Ubisoft needs to bring back its best multiplayer: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood!
Michael just doesn’t understand Ubisoft’s multiplayer strategy. For him, all current games either miss the trend by years, seem artificial or just aren’t fun. It’s actually a shame, he thinks, when one of Ubisoft’s best multiplayers is being forgotten more and more. He has so much potential and could be all the more successful today.
I have a love-hate relationship with Ubisoft games. Actually interesting ideas and concepts too often fall victim to its mainstream formula. It’s even worse when it comes to multiplayer. Let’s stick with a few examples:
- Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint alienated players with boredom and loot boxes
- Hyper Scape was the interchangeable “Battle Royale” clone, which felt like it was lost when it was announced
- And the last one that came out Riders Republic is quite nice, but doesn’t have a unique selling point or special gameplay that I want to sink into for hours
I somehow doubt that Ubisoft will ever have a huge success on this track. What’s fascinating about it is that my absolute favorite multiplayer comes from them: Der aus Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.
I’ve been playing it for almost 12 years now and keep it alive as part of a small community hoping that firstly Ubisoft will never shut it down and secondly maybe even re-release it one day. It would be a promising opportunity, as the concept is still ingenious and, above all, unrivaled to this day.
Who writes here? Michael follows games that continue to delight and tell compelling community stories for years to come. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is among his gems that he recommends to anyone seeking chaos and cleverness.
So good you’ll never want to play single player again
It was the best idea ever in 2010 to put the entire game of hide-and-seek and assassins in one multiplayer. Historical locations, parkour, various assassin tactics. In AC: Brotherhood’s multiplayer mode, up to 8 players meet and each is given the task of eliminating one of them.
The exciting thing is that the victims do not know who is chasing them. The problem: The locations are populated with dozens of NPC copies of the game characters, making it difficult to find the right person. And upon completion or failure, new assignments are immediately assigned. So stay and enjoy Venice is not!
In contrast to other multiplayers, success here does not only depend on your speed. Kills are scored on stealth, and rampaging will get no points for that bungling performance either. The tutorial teaches you only one percent, the rest of the know-how is based on years of observation and experience.
In order to master the game, you must adopt a certain “Assassinian” way of thinking, in which you have to go through the following questions in a matter of seconds: Where are my victim and my pursuer hiding? Who behaves suspiciously and is therefore not an NPC? Now how do I make the best kill without getting killed myself? And what’s the best way to escape after that?
But the mind game and the tactical depth go much further. All players have a set of two skills that they can customize with smoke bombs, pistols and throwing knives, for example. But since I don’t know what my counterpart is betting on, I have to reassess him or her in every situation.
Does my opponent play defensively or offensively? How should I react? And do I have the right office skill with me? Hundreds of situations, hundreds of combinations, hundreds of outcomes in which several people can always get involved: Despite all the features that have been added over the years, the single player could never even begin to approach this level of stealth complexity.
New parts came, Ubisoft donated three more multiplayer, with the same basic principle but different orientations, until Assassin’s Creed: Unity came and introduced the co-op missions. To this day I ask myself: Why? Why this step backwards? The typical semi-secret slaughter from the single player logically led to a brutal slaughter party. That wasn’t well received, the entire game and its technology even less so – and then it was over with the multiplayers.
More parts came, new consoles came, but for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and for the best Assassin experience, I stayed on my dusty PlayStation 3 – until I last year for my streams switched to the PC, as this is where the best chances are of getting enough players for a match.
Even after thousands of games I’m still tied. The never-ending rush between stealth and chase is unique, which is mainly due to the short game duration of ten minutes. Timers and score rankings stress you out just as much as they spur you on.
Then there’s the dynamic between the players themselves. It’s great to still be able to meet a nemesis from old games and treat him with respect and without mercy. There are just way too many great moments in this game:
- When my opponent’s new trick fails me, but I’ve been given it as a kind of lesson
- When I catch one of the old masters and they congratulate me after the match
- If I hide from three pursuers in a crowd and they all eliminate wrong people, for which I get a triple bonus
- When I propel myself from fourth place to first with a poison kill in the final seconds and leave gaping mouths
- But when I talk about it, I want to play it again
A jewel to this day – anyone who copied it failed
No, not everything is perfect in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood either. The matchmaking is unwieldy, there are still annoying bugs and the manageable community sometimes tends to show a certain toxic side. But to this day, Ubisoft can claim this stealth masterpiece as its own.
There are many games like Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid where I’m supposed to trick an NPC AI. But it’s an entirely different thing to set up a game of cat and mouse between real players without introducing gameplay gaps or balance issues.
Every studio that has attempted something similar has failed miserably.
- Hitman 2’s multiplayer mode, called Ghost Mode, threw the whole thing into a strange match between two parallel universes that had little influence on each other – the servers were shut down two years later.
- Hood: Outlaws & Legends, in which two Robin Hood gangs are supposed to pull off a stealth heist, led to a camper battle at the exit – also now as good as dead.
- And the multiplayer of Deathloop unfortunately only degenerates into a small, optional feature that fails due to the general balancing between the hunters, the matchmaking and the general concept – which is not the main reason for the failure of the game.
When it comes to Assassin’s Creed, I always hear how many players want the classic Assassin action back. When it comes to Ubisoft multiplayer games, I always hear how many players criticize the lack of ideas and the lack of fun.
Then kill two birds with one stone and remaster the multiplayer mode of AC: Brotherhood! To date, I think it’s the best assassin and multiplayer experience Ubisoft has ever produced.
I may not be able to summon huge waves of protest that settle in hundreds of thousands of petition signatures, but perhaps I was able to convince you why this game still has so many fans to this day, and actually many more fans needs.
Reference-mein-mmo.de