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Assassin’s Creed Syndicate: Stealth siblings
Ubisoft enters the age of industry with not one but two new characters: read our preview here.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate
© Ubisoft
“One thing we do a lot is that we take risks.”
François Pelland, Ubisoft senior producer on the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, could be talking about any aspect of the popular franchise. He could be talking about the publisher’s willingness to jump time periods. He could be talking about its willingness to leave console platforms behind, or even abandon main characters (RIP Desmond).
But on this bright Autumn day in East London, Pelland is actually discussing Assassin’s Creed Unity, last year’s release; a game as flawed as it was ambitious. The first Creed title to leave the PS3 and Xbox 360 in the dustbin of history, it attempted to recreate the throng of revolutionary Paris, but there was a problem: the game was so buggy, many characters didn’t appear to have any, er, skin. Unsurprisingly, Unity is now the lowest ranked game in the series on Metacritic with a tepid 7.0 rating (its user rating is much worse).
Cynics would argue the real risk Ubisoft took with Unity was releasing an unfinished game full of flayed sans-culottes and hoping players wouldn’t notice, but Pelland says the shift away from the swashbuckling of the eighteenth century games presented many challenges – challenges even the third largest third-party games publisher in the world struggled with.
“Sometimes you know we take risks, we make new features that work really well, sometimes doesn't work as much, and you learn,” Pelland says. “That’s the thing, that’s the beauty of an organisation like we have: we learn and we adapt and we sometimes change the way we work.”
Assassin's Creed Syndicate
© Ubisoft
One thing at least is clear: Ubisoft is not going to apologise for Assassin's Creed Unity. Or if it is, its apologia is this year’s sequel. Set in Victorian London, it’s an attempt to make up for Unity by doubling down on the same premise, with better graphics, on an even bigger scale. As we scampered up Big Ben, it was hard not to be taken in by its scope: in the Thames, scores if not hundreds of boats slipped by one another forming the city’s first highway, while the skyline of the boroughs swept out beyond St Paul’s Cathedral to the east and the sidings of Waterloo station to the south. At the very least, the Creed engine for PS4 and Xbox One is a lot more mature than it was with a year ago.
“The Unity team did a massive investment on the engine over the course of three years,” says Pelland. “It’s been a long process for them. For a lot of them we’ve managed to polish a lot on what they’ve done.” The game certainly seems less buggy than Unity when it was previewed to journalists this time a year ago. Yes, we did encounter a cutscene with invisible characters again, but at least you aren’t able to float across the Thames on an invisible platform as we could the Seine.
There’s a certain confidence to Syndicate, at least in the early sequences we were able to play. The game doesn’t appear to hide behind a sea of micro transactions or cruddy ‘companion’ apps. The voice acting is strong, and thankfully abandons the borderline offensive regional English accents employed by Unity’s French villains. Famous faces from the era – Charles Dickens, Alexander Graham Bell – appear as sidekicks and your nemesis, Templar supremo Crawford Starrick, is introduced right from the start. He’s a grizzled villain in the vein of Professor Moriarty, with an iron grip over the capital’s trade, legal and illegal. Of course, he’s a bad guy because he uses child labour – one of the early missions sees you breaking into a factory to free the kids employed on the line.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate
© Ubisoft
That swagger is present in your protagonists too, cocksure young assassins who immediately defy their superiors’ orders and hop on the train from the home counties to follow the bright lights of the capital. It’s surely not a coincidence that the strongest Assassin’s Creed games of recent years (Black Flag, the overlooked Rogue) skip straight over your character’s childhood and training and dive straight into the action/haystacks, and Syndicate seems to follow in their padded footsteps.
For the first time in Syndicate, you can also play as a female assassin, a conspicuously missing option in Unity’s multiplayer. In fact, you’ll have to: as Jacob’s twin sister, Evie is central to the story. Though there are few immediate differences in how the siblings play in the early stages of the game, stealth purists will probably prefer to play as her as they progress: her skill tree is more focused on stealth than her brother Jacob, who prefers to wade in with pistols and top hat cocked, and ask questions later. Of corpses.
“We wanted to tell a modern story, so the script writers right at the start wanted to explore that idea of having two siblings, a brother and sister,” Pelland says. “And so one way to explore, to talk about and explain what’s the personality of someone is to have someone else to balance it or to contrast that personality. So to have those two, you know how they work: sometimes they collide, sometimes they’re best friends in the world, so it’s that type of relationship you see. So with that kind of storytelling, we can have even more.”
Assassin's Creed Syndicate
© Ubisoft
While on many missions you can tag the twins in and out with R3, we stuck with Evie for as much as possible of the first sequence we played, which sees you kidnapping several gang leaders before booting the Templars out of Whitechapel. To our untrained eyes, she seemed noticeably harder to fight with – fisticuffs with the hulking Assassin’s Creed meathead archetypes went on for longer than we cared for – but Pelland says that’s not the case.
“Evie can kick some ass as well. You can have the same results with her as with Jacob. But it’s true that with the skillset on Evie on stealth – specifically with the chameleon skill – for example, it’s true that it gives a way bigger advantage with stealth for Evie.”
Even so – perhaps in part because of the levelling system which means some thugs are much tougher than ever – we found that playing as Evie forced us more to look around and make use of the environment. Battles with lumpy ruffians a few levels above you turn into serious button bashing slogs as you gradually whittle away their health by clubbing them over the head with a cane (“It would have really been hard for us to have a fight that has swords. It would not make sense within the period,” Pelland points out), so you end up shooting barrels down onto their heads or looking for higher ground to zipline away to.
Oh, did we mention there’s a zipline? Yep: as part of the twins’ arsenal you can fire bat rope to haul yourself onto rooftops, or in the case of one mission, to abseil across the Houses of Parliament. Somewhat surprisingly, you can also zipline uphill as well as down, but the mechanic makes for some interesting gameplay – and provides for a new way to drop down (or drop bombs) on unwitting guards. It’s easily our favourite new tool in the series since the hidden blades themselves, and we’re excited to see the potentially game-breaking opportunities players may find it offers on release.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate
© Ubisoft
What you’ll see less of this year on the streets of London are NPCs. The teeming streets of Paris, the crowds on the cusp of becoming mobs, are gone; Syndicate seems a much quieter affair by comparison. Pelland says there wasn’t a technical decision behind this:
“For us the key factor was to recreate the atmosphere. So one thing, you go on any of the big streets of London, if you see a large group of people walking in the middle of the street you would say there’s something wrong, it’s not normal. My perception makes me think that there’s something going to happen. It’s the same thing for modern games: in 1868 [when the game is set] you have vehicles in the street and you have people on the sidewalks. So in the medieval period it was very normal to have people walking in the street – so it changed the composition of what you see.”
Multiplayer, on the other hand, or its omission, might have been. Pelland says that multiplayer was never on the table for Syndicate for a very good reason: resource. “For us, when we started to work on Syndicate we wanted to really focus on the single player experience for a lot of reasons. If the carriages were to not be drivable or interactable with fights on top stuff like that, people would have just said ‘Eh, that’s just window dressing’. It would have been a huge challenge to include multiplayer as well. All the vehicles, all the physics driven...our team really just wanted to focus on the single player experience. That’s where our expertise is.”
Unity’s disappointing four-player mode won’t be missed, though whether these new modes and modes of transport make up for the fun two player co-op is unclear. The early missions we played had their fill of train top combat – kicking people off a speeding locomotive is as much of a thrill as we’d hoped – but the carriages you can hijack? Much less interesting: you can ram other coaches off the road, but otherwise driving one felt very pedestrian, even if it were not on foot. Ubisoft’s introduction of naval warfare in Black Flag was masterful, but here the driving mechanic feels added on, an open world element for the sake of open world.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate
© Ubisoft
In this respect, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate feels more like the forgettable Watch Dogs, some ancestor of Aidan “chunky knitwear” Pearce merely going through the motions, than we’d have preferred. It is at least more detailed. Ubisoft has always focused on historical accuracy, gravity defying ziplines aside, and Pelland points out that the Victorian setting provides fertile ground for the team’s historians, researchers and writers (a dozen of them, no less). Compared to the Crusade era at least, the 1860s is very recent, only a few generations from the present.
“The big difference is with the landmarks that you see in Syndicate,” he explains. “They are almost all still here now, so it was really important to make sure they were spot on. The research has been a huge enterprise, working with historians, but the one thing that’s been very different from past medieval ACs is that we almost have the name and function of people and where they were living in each building in the entire city. It’s crazy, we have these records now. The amount of data has been huge.”
That’s both an exciting prospect and a dangerous one. Ubisoft unquestionably bit off more than it could chew with Unity. Syndicate by contrast feels more polished, a refinement with some exciting and importantly fairly small new additions. All of this will count for naught however, if the game ships in the state Unity did. As our interview draws to a close, we push Pelland on this. Will the game be ready by its October 23 launch date?
“We are still in dev, we still have some work to do, so that’s something we wanted to have from a performance point of view, from a fluidity point of view there’s been a lot of work done in the past year.”
Pelland has been trained well by the Templars in Ubisoft’s marketing team, but we’re not letting this parry pass. We try once more: will you be happy with the state of the game at launch? Pelland’s response, like the Syndicate gameplay we experience, is encouraging if not conclusive.
“We’ll be working really hard to make sure it’s in great shape.”
Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate releases on PS4 and Xbox One on October 23 and on PC in November.
