Gaming
Games
10 Assassin’s Creed Syndicate changes we need
Ubisoft, you’d better roll out these Animus updates or we’ll take our hidden blades elsewhere.
Another year, another Assassin’s Creed title has been announced. Ubisoft is taking us to London during the Industrial Revolution in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, and while the trailer is promising, it’s got a lot to live up to after critics led last year’s AC: Unity straight to the guillotine for its laughable bugs, irritating micro-transactions and dull multiplayer.
This time round, Ubisoft Quebec are taking the reigns, so can a fresher perspective give us the ultimate Assassin’s Creed game we’ve been craving? Here’s hoping: in the meantime, here are the 10 changes that have to happen if the series is to stand any chance of maintaining its momentum.
Maybe don’t assassinate the QA team this time
Last year’s Assassin’s Creed is easily the most gorgeous looking game in the series – hardly surprising as the first built exclusively for the next console generation – but it’s also by far and away the buggiest. Unity’s biggest problem was that it seemed like it put on a pair of trousers backwards, pulled up its hood and rushed out of the door without a second look in the mirror. Major characters sometimes appeared without any skin (even more disturbing than it sounds) you could often find levitating objects that let you hop across the Seine without getting wet, and background characters, as well as Arno himself, would sometimes decide to stop what they were doing and run on the spot forever. Ubisoft repeatedly patched the game but by the time it had there was already so much egg meringue on its face that Marie Antoinette herself would have advised starving peasants to just lick it off. Let’s hope Syndicate gets picked apart at the seams by the Quality Assurance team this time.
Kill the clutter
Assassin's Creed: Unity map
© Rapskilian / YouTube
With each Assasin’s Creed game comes new locations, characters, features and gear, but trying to claw your way through the menus to learn more about them is an exercise in futility. Yep, each successive game’s menu screen grows and grows, and are littered with submenus and lists and even more menus that makes trying to sort through them a complete pain. And that’s not even mentioning the map, which has seemingly more points of interest than a Google Map of the whole of France – even the map legend, which is supposed to make things easier to understand, is ridiculously over the top and doesn’t help things. Slay the clutter, Ubisoft, as there’s far too much to crawl through.
No more mini games, please
You’d think that Ubisoft would be busy enough churning out a new Assassin’s Creed every year to get its poor, forever-in-crunch developers to get working on mini games for each new instalment in the franchise, but you’d be wrong. Almost every game seems to come with some new gimmick, like the pointless tower defense game Ezio must endure in Revelations, or the “Send your assassins/ships out into the world and see if they come back” strategy game that doesn’t actually require any strategy which seems to have somehow become a staple of the series. And does anyone actually stop off at a tavern to play checkers? Ubisoft has made a smart move by ditching a multiplayer component for Syndicate – with any luck it’s also ditched any silly little side games as well to focus on the main storyline.
The companion apps need a date with the hidden blade
Ubisoft isn’t just in the business of flogging games, you know. It’s all about ‘experiences’ these days, worlds that you can take with you wherever you go. Hence last year’s dreadful Unity smartphone and tablet apps that were about as welcome as an invitation to have dinner with Robespierre. Don’t get us wrong: while using a ‘second screen’ works well for movies or slower-paced games, trying to fiddle with your tablet to plot out a marker while trying to escape from a group of angry sans-culottes and tap the analogue sticks to run away is far from ideal. We’d rather see Ubisoft borrow from Watch_Dogs and its excellent player vs player action that you can tap into with its app rather than listing all the stats of a piece of armour or forcing you to solve a puzzle to open a special treasure chest. And at least make it so that the app doesn’t risk wiping your entire saved game, as Unity’s app can do – a bug that unforgivably still hasn’t been fixed.
Some more meta story please
The wider story narrative of the entire Assassin’s Creed series is at this point rather convoluted, but it provides lots of extra detail to get hardcore fans coming back for more, much in the same way Thanos keeps throwing a tantrum over the credits of Marvel movies. That ended pretty abruptly with Unity however, which didn’t even see your present-day protagonist leave the Animus. Desmond Miles may be gone, but there are still lots of questions we need to see answered about the modern battle between Templars and Assassins. Pressing and important questions such as “Why does nobody put a password on their computer?” and “Is Danny Wallace still a barista?” Black Flag and Rogue struck a great balance between standalone story and overarching narrative with their weird first-person office simulator mode, and we’d love to jump out of the Animus again this time around to find out what Abstergo is planning.
The inexplicable accents have got to go
Yes, many characters in Unity appeared to have had their faces flayed off, but that wasn’t the most egregious error Ubisoft made with last year’s Assassin’s Creed. Nope, that honour goes to the bizarre and borderline offensive voice acting: most of the characters strutted around with plummy posh British accents while the evil Templar henchmen were all inexplicably Cornish. This was particularly odd given that Ubisoft is in fact a French company, and that voice actor Roger Craig Smith was allowed to give Ezio Auditore an excellent Italian accent in the Renaissance-set Creed trilogy rather than, say, an anachronistic Canadian accent. Hopefully Syndicate will see major characters given respectable British brogues, although we’re bracing ourselves for a barrage of rhyming slang that even Dick Van Dyke couldn’t translate.
Assassin's Creed: Syndicate
© Ubisoft
Combat overhaul
Ubisoft’s franchise has largely stuck with the same combat mechanics since the series became annualized, only fine tuning and evolving the system with each new release, but after Unity’s major overhaul, which focused on slow and ungainly sword fighting above all else, it could do with another one. While fights were better balanced – Arno could not expect to come out of a fight with more than two guards unscathed – they were also frustrating and clunky compared to the elegant parkour elements of the game. Hopefully that’s changed with Assassin’s Creed Syndicate: star of the show Jacob Frye and his twin sister Evie appear to have acquired a Batman-style grappling hook and have ditched the sword in favour of a cane, which we’re hoping is at least poison tipped. Throw in exciting battles on top of trains and the whole of London to duke it out in, Syndicate could be the title to change up the series for the better. Speaking of which...
Please, please don’t ruin the trains
Set in London around 1868 during the Industrial Revolution, there were of course, plenty of trains cutting through the city – but it looks like Ubisoft hasn’t done its homework properly. As some enterprising Reddit users have found in the reveal trailer, Ubisoft isn’t quite up to scratch on its trains, and has plopped in a British Railways logo on a locomotive that doesn’t even exist yet. Tut tut. Still, we can forgive anachronisms like this so long as Ubisoft gives us train-top combat, something we briefly glimpsed in the trailer. This is a dealbreaker. We need to be able to scurry along the coaches, pulling guards out of windows, fight while ducking railway viaducts and drop quips from Speed as our unfortunate opponents fail to do the same. “You’re smarter? Yeah, well I’m taller!” Ubisoft, don’t ruin our action movie fantasies.
Sort out the idiotic AI
Unity gave us slightly smarter enemies than what we’ve seen in previous AC games, but they’re still not geniuses. We’ve seen them fail to learn from the mistakes of their peers: for example, you could be hiding around a corner waiting for a group of charging combatants and you’ll be able to take them out one after the other even if it seems like one should have spotted his comrade fall onto your hidden blade. Guards are not smart enough to look up above their heads, and they’ll rarely follow you up onto roofs, making stealth missions a bit of a doddle. We’re just hoping Syndicate gives them a few more smarts, such as being able to learn from the mistakes of others and craning your neck in the direction of a sound.
Bring back the bestiary
Ubisoft is no stranger to taking bits and pieces from its other games and regurgitating them in slightly different ways, and it could do the same with this year’s Assassin’s Creed. Far Cry 4 has some of the best wildlife we’ve seen in a game – and some of the most deadly too. While you wouldn’t expect to see any wild boars roaming the streets of London, all sorts of birds could perch in the big smoke to spoil your top hat assassin ensemble. Here’s hoping Jacob and Evie will be able to pop by the zoo in Regent’s Park, and ride an elephant into battle.
Get the best gaming stories delivered straight to your inbox with the Red Bull Games newsletter.
