite what the rumors have suggested,” he said. “With player feedback at the heart of our approach, we’re exploring ways to bring the community in earlier so we can shape the experience together.”

We’re particularly excited about Assassin’s Creed Unity, with a 60 FPS update dropping tomorrow for Xbox Seris X/S and PS5 to put a refreshing new twist on Arno’s experiences during the French Revolution. If this one is anything like the one that was dropped for Syndicate, we can tell you that it just hits different, as Arno flits from rooftop to rooftop with an agility that’s rare even among the Assassins.

If you happened to have missed this one back in the day, it’s worth checking out for its story and a gameplay loop that has shaken off a troubled, buggy start to become one of the best takes on stealth in the franchise behind Naoe’s excellent skill set. You might also be excited to know the official confirmation that Black Flag: Resynced is in the works, in what’s now one among the worst-kept secrets in recent gaming discourse.

There are also updates on Codename Hexe and Invictus, which are both gearing up to bring their own unique twists to the franchise’s sneaky formula. It’s looking like a good time to be an Assassin’s Creed fan despite Ubisoft’s recent turbulence.

Assassin’s Creed Unity

Most games these days includes mechanics to facilitate stealth, but oftentimes enemy AI is poorly implemented that you risk being detected no matter how hidden you are. Assassin’s Creed Unity isn’t perfect, but it’s arguably last gen’s best stealth experience due to thoughtful level design and enemy placement. There’re the token tools to distract guards, of course, but Unity has a surprising depth to character move sets. Understanding distinct animation length and noise emitted in low or high-profile moves is key, as is – perhaps counterintuitively – mastering non-lethal takedowns. 

]]> 604976 https://gamingbolt.com/assassins-creed-mirage-takes-inspiration-from-assassins-creed-unity-developer-confirms https://gamingbolt.com/assassins-creed-mirage-takes-inspiration-from-assassins-creed-unity-developer-confirms#respond Tue, 13 Sep 2022 12:21:16 +0000 https://gamingbolt.com/?p=529952 Assassin’s Creed Mirage is taking a back-to-the-basics approach in more ways than one, with the massive open world and RPG mechanics of its recent predecessors being replaced by a smaller and more stealth-focused experience that harkens back to the older Assassin’s Creed titles. And one game in particular that developer Ubisoft Bordeaux seems to have looked to for several aspects is 2014’s Assassin’s Creed Unity. 

Leaks prior to Mirage’s formal unveiling claimed that the game would be bringing back Unity’s crowd density, and creative director Stephane Boudon confirms that that is indeed the case. He also adds that Mirage borrows “some ingredients and some tools from Unity“, and that it also takes cues from the 2014 titles in terms of stealth, parkour, animations, and the density of the city of Baghdad, which serves as the game’s setting.

Speaking in an interview with Game Rant, Boudon said: “Unity was indeed an inspiration for us. Unity was really built for parkour, with animations. etc. And in Mirage, we aim to add the best quality possible. Let’s say enhance the way we have parkour. So, we have new moves for Basim, we have new ingredients, and also the density of the city is really key because it’s helped us to move very quickly everywhere, like on the roofs of Baghdad. The flat roofs are also really a good way to really tackle the city during your playthrough.

“Unity was an inspiration, of course, but we aimed to upgrade and enhance with new animations and a quickness for Basim. As you know in Valhalla, Eivor was heavy and parkour was not at the core of the experience. Another example of inspiration from Unity, it’s also the crowd. So in Assassin’s Creed Mirage, you will see a big crowd. It’s been a while since you’ve seen such a crowd.”

It’s also been confirmed that Assassin’s Creed Mirage is going to be a significantly shorter game than recent entries in the series, clocking in at roughly 15-20 hours– which, again, would put it in line with older games in the series.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage is due out sometime in 2023 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Ubisoft recently confirmed that the game will not have any lootboxes- read more on that through here.

Original story follows:

Sony has announced its lineup of titles coming to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium this month, starting from July 19th. Just as the rumors claimed, Final Fantasy 7 Remake (PS4) and Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade – which includes Episode INTERmission – will be available for subscribers. They’re joined by Marvel’s Avengers and Stray on PS4 and PS5.

Numerous Assassin’s Creed titles are also coming to the service. Assassin’s Creed Unity, Assassin’s Creed 4 Black Flag, Assassin’s Creed Rogue Remastered, Assassin’s Creed Freedom Cry and Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection are all going to be available on PS4. Saints Row 4: Re-Elected and Saints Row: Gat out of Hell on PS4 are also included.

The remaining roster includes Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure, Jumanji The Video Game, Paw Patrol on a Roll! and ReadySet Heroes on PS4 along with Spirit of the North: Enhanced Edition for PS5. Classic titles include No Heroes Allowed! and LocoRoco Midnight Carnival on PlayStation Portable.

Interestingly, PlayStation Blog Italy notes that Dino Crisis on PS One and Ridge Racer 2 and Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny on PSP will be added to the Classics catalogue as well. It remains to be seen if these will be available for other regions later. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.

So let’s take a look at 15 of those creepy glitches here!

Broken Face Textures – Assassin’s Creed Unity

No list of glitches is complete without mentioning Assassin’s Creed Unity and it’s missing face textures. The nature of the glitch is also amazing – one instance produces only the character’s teeth and blood-shot eyes, searing into your soul. Another was suitably more terrifying with its mess of textures, eyes and teeth coalescing into what might be a smile. Thanks to the game’s problematic launch, these glitches maintain their infamy to this day.

An overwhelming number of allegations of sexual misconduct against top Ubisoft executives have emerged in recent weeks, leading to major shake-ups at the French company, including changes being made across a number of positions and departments. This includes high-ranking Ubisoft employees having left the company amid these allegations, including chief creative officer Serge Hascoët (who has faced many of said allegations), managing director of Ubisoft’s Canadian studios Yannis Mallat, and global head of HR Cécile Cornet.

Now, a new report written by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has gone into greater detail on these issues, citing several more instances of sexual and racial misconduct, on top of describing a hostile and “machismo” work environment that pervades the entire company, which has offices all over the world, while also going into detail on how most of these problems had been well known to the company, its HR departments, and its top executives for years (owing to countless complaints, among other things), but were swept under the rug.

The report goes on to explain that these problems – described as systemic and deeply entrenched by multiple former and current Ubisoft employees, many of whom chose to remain anonymous – seeped into the company’s creative decisions as well. For instance, the roles of several major female characters in multiple Assassin’s Creed games were significantly reduced following orders from either the aforementioned Serge Hascoët or the company’s marketing, because “female protagonists wouldn’t sell.” As Schreier points out in his report, in an industry with numerous commercially and critically successful games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, the Tomb Raider series, and more recently, The Last of Us Part 2 (to name a few), that notion doesn’t ring very true.

The report explains that an early outline of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate had twins Jacob and Evie Frye sharing equal screen time as deuteragonists. The final product saw the latter’s role being reduced, and the former playing the much more dominant role. Following that, Assassin’s Creed Origins was originally going to either kill off or seriously injure its protagonist Bayek early on in the game, with players taking control of his wife Aya for the rest of the story. In the final game, Aya was playable for a negligible amount of time, and had a significantly reduced role. Finally, 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was originally going to have Kassandra be the sole playable protagonist, but the development team was told that that wasn’t an option.

All of this happened following a similar incident in 2014- when Ubisoft were called out for not having included playable female characters in Assassin’s Creed Unity’s co-op, they said that adding women character models, clothing, and animations would have required too much production work.

Schreier’s report goes into great detail on the system issues at Ubisoft. You can read it through the link in the beginning of this report.

No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky was hyped to the high heavens. No one can deny that. But the launch was missing so much and we’re not talking about the lack of “meeting other people” (which was stated to be very hard, not impossible). The lack of decent closure in the story, repetitive gameplay, no huge space battles – the list goes on. Hello Games went dark for some time, prompting more backlash, but eventually emerged with the Foundation update which brought base-building. This was followed by the Pathfinder update which introduced new vehicles and Survival mode and then Atlas Rises which added significantly more story content. The Next update added four player co-op while Beyond brought support for 32 players on one server. All of these updates were free, redeeming the developer’s reputation somewhat.

And in this feature, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. And we’re going to begin with what is probably (in retrospect, at least) their most hilarious blunder to date.

E3 2011

All major publishers have, at one point or another, made fools of themselves at E3. Sony did it in 2005, Nintendo did it in 2008, Konami did it in 2010, EA have done it more times than we can care to count. Ubisoft’s rock bottom E3 moment came in 2011, with the infamous Mr. Caffeine. It was an uneventful and dull conference all around, but Mr. Caffeine’s silly shenanigans turned it into an absolute train-wreck.

The point is: There’s no one route to story-telling in a video game. It often depends on the game itself, whether it can support these ambitions and even if it should focus on packing as much story content into a game as possible. In that respect, I feel the Assassin’s Creed franchise stands out. The series is one of the progenitors of the open world, collectathon genre as we know it. With Assassin’s Creed Origins and even more so with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, there’s been shift towards packing as much story into the game as possible.

In the case of Odyssey, you have a main narrative that culminates in reuniting your family. Now it’s off to hunt down the members of an evil cult. Is it over? Nope. Now you have to discover who your real father is and your true purpose. In between, there are dozens upon dozens of smaller quests, Lost Tales of Greece, hunts, side missions, bosses, camps to assault, wars to wage and so on and so forth. It’s easy to see why Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has garnered some criticism for feeling bloated.

It’s interesting when you think about Greek classics like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Both poems are sweeping narratives with their various events, characters and conflicts meticulously connected. Removing a dozen lines or so would be sacrilege. By comparison, you could remove a few side quests and missions from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and very few would notice. But I digress.

The quality of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey can be called into question but it’s a different story format. This isn’t a one-and-done read that you might go back to at some point like a poem. This is a video game, that too with a live service infrastructure, action RPG mechanics, loot grinding, leveling systems, DLC, Mercenaries, ship battles and user-created content. It’s meant to be engaged with over a longer period of time. Which is all well and good if you’re a fan of games that can provide dozens of hours of content, repeated and dull as some of that content may be. But what if you don’t want to commit to a game in the long-term?

Well, for starters, you can forget about going back to a shorter experience with Assassin’s Creed 2020 (rumoured to have a Viking setting). Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot was recently asked about the same by GamesIndustry.biz and said that, “Our goal is to make sure you can have an [Assassin’s Creed] Unity within an Odyssey. If you want to have a story of 15 hours, you can have it, but you can also have other stories. You live in that world and you pursue what you want to pursue. You have an experience, many Unity-like experiences.” Guillemot also pointed to the game’s playtime, roughly 60 hours on average, and noted that “players got a lot from their investment in the game, a lot more than they got before.”

From a business perspective, it makes sense why Ubisoft is taking a more measured approach with Odyssey. Even if you account for XP boosters, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has clearly been designed for its players to engage with a wide suite of content outside of “just” the story. For better or worse, the game pushes you to discover other things in the wilderness. Alternatively, you could just “grind” those levels out, assaulting forts and bandit camps even it quickly got old. Either way, you’re in it for the long haul and Ubisoft releases free content to keep you coming back (with this “good will” philosophy hopefully translating into sales for their paid cosmetic items).

Besides, weren’t people getting tired of the way Assassin’s Creed used to be? Isn’t the current model more successful, especially in terms of sales and revenue? Yes to both. So from a business standpoint, it makes sense to ensure that Assassin’s Creed 2020 is yet another immense open world with loot to earn, levels to grind, side quests by the dozen to undertake, etc etc.

However, when we talk about “investment” from a narrative standpoint, it’s interesting to think that a game like Assassin’s Creed Unity can just “fit” into Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Hearing that investment broken down into “hours” makes sense but how do you measure emotional investment? More hours spent playing may be better and translate to better sales but does it make for a better story?

Personally, I believe Ubisoft should consider returning to tighter, more focused narratives. Not that Assassin’s Creed Unity was “small” by any means but think of a game like Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. It provided the backdrop for a litany of side missions, each with genuinely interesting stories and characters. You had your share of collectibles, sure, but you never deviated too far from the main narrative.

Even though certain side missions and interactions could be removed from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey without anyone noticing, all of this has been designed keeping the overall pacing in mind. Some side quests and missions may have multiple parts but you’re mainly looking at objectives that require killing X animal or enemy. You’re looking at burning X amount of enemy supplies or assassinating X target. There’s quantity, for sure but when you try to take the narrative of Unity or Syndicate and simply slot it into Odyssey, changes have to be made to properly align it with the game’s core narrative. It’s not going to be the same narrative experience by a long shot.

This isn’t to say that Guillemot’s idea of having “Unity-like experiences” is disingenuous but there’s more to a game’s story and the engagement that it creates with the player than just “number of hours played”. I would argue that Assassin’s Creed as a franchise suffered not because it didn’t have enough content in each game but because each new story failed to really engage the player on an emotional level. These games haven’t been getting smaller over the years but there’s been a clear shift away from “We have an interesting story to tell” towards “We need to pump out a new game every year, no, I don’t care if Desmond is dead.” It finally settled on alternating between Ubisoft open world franchises every other year.

When comparing the overall goals of narrative design between this generation’s Assassin’s Creed and the previous titles, I can’t help but think about Days Gone and The Last of Us. Both take place in post-apocalyptic settings where infected humans are the biggest threat. Both have are pretty character-focused as our heroes struggle to survive in a society where the norm has long since been abandoned. It’s the overall focus of these narratives that determines their scale and how the plot plays out.

Days Gone, for all intents and purposes, is about Deacon finding his wife. The journey is constrained to a single open world, providing ample opportunity to interact with different survivors and learn their stories. The main narrative can be tackled whenever is convenient for the player. By comparison, The Last of Us is about traveling across the country as our protagonists struggle to fulfill their objective. You may not explore the entire country as each Chapter is its own linear level but it suits the narrative at hand.

Other survivors are encountered but these stories are woven into the main narrative, each event influencing the protagonists’ growth in the overall journey and beyond. There is no “start and stop” point for the player – it’s a ride from start to finish.

So while Days Gone may be more open-ended and sand-boxy, The Last of Us fine-tunes its cinematic pacing and story-telling to tell a concise story. You can enjoy the narratives in both games because both games take effective approaches to immersing the player. However, personally, I find the story-telling and characterization of The Last of Us superior simply because the game did a better job immersing me into the story. Quality of writing, cinematography, scripting, plot – a number of factors influence that immersion and it varies from person to person. But both of the above games try to tell meaningful, focused stories within their frameworks.

What kind of story is Ubisoft trying to tell with Assassin’s Creed 2020? If we discount the rumours and believe that it emphasizes a tale of warring Vikings, it would have a completely different treatment from, say, SIE Santa Monica’s God of War. And I say that keeping in mind that even God of War had superfluous systems like loot and larger environments with side missions, secrets and collectibles. With God of War 2, you don’t know what new innovations the studio will bring to its gameplay forefront – all you know is that the story-telling will be similarly engaging with a sharp focus on its lead characters. You know to expect a good story, not to suddenly veer off in the action RPG route, socializing with other players controlling their own version of Kratos in a hub while grinding daily faction missions.

Assassin’s Creed 2020 will likely dabble with Norse mythology, giving the players some mythical weapons and powers to play around with. You’ll still be assaulting outposts, completing kill quests for citizens and trying to grind XP to equip better loot. Maybe you’ll meet different Viking clans and get your daily faction missions that way. If the rumours are true and we’re indeed allowed to influence the economy of different regions, that would be neat. But how much do you want to bet that it would be akin to the Conquest battles in Odyssey – flashy, but ultimately not all that meaningful in the long run?

I’m not trying to say that the next Assassin’s Creed should be like God of War, simply aping that franchise’s new-found direction. But there’s something to be said about the stories that Ubisoft has told over the years. They’re becoming less about memorable characters, fleshed out and unique worlds, and plots that emotionally resonate with players.

The new trend is to cobble as many elements together into as big of an open world as possible, capturing that ever-elusive player engagement and delivering free content for the sake of pushing microtransactions. If the recent Ghost Recon Breakpoint has proven anything, it’s that the company might want to think about its current loot-obsessed, live service model before it risks burning players, yet again.

I remember back in the day when Assassin’s Creed had a “story”. I remember when it was about more than just artifacts, reliving memories for the sake of reliving them, and having interesting characters who we bonded with. Characters who stayed with us, through thick and thin, and saddened us with their passing. I remember when even the historical figures themselves were vehicles for complex sagas – how long has it been since Ubisoft presented a character arc like Ezio Auditore’s?

We might never go back to the old days. But a strong focused narrative, one that favours a highly polished storyline over excessive grinding and tasks, will never go out of style. You could argue that it wouldn’t make the most money or have the longest revenue tail but with the number of samey open world titles that Ubisoft is pumping out, surely there’s a possibility of something, anything different.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.