Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Aha! I’ve just received word that PC review code for Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is leaping towards my post box as we speak (WITtery due on Nov 29th, if all goes to plan), which means we can stop worrying that we’ll be waiting months for Ezio and Desmond to finally creep this way. So, it seems apt to run this AssCreed: The Story So Far videorama, given the time-hopping backstory of this series is fairly convoluted and not a little silly. Oh, I wish they’d lose the sci-fi stuff entirely, but ultro-lore does seem to be the default way franchises build frighteningly passionate fanbases.
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Poor old Ubisoft has taken a few money-knocks, admit its latest financial results, which involved a $74.1m / £45.5m loss for the last fiscal year. This has, sadly, led to the cancellation of several unnamed games. Everyone’s praying it’s not Beyond Good & Evil 2, of course, but it’ll probably be a while until we find out what definitely faced the axe. However, a piece of good news for RPS-types is that the reorganisation (which is a word that sounds like it’s positive but actually means lay-offs, closures and cancellations) resulting from these bad times has lead to Ubi looking more confidently at the PC as a gaming platform…
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Ubisoft’s third Assassin’s Creed game arrived on PC on Friday – some four months later than the console version. I poured some time in the Xbox 360 (hissssss) edition late last year, and I’ve now spent the last week or so with the PC one. Too little too late, or about damned time? Or a bit of both? Here’s my verdict.

The game that’s least like the Assassin’s Creed concept turns out to be the best use of the concept yet. Oh look, a conclusion in the very first line. I’ve ballsed this one right up, eh? Perhaps; but I’m aware there are preconceptions to be got past here.
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Ubisoft, you do like making mistakes. The publisher’s strange habit of incorporating piracy into their products seems to have reared once more. Remember back in 2008 when they thought it would be a good idea to officially patch Rainbow Six Vegas 2 with an illegal NO-CD crack? Today Eurogamer brings us news that those copyright infringing scamps may have been at it again. This time it looks like they’ve included a torrented version of their own soundtrack in the Digital Deluxe Edition of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood on PC.

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The people of Ubisoft have released a video to hype up the fact that the PC version of Brotherhood – that multiplayer stabbing game of the series – will come with The Da Vinci Disappearance, which is the console DLC for the game. Which essentially means it’s not DLC on PC, it just is part of the game. The clue to the details of this content is in the title: it’s a single and multi-player mission which features the kidnapping of Leonardo Da Vinci. Presumably you’ll have to rescue him, and dudes will get stabbed. Yeah, go watch the trailer, that is what happens. And it happens with style.

With that thought in mind, I suppose I’d better go and hunt for the scalps of indie devs at the IGF. Wish me luck!
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The accursed always-on DRM of Ubisoft’s last couple of games seems to be dead. VG247 have word from a Ubi rep that “The PC version of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, after an initial login, will be playable offline in single player mode.” So that’s better. Still internet-based, of course, but without the need to always be online.

The game is out March 17 in the US and March 18 in Europe. I’ve posted a tech specs and special editions detail release we received yesterday below, in case anyone is interested in that stuff. It basically says that The Da Vinci Disappearance DLC will appear immediately in the PC version of the game.
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The Steam pre-order page for the PC version of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood (which we now know will be landing on the 18th of March) would appear to be missing something. The eagle-eyed tipsters at Beefjack have spotted that where the Steam page for Assassin’s Creed 2 described the game’s need for an permanent internet connection in capital letters and addressed the game’s DLC in the Game Details box, Brotherhood has no such warnings, indicating that the game will be shipping without the DRM (though they could always update the page later). It wouldn’t be a massively surprising move, seeing as how R.U.S.E. shipped without the hateful thing. We should celebrate! Is it too early to open a bottle of something? Surely not.

We’ve asked Ubisoft to make an official statement on the DRM for Brotherhood, but no response as yet.

Caw, Assassin’s Creed 2 made me angrier than a game’s done for ages. Loved the first game. Loved how hard and how tense it got towards the end. Then what does the second game do? It crumples up that difficulty like a paper bag, and makes the whole game a cakewalk.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood should be much more my kind of thing. The multiplayer looks great, and the new trailer located below makes the single player seem pretty appealing too, even if it just comes down to how fun your murder-squads are to control.
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Brotherhood’s multiplayer is smart. The singleplayer might have you driving tanks and sinking ships, but the multiplayer remembers that you’re all meant to be assassins and has a ton of fun with that. There’s some expositional stuff about how you’re all Templar agents training in the animus, but what it boils down to is that you choose from one of eight different Renaissance characters and then spend the next ten minutes desperately trying to murder one another. But this isn’t some plain old deathmatch, or even some exciting new deathmatch with the Assassin’s Creed engine. You see, you guys are professionals. There are rules.
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As the subject line says. Which is sad, but is just something that occasionally happens. As long as it’s a proper delay, and not just one format being treated as an afterthoug… what? Oh no. Really? Man! Yeah, it’s just the PC one that’s been delayed until early next year. Ubisoft, you loveable funsters. You know how to make a dying format feel special.

In other notes, this talking about the Doctor’s deadly syringe seems very skeezy to me. MAN SYRINGE, etc.

RPS didn’t got to E3. So E3 came to RPS, with Ubisoft showing their E3 demos in London yesterday. South London being slightly easier to reach than Los Angeles, I went along to have a look at what they have to offer us in the coming twelve months. Well, quite a bit. While ManiaPlanet will await a future date to look properly at it, there were four key PC-relevant games on show: Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Driver: San Francisco, Ruse and – though it hasn’t been announced for the PC, I’ll be surprised if it’s not – Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. What did I make of them? I tell you below, via the medium of telling.
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