Assassin’s Creed Unity Won’t Have Competitive Multiplayer Due to Co-op Focus

Players who haven’t been paying attention to Assassin’s Creed Unity news will be surprised to learn that Ubisoft is dropping the series’ trademark competitive multiplayer modes in favor of a pure co-op experience in the upcoming game. 

Players familiar with Assassin’s Creed multiplayer will recall the cat-and-mouse style assassination hunts that were a staple of the series. Players stalk each other through maps populated by non-player characters and attempt to flush out enemy players hiding amongst them while simultaneously evading pursuers of their own.

Speaking to GamingBolt, Assassin’s Creed Unity level designer Bruno St-Andre said that the core systems of Unity were designed with co-op in mind.

"[W]e made choices on the game early on that we're going for the shared experience," St-André said. "This meant that we developed core mechanics more on cooperation instead of confrontation.

"So we put a lot of effort into redefining the fights so that multiple players can actually engage in them and have a better strategy against the AI, which reacts differently each time. Same thing for navigation and same thing for the stealth. All of our effort and our decisions were based on this topic. We really wanted to be focused on that.”

Assassin’s Creed Unity may not be the only time we see a co-op focused Assassin’s Creed game. According to St-Andre, this is the direction the series is headed towards. 

"It's been asked nearly every year by the fans to be able to play co-op and finally were able to deliver it with next-gen consoles. That was really our focus and we're heading strong in that direction."

Unity will be out on the PC, Xbox One and PS4 on October 28.