Assassin's Creed MMO: Is it a great idea or not?

A couple of years ago, when I was just a bud figure in the games journalism world (now I’m just fruit gone bad), I wrote an article about how Assassin’s Creed’s multiplayer, the first of its kind in Brotherhood, could potentially be one of the best online experiences of all time, if only Ubisoft had changed a few things. Two games along and it doesn’t seem like they’re shaking it up any; if anything, it’s getting worse. There’s a long list of good things to say about the multiplayer component in the recent Assassin’s Creed games, and a lot of bad things, and the news of a potential Assassin’s Creed MMO could extend either list. In today’s article, I thought we’d take a look at why a massively multiplayer entry in the world of Ezio and pals could be a great thing – and why it might not.

Assassin’s Creed MMO

But before we look to the future, let’s take a look at the past. The original two main entries in the Assassin’s Creeds games were single player only, and while Assassin’s Creed 2 dabbled in social media by including the then-ridiculous (and still annoying) uPlay feature. Brotherhood was the first to bring the ancient battle between Templars and Assassin’s into the online realm and did so wonderfully. The aim of the game’s main mode was to find and kill an enemy who didn’t know you were coming. You had to blend into groups of people, move slowly without drawing attention and strike at just the right moment if you wanted to win a match. At least that was the idea in theory and occasionally you’d actually manage to get into a game like that. Otherwise, it was like a strange addition to Call of Duty.

You see, despite the fact that you got extra points for killing silently and creatively, it wasn’t long until people started to discover that you had a much better chance of winning if you looked at quantity rather than quality. Killing more people would net you less points per kills (and a lower increase on the leader board) but would give you more points overall, and when one person started playing that way, the only chance you had of winning was to join him. You’d occasionally come across a very skilled (and slightly lucky) player who could win just by taking advantage of the environment and a steady hand, but for the most part you were looking at something vaguely chaotic and not as good as it could have been. When Revelations came out, it seemed that things had only sunk further into desperation; the games remained largely unchanged but new additions made it even easier to seek out and kill those who would otherwise have been hidden.

What COULD They Have Done?

The problems in the online mode and in the decline in quality between Brotherhood and Revelations weren’t necessarily that the developers didn’t know what they were doing or that they’d decided to dumb it down or anything like that, but that the gameplay they’d decided to implement just doesn’t work well in an online mode. The dramatic, pre-animated kills are a huge part of the single player and it’s hard to imagine the multiplayer without them, but they just don’t work in a situation where a split-second can mean the different between winning and losing. In a game built around stealth, it defeats the point if you’re going to have perks in place that lets you see who’s coming, but how well balanced would it be to have the best players practically invisible and the new players little more than fresh meat? They might have added a better “expert” mode, or allowed you to kill anybody (As it is, you’re limited to your target), but there are problems with both solutions.

So where do you go with an MMO?

So Ubisoft have proven that the Assassin’s Creed series has a lot of potential in the online market – untapped potential in a lot of ways, but potential nonetheless. So how will an MMO work? I can’t see free running in a beautiful, open, massive, living, breathing city working in a persistent world, and that description is basically the tagline for the series as a whole. It could (and has) worked in a social gaming setting, but I suppose that’s hardly an MMO, and not something that would be very surprising. The closest you could get is some of the features of the series – the climbing and maybe bits of the battle system – set in the same world, perhaps even a series of ages linked by the Animus. Actually, I rather like that idea: the ability to visit everywhere from Jerusalem to Rome to discover further mysteries away from Altair and Ezio.

What are the Chances of it happening?

But let’s be honest here, the chances of an Assassin’s Creed MMO seem slim. I love the world and, being a history buff, I love their alternative take on events and characters of the past. The question that I have to ask, and I’m sure it’s a question a lot of people will ask if rumours of an Assassin’s Creed MMO persist, is why would they take this series to that level? It’s isn’t an obvious combination and while I have no doubt that the developers could make it work, I can’t see it happening now and retaining anything that made it such a great series in the first place. The fans will be disappointed, will probably play it anyway while complaining in online forums, and word of mouth will mean Assassin’s Creed Online will go the way of so many MMO spin-offs from the last decade.

But there’s still hope, right?

With that said, the job listing that started this rumour did call for somebody to work on a next-gen MMO, something that we tend to talk a lot about in these articles. As the leap in console tech is implemented, things will start to change. It’ll probably be gradual at first and, to be fair, there are a series of MMOs out right now that I would consider “next-gen MMOs, things like TERA and The Secret World. So perhaps Ubisoft really can impress, maybe they know something that we don’t and in two or three years, it’ll be impossible to tell the difference between a single player game and an MMO. That would be pretty exciting, I just hope that this time the developers manage to get a little closer to that perfect online game than they have over the past two years.