Next-gen consoles are giving the Assassin's Creed franchise a makeover. The next game in the series, Assassin's Creed Unity, is the first to take full advantage of the capabilities of PlayStation 4, Xbox One and high-end PCs, but we've reached a point in hardware sophistication where "next-gen" doesn't equate to visual bells and whistles. Those are certainly in there, too, but new design capabilities open doors to new kinds of gameplay.
Aside from stunningly huge and detailed historical environments and massive crowds, Assassin's Creed Unity gains a whole host of new abilities, thanks to all that horsepower. Among them are enhanced movements to allow you more variety, like the option to quickly climb down from a high spot, rather than just leap onto one of those conveniently-placed bales of hay. Crowd behavior has been reinvented from the ground up, and stealth is greatly improved as well.
A brand new trailer (via Game Informer) shows off some of those capabilities with a voiceover from Arno Victor Dorian, the game's protagonist and the latest major assassin character to be added to the mythology. Unity's dashing, swashbuckling new hero could be just the kind of old-fashioned shot in the arm this franchise needs. The story goes that Arno was born half Austrian and half French, raised in Versailles, and grew up with a strong need to correct injustices, thanks to the murder of his father when he was a child.
From all indications, he's cut from a similar cloth as Ezio Auditore, the much-loved assassin from the second through fourth games, instead of the less popular Connor Kenway of Assassin's Creed III or his grandfather Edward Kenway from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. (Why Unity isn't a numbered entry in the series has not yet been explained. Until now, every major new assassin protagonist was introduced in a numbered game.) Arno is also not believed to be related to modern-day hero Desmond Miles (RIP), which makes sense since Arno and Connor Kenway would have been alive at the same time -- albeit on different continents.
The trailer, which you'll find embedded below, speaks to the true and terrible history of the French Revolution, long remembered as a time of incredible corruption and anarchy, insinuating Arno into it as the one man "who will fight for" the common people of France.
Assassin's Creed Unity arrives October 28, 2014 exclusively on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
