If you thought that all of the Assassin’s Creed titles announced last month, ranging from the 2023 title Assassin’s Creed Mirage, to further titles in the pipeline including Assassin’s Creed: Codename Red, Assassin’s Creed: Codename Hexe, as well as several mobile titles, and of course, Assassin’s Creed Infinity, the online portal which will connect each game together, now you’ve got some more Assassin’s Creed on your plate in the form of a dedicated multiplayer project, Project Invictus.
It was Ubisoft’s latest earnings call that played host to the formal announcement of Project Invictus, not in any big splashy way, but it was simply noted during the report reading, “Additionally, a team, including For Honor veterans, is currently working on bringing back multiplayer to Assassin’s Creed with a standalone experience through Infinity under the project codename Invictus” Invictus will be a part of the Infinity hub that is building, to go alongside both Hexe and Red. Infinity itself is still a strange subject with it not being especially clear as to what need it serves, but as Ubisoft describes it, “Assassin’s Creed Infinity will be a gateway for all Assassin’s Creed experiences where the metastory will live asynchronously”.
What Infinity does do is connect the games in more ways than just a narrative, it’s designed to promote engagement in content both current and future in nature, “This project will allow us to link games with a common and more coherent narrative thread that will reward players for their involvement in the universe, driving engagement, while at the same time providing more discoverability for the content we create,” a project such as Invictus is certainly something that will promote prolonged engagement if it is executed upon properly by Ubisoft’s teams.
Multiplayer modes in the Assassin’s Creed franchise are a long-forgotten element of the franchise. The first time multiplayer arrived in the franchise was with Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood in 2010, and it was a present element in the next few titles, Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Assassin’s Creed III, and then 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. These were competitive multiplayer experiences, but even since then the franchise has dabbled in variations of multiplayer, with 2014’s Assassin’s Creed Unity supporting online cooperative multiplayer. Assassin’s Creed Unity launched with a bevy of bugs and visual flaws at launch that detracted from the fan experience and resulted in the multiplayer largely being overlooked. The Infinity hub could play host to both a competitive and cooperative Assassin’s Creed multiplayer experience, meaning that it is hard to know exactly what path Ubisoft will take with this upcoming take on multiplayer – needless to say though, the recent trickle of Assassin’s Creed has now become a flood, and is absolutely set to continue for years into the future.
