Assassin's Creed Unity

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Assassin's Creed Unity is a video game released by Ubisoft in November 2014 . It is the eighth part of the Assassin's Creed series. Like its predecessors, it belongs to the action-adventure genre. The game is set in 18th century Paris at the time of the French Revolution and follows the main character Arno Victor Dorian. He has French and Austrian ancestors. He suffered a grave loss in his youth: both his birth father and stepfather perished under mysterious circumstances. Arno was wrongly accused of murdering his stepfather, which is why he was locked in the Bastille , from which he and an assassin can escape during the storm on the Bastille . It later emerges that his stepfather was a high-ranking Templar , and so was his daughter Élise, with whom Arno had fallen in love. After escaping the Bastille, he joins the Assassins to uncover the real forces behind the French Revolution.

In the course of the game, as in the other Assassin's Creed parts, you meet some historical personalities such as Maximilien de Robespierre , the Marquis de Sade , Napoleon and many more.

In addition, as in the previous series, there is a storyline in the present.

There are also time anomalies in which Arno Dorian finds himself in Paris during World War II , the Belle Époque and the Middle Ages through a mistake in his DNA .

action

Intro

The plot initially takes place in the present, with a new, unknown assassin adept from the first-person perspective. The memory in the Helix begins in 1307 and the storming of the Paris Temple and the capture of the Templars and their Grand Master Jacques de Molay . During the attack, de Molay instructs another Templar brother, whom you play, to hide his sword and book. After he takes it from an assassin who has already stolen it to hide these artifacts in a crypt , he is killed by an assassin while he is watching de Molay's capture. The memory jumps to de Molay burned at the stake , and his curse against King Philip IV. And Pope Clement V in front.

At this point, Bishop, the Assassin Operations team leader, hackers into the current memory sequence and personally asks the player to join the Assassin Brotherhood as the new Adept . Bishop reveals a top-secret Abstergo internal video memo in which Abstergo describes how they intend to use that memory. For this purpose, they want to use the precursor DNA (which is hidden in a triple instead of a double helix) for their own purposes ( Phoenix project ). Bishop offers access to another segment of memory in the hope of learning more about the Templars' plans.

Main story

The memory begins in France in 1776 in the Palace of Versailles , when the 10-year-old Arno Victor Dorian, the son of a French nobleman , meets Élise de La Serre, who is of the same age, while playing. Élise is the daughter of the Templar Grand Master François de la Serre. After his biological father was murdered under mysterious circumstances in the palace (see the end of Assassin's Creed Rogue ), Grand Master François de la Serre adopts Arno as his son, although De La Serre knows that his father was an assassin. The story jumps back to 1789 and shows Élise's initiation into the Knights Templar. Meanwhile, Arno is given the task of delivering a message to his adoptive father de la Serre. However, he does not hand over this message personally, but places it in his stepfather's office to meet with Élise after her inauguration ceremony. After meeting Élise, Arno finds his stepfather François de la Serre murdered in the courtyard. The undelivered letter was intended to warn de la Serre of the assassination attempt. The gendarmerie thinks Arno is the murderer and locks him up in the Bastille .

In his communal cell he finds cryptic writings on the wall and impresses a fellow prisoner, the assassin Pierre Bellec, with his martial arts. Bellec offers Arno to join the Assassin Brotherhood. The two prisoners escape during the storming of the Bastille . Arno returns home and is informed by Élise that the message that Arno was to personally deliver to her father was a warning of his impending murder. When Élise learns that Arno had not personally delivered the letter to her father, she blames him for his death and decides that she has nothing more to do with him. She reveals herself to him as a member of the Templars.

Arno joins the Assassin Brotherhood. Bellec takes Arno under his wing and introduces him to the arts of the assassins as his mentor. Arno asks the Assassin's leaders for permission to find and eliminate the other Templars involved in de la Serre's murder plot. The leader of the assassins, Honoré de Mirabeau , allows Arno to plot the murder to expose his stepfather; he himself wants peace between the Assassins and the Templars. The mutual peace efforts were already initiated by the former Templar grand master and Arno's stepfather de la Serre, which is why he was murdered by his colleagues.

In the course of his investigations, Arno rescues a silversmith named François-Thomas Germain, who is being held hostage by the current Templar Grand Master Lafreniere, from his captivity. After the assassination attempt on Grand Master Lafreniere, who was actually the one who tried to warn his stepfather de la Serre with his message, Arno meets Élise again. With the help of Élise, he finds out that the Germain freed by him was the real mastermind behind the murder attempt on his stepfather de la Serre. The Assassin Leadership Council, meanwhile, begins to doubt Arno's loyalty, as Arno is increasingly acting on his own to uncover the conspiracy behind the murder of de la Serre.

In the course of his investigations, Arno came to the conclusion that Germain was planning to unleash a mass revolt against the King of France. To prevent this, Arno murders two central figures behind the uprising, an officer named Captain Frederic Rouille, who is organizing a prisoner uprising, and a merchant named Marie Levesque, who initiates a food shortage to create the impression that the nobility are lavishly while the third estate starved to death. Arno's path also crosses an artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte in search of letters from the leader of the Assassin Brotherhood Mirabeau to King Ludwig. The Templars used the contents of the letters as a pretext to eliminate the agents of the assassins in France. Bonaparte later helped him capture Captain Rouille, who was under his command during the September 1792 massacre .

During the uprising, Arno convinces his adoptive sister, Élise, to work with the Assassin Brotherhood. Mirabeau agrees to work together in the hope of being granted a favor by the potential future Grand Master of the Knights Templar in order to be able to restart the peace talks that have begun. Mirabeau is murdered by Bellec, who intends to punish the Assassin leadership because of the close cooperation with the Templars. Bellec offers his former apprentice a collaboration; Arno refuses, however, and a fierce battle breaks out between student and mentor. Arno kills Bellec and flees the beginning uprisings of the citizens for food, only to escape shortly afterwards with Élise in a hot air balloon . Arno confesses to Élise that he has always loved her; she reciprocates his feelings.

When the revolution is in full swing, Arno pursues Germain and discovers he was the beheading of King Louis XVI. significantly advances. At the same time, Élise is also to be executed. Out of love for Élise, Arno decides to protect her instead of pursuing and killing Germain. Élise rejects his decision. Arno is also banished from the Brotherhood of Assassins for ignoring orders in order to pursue his personal vendetta. This plunges him into a deep depression .

Arno languishes for a few months before being found in Versailles by Élise, who convinces him to return while Paris suffers from the reign of terror . Arno returns to Paris and, with Élises' help, discredits Maximilien de Robespierre's reputation . Germain, now Grand Master of the Templars, used Robespierre to keep the chaos going during the revolution. After Arno and Élise have found Robespierre, who has locked himself in his office to avoid imminent arrest, Élise shoots Robespierre in the jaw, forcing him to locate Germain.

The two find Germain in the same Templar crypt where the game started and where the Templar hid Jacques de Molay's sword and book. Germain wants to recover the sword of Eden. In the course of the battle, Germain uses the sword's magical abilities and buries Arno under rubble. Élise tries to help Arno out of the rubble, but then goes on to attack Germain. When Arno is able to free himself from the rubble, Élise is killed by Germain at the same time. Arno kills Germain, who in his agony reveals to Arno that he wanted to cleanse the Templar Order from the inside out because he believed that they had forgotten the true teachings of their last Grand Master Jacques de Molay.

The game concludes with a monologue by Arno, in which he explains how his understanding of the Assassin's Creed has changed and he promises to watch over Paris and keep Élise's memory alive. Years later, Arno has now become a master assassin, he retrieves Germain's skeleton from the temple with Napoleon's help and deposits it in the catacombs of Paris.

In the present, Bishop expresses confidence that Abstergo will not be able to find the skeleton.

Gameplay

General

As with its predecessors, it is an open world game from the third-person perspective . In contrast to its predecessor Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag , the game takes place again primarily on land, in Paris and Versailles in the 18th century. Seven Parisian and two Versailles districts can be visited, plus there is the Paris Underground. The look of the different areas is very different, with roughly every fourth house being accessible. In addition to the well-known stealth passages, for which the cover system has been revised again, so that Arno can now also creep around freely, the action-packed fights also return in a revised form. In addition to a sword and a pistol, Arno also has the new phantom blade, which can shoot berserkers and normal blades, a combination of the classic hidden blade with a small crossbow. During the battles, a life bar is shown above the opponents for the first time. The controls of the game have been fundamentally revised so that more control is possible in the climbing passages. Similar to classic role-playing games, there is for the first time a skills tree that can be used to improve the various skills such as sneaking or handling certain weapons.

Multiplayer mode

The game has a co-op multiplayer mode in which two to four players have to complete a mission together. Each player takes on the role of an assassin, each player seeing himself as Arno. The faces of the three players are simply exchanged, the body model remains the same. Each player can use the skills developed in the single player mode in this mode. These cooperative missions take place next to the main game and should turn out to be very variable due to some random elements and approaches. These missions can also be played alone, there is no need to use the co-op mode. The classic competitive multiplayer mode, which was included in several predecessors, will not return for the time being. The video game designer and producer Vincent Pontbriand responsible for the game stated, however, that it is possible that it will be subsequently delivered via DLC .

synchronization

The character animations for the game were created with the help of the motion capturing process.

role Original voice German voice actor
Arno Victor Dorian Dan Jeannotte Timmo Niesner
Élise de La Serre Catherine Berubé Manja Doering
François-Thomas Germain Julian Casey Bernd Rumpf
Aloys La Touche Olivier Lamarche Santiago Ziesmer
Marquis de Sade Alex Ivanovici Till Hagen
Napoleon Bonaparte Brent Skagford Axel Malzacher
Maximilien de Robespierre Bruce Dinsmore Bernd Vollbrecht
Pierre Bellec Anthony Lemke

marketing

Download extensions

A Season Pass was offered again when the game was released. In addition to the weapon and single mission packages, this included the DLC Dead Kings and the stand-alone game Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China . This is a 2.5D game. In the course of the protests against the poor quality condition when the game was released, the CEO of Ubisoft Studios Montreal and Toronto announced that all customers would have access to the announced DLC Dead Kings and that the Season Pass would be withdrawn from sale. Previous buyers of the Season Pass could choose a title from Ubisoft's 2014 program as compensation.

Special editions

As with the predecessors, several different special editions are offered:

  • Assassin's Creed Unity: Special Edition: Contains the game as well as the single player mission
  • Assassin's Creed Unity: Gold Edition: Contains the game in digital form as well as the Season Pass and is only available for PC
  • Assassin's Creed Unity: The Bastille Edition
  • Assassin's Creed Unity: Notre Dame Edition
  • Assassin's Creed Unity: Guillotine Collector's Case

In addition, Amazon offers a Pocket Watch Bundle with a pocket watch, an in-game parade pistol and a single player mission.

Pre-order content

There are several pre-order packages that are issued when you pre-order from different retailers. These are missions, clothing or weapons for the assassin. As with the predecessor, there is also a website that is only accessible to pre-orderers. This pre-order program is called “Unite” and gives the opportunity to unlock further in-game content, the first volume of the “Der Untergang” comics in digital form and the game's soundtrack by joining forces with other players.

Merchandise

Corresponding to the release date of the game, a figure of the main character will appear again, who will unlock the in-game content "The Fearless Assassin's outfit". A replica of the phantom blade (a combination of the hidden blade and a small crossbow) will also appear.

At the end of November 2014, Panini Verlag published the book of the same name on the game, written by Oliver Bowden , and a fictional employee handbook for Abstergo employees who deal with the Unity project with regard to the contemporary part of the game.

Leak

On March 19, 2014, the Kotaku website received screenshots from an Assassin's Creed game. They also received the information that this should be called Unity and that it would play during the French Revolution. On the screenshots you can see the main character Arno Dorian, as well as the area around France, with some famous buildings. New control elements, such as the “Parkour-up” and “Parkour-down” buttons, are already recognizable. On March 21st, Ubisoft responded to this leak by confirming the game's development. Since no announcement was actually planned at this point in time, only a very short teaser was shown that confirmed the setting at the time of the French Revolution. In addition, the leak speaks of a game called Assassin's Creed Comet . This is the game Assassin's Creed Rogue .

reception

Criticism of the lack of playable female character

After Ubisoft presented the cooperative mode on June 9, 2014 at E3 , voices were raised criticizing the lack of a female character in this mode. In an initial statement, Ubisoft cites the reason that there was a lack of resources to introduce an additional female co-op character, since "a female character (...) [would] mean that we would have had to make numerous animations and costumes again". Jonathan Cooper, who used to work as a designer for the Assassin's Creed series, described this statement on Twitter as nonsense. In his opinion, the necessary animations could be completed "in one or two days". Ubisoft responded to the advancement of the debate with another statement, in which it was again emphasized that the Assassin's Creed franchise is "developed by a multicultural team with different beliefs and religions" and that there are quite strong female characters in Unity and the main characters of the past games were already diverse. In addition, Ubisoft's Creative Director Alex Amancio made it clear that the player would see himself as Arno, even in co-op mode. The other players also see themselves as Arno in their game, but are shown with a different face to their teammates. In response to the debate, fans started a petition calling for not only the introduction of a female lead character but also greater ethnic diversity among the characters to be seen.

Frame rate controversy

In October 2014, British online games magazine senior producer Vincent Pontbriand quoted as saying that Ubisoft would publish the game for all console versions with a resolution of 1600 × 900 pixels (900p) and a frame rate of 30 frames per second. The main reason is that you can offer identical versions on both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and avoid discussions about the different performance. Technically, the developers are limited by the insufficient CPU performance. Ubisoft was accused from customer circles of slowing down the more powerful PlayStation 4 compared to the competing product Xbox One for no apparent reason. Ubisoft contradicted this interpretation and called the rendering of Pontbriand a misinterpretation. According to World Level Design Director Nicolas Guérin and Creative Director Alex Amancio, the decision regarding the frame rate was made in order to create a more film-like impression. Higher frame rates of 60 frames per second are therefore mainly of interest for shooters , while with Unity, similar to the film adaptation of The Hobbit recorded at 48 frames per second , they would not look realistic. Guérin suggested that the gaming industry as a whole would opt out of a 60 frames per second standard, including a. because it is too expensive.

Post-release criticism

Especially on PCs, testers and customers complained about serious performance problems with the game, even with above-average hardware. These included, for example, a drop in the frame rate and long loading times. The game received negative reviews, especially when it came to customer ratings. Ubisoft responded to the criticism with a hotfix and a one gigabyte patch on November 13th. The graphics card manufacturers Nvidia and AMD also released new drivers that should fix technical problems with the game. Because of the importance of the annual Assassin's Creed release to Ubisoft's business model, the company's share price fell 10% after the problems and criticisms became known.

Markus Schwerdtel, online editor-in-chief of Gamestar, criticized Ubisoft's business behavior as "French fat bowl bingo" in a column. With Unity , the company did pretty much anything to annoy customers. Even without the controversies about a missing female player character, the repetitive game design of all major Ubisoft game series (including Far Cry , Watch Dogs ), strange DLC promotions, the forced graphic equality between PlayStation 4 and Xbox One or "predatory pre-order bonuses" be it above all the obviousness with which the program repeatedly prompts the player to purchase gaming advantages through micropayment even after purchasing the full price title , even though it is not a free-to-play game. The compulsion to use a smartphone application accompanying the game in order to be able to solve certain tasks in the console game is also unfriendly to the customer. Ultimately, in contrast to other main parts, the game does not show any further playful development and is now lagging behind the competition from Middle-earth: Mordor's shadow , especially in the core mechanics, parkour climbing . Ubisoft has become too cocky after the success of the series in the years before and is trying to get as much money out of it as possible. Instead, the company should have invested a little more time in developing the new generation of consoles and technology. The offshoot Assassin's Creed Rogue, which was published at the same time as Unity only for the previous generation of consoles and is therefore based on old technology, does not have any of these problems. Polygon’s Ben Kuchera also complained in a column about Ubisoft’s press embargo, which banned online magazines from publishing a test report on the pre-distributed test samples before the game was released. Instead, tests could only be published at noon, twelve hours after the start of sales. Kuchera described such measures as a frequent sign that a company is aware of the problems with its product, but should not jeopardize the start of sales by negative reports. In such cases, the embargo would be used as a weapon by the game manufacturers. Paul Tassi of Forbes Magazine described Ubisoft as "the new EA", alluding to the continuing bad reputation of its competitor Electronic Arts .

Ubisoft responded to the criticism that the responsibility for the series offshoot planned for the following year lies with the studio Ubisoft Quebec, while the previously lead studio Ubisoft Montreal should not publish a title in the series again until the following year. According to Ubisoft Montreal's creative director Lionel Raynaud, the developer has more time to develop a successor. However, he also defended tight schedules as a positive incentive to carefully consider expansions to the game and only commit to changes that are meaningful and fun. The decision to include Studio Quebec in the series' development cycle was announced in July 2014.

successor

The successor Assassin's Creed Syndicate was released on October 23, 2015 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The plot is now in London of the Victorian age set.

Trivia

In response to the Notre-Dame fire in Paris in 2019 , Ubisoft made the game available for free download on Uplay for one week . The company also promised a donation of 500,000 euros for the reconstruction of the damaged cathedral. The publisher cites the reason for this that the developers feel connected to him because the building is detailed and freely accessible in the game.

Web links

Individual evidence

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