14 DAY TRIAL // Assassin's Creed would make prime-source material for a massively multiplayer online game, especially given the current power of the new generation of consoles, and it seems that the potential for this transition is not lost on Ubisoft.
Assassin's Creed Unity's producer, Vincent Pontbriand, mentioned that he would love to build a massively multiplayer entry in the stealth-based parkour and murder series. He said that an MMO setting would make for the perfect excuse to revisit several of the storylines and locales that Ubisoft had created for the Assassin's Creed franchise over the last few years.
"I'd love to have time personally, but it's not there. My dream would be to build basically an MMO where we can just revisit all these storylines through the same avatar, that would be awesome. But it's not the game we're making," he told Arabic Gamers.
While Ubisoft does not currently intend to make the leap, the introduction of seamless cooperative action, supporting up to four different players tackling the challenges of the campaign together in the upcoming entry in the series, Assassin's Creed Unity, is the first step toward building an online version of the popular game.
"We haven't gone as far as we want, you cannot share the world with other groups of people. When you're online with three other friends you're just the four of you in your session of Paris. Other players might be playing at the same time, so one of your friends could drop out and one of your other friends could join you and we have joining progress and stuff like that," he explained.
Ubisoft is however developing its first MMO, built by a different team, in the form of Tom Clancy's The Division, a third-person shooter slightly futuristic experience, and we'll get to see how good the team is at capturing the essence of multiplayer interaction sometime in 2015.
The Division will come out for Windows PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and will feature both AI-controlled opponents, as well as other human players, in a world torn by chaos, in the wake of a massive outbreak of a deadly virus.
Assassin's Creed Unity is scheduled to come out on October 28, 2014, headed to the PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 platforms. The game takes place during the French Revolution, and follows the adventures of Arno Dorian, a new protagonist, while exploring the evolution of the Brotherhood of Assassins during the tumultuous events.