Ubisoft wilde al sinds Assassin’s Creed 2 co-op in de serie

Een grote feature van Assassin’s Creed: Unity is om de game straks in co-op te kunnen spelen. Dit is echter een concept waar Ubisoft al vele jaren mee bezig is, want ten tijde van Assassin’s Creed 2 testte men al coöperatieve mogelijkheden uit.

Volgens Vincent Pontbriand, producer van Assassin’s Creed: Unity, had men al een prototype co-op werkend voor Assassin’s Creed 2:

We’ve wanted to do [co-op] for a very long time. We actually started to prototype it during AC2, a very long time ago. Then we started work on trying to implement online into the engine. The engine wasn’t built to allow for that, so what we came up with was the PVP multiplayer that came out with Brotherhood, so it actually came out later than AC2. But it branched out from the AC2 code and became its own separate thing.

Het verzorgen van co-op was echter een complexe bezigheid. De engine moest flink onder handen genomen worden om dit mogelijk te maken, zo vertelt Pontbriand:

But it just wasn’t possible to have a seamless experience [on the previous engine]. The engine was not made for that. The PVP mode was more self-contained and just a snippet of the experience. Fans and people were starting to ask for co-op, but we had to wait for the right moment, and we had to actually spend a lot of time and energy to re-code the entire engine to suit co-op because what we really wanted was the co-op experience to be a shared experience.

That’s what people were asking for. They’re not looking for synchronising opening doors or pulling levers, they wanted to share their AC experience with their friends. In order to do that, you have to support replication for every single system. So for PVP assassination, the only thing we replicated was the position and orientation of other players. But everything else, the crowd for example, was unique to each player’s session, it wasn’t replicated at all. I could see NPCs that you couldn’t see, but it didn’t matter for the gameplay at all.

In order to have an actual shared experience you need to have all the NPCs replicated. The state of guards if you’re fighting them right now, if you’re playing a mission you need to be at the same checkpoint… I mean, all these things. And we had to recode our entire behaviour set in order to optimise it to go through the internet bandwidth, all of these things that the previous engine wasn’t made for. So… we’ve wanted to do it for a while, it just took a long time for the pieces to come together.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity verschijnt 14 november voor de pc, Xbox One en PlayStation 4. Lees meer over de game in onze recente hands-on preview.