Rakim Allah
Superstar
The benefit of another person is they can lessen all of the mistakes you'd normally make alone. You always have a general sense of where your coop partner is via their ever-present icon. It pays to stay close to them, but not too close; you want to be able to save them, or at least minimize their mistakes, but you don't want to get caught in the crossfire when they screw up. The Last-Known Position is still handy in coop, making it simple for you to take down foes while they're hunting for your friend. There are also special skills just for coop, like the group healing ability my assassin had equipped, or another skill that shares the information found via Eagle Vision with the team.
There there was the Heist, which scaled the action up with 4-players. This was still fun, but waymore hectic. The Heist in question had us sneaking into a guarded mansion to steal a painting, but there were multiple hiding spots for the painting itself. That meant reaching a number of different spots on the map and examining each potential winner. Of course, the correct painting happened to be the very last painting we scanned, something the developer assured me is completely random.
In 4-player co-op, there seemed to be a near-constant stream of one or more players tripping into guards and causing an all-out melee in their section of the map. The other non-dev in my play session was constantly stumbling into combat and he even died at one point while I was on the other side of the mansion. When a player in the team falls in battle, the rest of the team has around 45 seconds to revive them. If that player completely dies, the whole team fails, meaning your group is only as strong as its weakest link.
I'm sure that last idea saddens some potential coop players. Yeah, you have to rely on the team. To me, this means Assassin's Creed Unity's matchmaking is key. I asked the developers present about the matchmaking system, which seems to be partially-based around the star ratings I mentioned before. The game attempts to pair you with other players who have the same star rating, while also trying to find people who compliment your currently equipped abilities. Unity will try to stick a heavy with a stealth character, or a ranged assassin with a melee specialist.
The Co-op Icons let you know what you're dealing with online.
The co-op icons for each player also clue you into their personal specialities. Of course, you can still change skills and gear on the fly if the system goes awry. Great matchmaking is key in any online game mode and in Assassin's Creed Unity the difference between a great team and a melange of failure is so wide. (Splinter Cell: Blacklist's Spies vs. Mercs online mode had the same issue.) This remains my biggest question mark for the live game, despite the assurances of the Ubisoft team. At the very least, coop looks like it'll be fun with friends.
Finishing the Heist rewards all four players with the mission pay-out, plus an additional bonus. Again, the new focus on stealth is apparent; this bonus starts at 50,000 currency and then gets docked when you do things that aren't stealthy. (Your humble previewer had the highest bonus pay in his run-through, thank you very much.) If you're going to be buying some of the most expensive equipment in the game, doing repeatable Heists seems to be the way to go.
Overall, the switch to co-op is a change I prefer. Again, I've never been a huge competitive multiplayer fan. I like to play with people, not against them. Ubisoft has gone a long way towards making co-op action a seamless part of the single-player game: co-op missions appear on your map just like any other mission and you can decide to play them or ignore them. I forsee myself ignoring them until I finish off Arno's story, but I won't ignore online completely as I have in previous AC games.
It's not completely fresh. I mean, it's still Assassin's Creed.
A Fresh Start
Looking back over the words I've written above, I feel like I came away with a more positive impression of Assassin's Creed Unity than I had when I was in Vegas. There's a lot of great ideas here, but the painting feels a bit unfinished in places. The digital city of Paris looks great, but the performance is rough at times. The new Parkour system is a welcome change, but Arno gets stuck occasionally. Stealth takes the cake again, but combat is more unforgiving than it's been in the past.
Unity is looking good so far, but from a pure polish standpoint, Black Flag currently reigns supreme. (I guess it says a lot when the person you have to beat is yourself.) Unity is Assassin's Creed 1 again, a new start for the franchise with all the problems inherent starting from scratch. And while I definitely enjoyed my time with Unity, I admit that my vision is already moving towards Assassin's Creed 2015, to see if it can improve on this base they way Black Flag improved on Assassin's Creed III and Assassin's Creed II improved on Assassin's Creed. If a jump like that is in the cards, AC 2015 will blow some minds.
Until then, Unity feels like a great rebuilding year.
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