The new game seems designed to placate the community

May 15, 2015 21:52 GMT  ·  By

Assassin's Creed Syndicate is the name of the new title that Ubisoft will deliver this year in order to push forward the complex and apparently never ending story of the conflict between the Templars and the Assassins.

The official name, alongside a range of details about the experience, was announced earlier in the week and gamers were also able to take a look at the improved game engine which will power the experience and some of the new gameplay mechanics.

The game will take gamers to Victorian London and will feature a single-player story that focuses on a pair of twins who are seeking to eliminate the Templar presence and are ready to use both violence and stealth to achieve that objective.

Unity received criticism, Ubisoft moved fast to address it

Assassin's Creed Syndicate is clearly a game that was not entirely created by the development teams that have and continue to work on it at Ubisoft.

The previous title in the series, Unity, which arrived in late 2014, was criticized by the fan community for a number of issue, some of them technical and others linked to the core approach of the company.

The problems the game had, which ranged from mutilated faces for characters to making it impossible for some players to access content, were remedied via updates.

There's no way to make sure that there will be no issues for the launch of Assassin's Creed Syndicate, so Ubisoft sought to deal with the design choices that the community attacked when Unity was introduced.

The game contained no female options for players' avatars, even for those that were customizable for the multiplayer mode.

This time around, the company emphasized that the protagonist of Assassin's Creed Syndicate might be once again a man, but he has a twin sister named Evie which will be featured in campaign missions, although it seems that she is only central to about a quarter of them.

This lack of parity might be a sign that the developers found out relatively late about the need to create a female presence and to make gameplay for her different from the experience associated with Jacob.

It will be interesting to see how fans react to this Ubisoft move and whether they will be satisfied with the fact that they get a fully formed female character rather than an option to just choose the gender of their in-game avatar.

Assassin's Creed Syndicate will not feature multiplayer

One of the big new features of Unity was cooperative gameplay for a range of story missions, allowing up to four gamers to join forces in order to tackle a range of challenges.

In part because of technical issues, the mode seems to have been a disappointment and has not kept gamers occupied in the long term.

Ubisoft has announced that Assassin's Creed Syndicate will not have any sort of multiplayer and will focus on the single-player roots of the series.

The company is once again reacting to the feedback coming from the player base and changing the core experience of the series to better suit its perceived needs.

Presumably, multiplayer for Assassin's Creed will return for the title set for 2016, after the fan base criticizes Syndicate for the fact that it does not offer such a mode.

Ubisoft should try to develop a clear, long-term vision for the franchise, with or without multiplayer, including or not female characters.

It should then explain it to the community and stick to it, because fishing for fan approval via hasty changes is not a recipe for success and relevance.

Gamers might be disappointed with the choices a company makes, but they will respect them if Ubisoft is able to talk about them honestly.