“Activate the chameleon ability and Evie goes a little bit transparent,” explains Jeff Skalski, senior producer on Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. “But it’s not that she’s really transparent like she’s wearing active camouflage, we just did that so that players could understand that they’re in that mode. It’s just more of a visual cue for them,”
“But really what Evie is doing is that she’s becoming one with the environment. She’s really controlling her breathing, she’s very much undetectable. She doesn’t need to be in cover, it’s almost like she just gains cover right away. As soon as she moves she can be spotted, but if she can stop prior to that then she’s hidden again. It adds a different way of playing because you can kind of move and wait, and observe the enemy’s route from up close and edge your way through.”
Evie’s chameleon skill is effectively Solid Snake’s cardboard box… Without the box. Like the tongue-in-cheek mobile cover from Metal Gear Solid, Evie’s chameleon skill also requires a bit of suspension of disbelief. Fair enough a cloaked, crouched person might be hard to spot in the shadowy night time setting of the Tower of London mission, but chameleon apparently also works just as effectively in broad daylight, which seems a little artificial or ‘gamey’ to me. At any rate, I much preferred using it to inch my way around heavily guarded areas at ground level as opposed to previous methods such as merging with a pack of wandering civilians who adhere to a set path, although I still found myself instinctively sticking to the rooftops for the most part (especially since I found the new zip-lining mechanic so efficient).
The Tower of London assassination mission I played was an example of one of Syndicate’s many ‘black box’ missions, the mini sandbox assassinations introduced in Unity that offered up multiple methods for garnering information and approaching the main kill. Apparently these black box areas are both more prevalent in Syndicate and better designed than they were in last year’s game.
“Black boxes are really the heart of the Syndicate experience,” explains Skalski. “We loved what was starting to happen in Unity with the black boxes, and we wanted to push them even further this time around,”
“So right off the bat players will notice that should they die or de-synch during a black box, then they won’t have to start at the beginning. They’ll pick up near to where they’ve left off at a nearby highpoint. On top of that, all the investigations that you have prior to the black box feed in and open up areas of opportunity to you.”There were certainly a number of ways for me to reach my target in the Tower itself. I could have pick-pocketed the key from a Royal guard and just let myself in, but then I’d still have had to contend with the guards on the inside. I could have influenced a small group of disenfranchised Royal guards to fight for me and just stormed the place with my fluffy-hatted killsquad, but that option felt too out of character for the more stealth-inclined Evie.
Instead I relied on Evie’s unique knife-throwing skills to lure a number of guards into their untimely demise. I threw one knife at the ground below a number of crates conveniently suspended from a rope, before flinging a second knife at the rope to drop the crates on the hapless guard when he came over to investigate. I’m told that environmental takedown opportunities like these will be numerous in the game, and will grow more elaborate and emergent than the typical explosive barrels (apparently you can also throw hallucinogenic darts at horses and watch them freak out and trample enemies to death, which sounds particularly amusing).
I threw a third knife at a window to get the attention of a group of three patrolling enemies, and with them all clustered together I was able to take them all out with one lob of the electrified Voltaire bomb. With the guard numbers subsequently thinned, I was then able to rendezvous with a double agent amidst the Royal guard ranks and use him to create a false arrest. At this point control switched from Evie to the guard and I was able to lead Evie through the front door of the Tower and past the other guards, with her right arm pinned behind her back as though she was my prisoner.
“The false arrest move actually originated from one of our other gameplay mechanics that already exists in the game, that allows you to coerce and manhandle someone else,” explains Skalski. “For example, you might want to capture a target but you don’t want to do it out in the open. You can instead lead them off by force and throw them into a carriage and drive off to a remote location to deal with them in private.”
More Gamescom 2015
From my time with the game at both E3 and here in Germany, it certainly seems apparent that Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is packing a lot of fun ingredients for fans, borrowing traversal elements from the Batman Arkham series, stealth options from Metal Gear Solid, the character switching and vehicular mayhem of GTA V, and even the use of animals as distractions from Ubisoft's own Far Cry series, while introducing a handful of neat twists on the stealth formula such as the false arrest. Yet my biggest concern is that I’m yet to recognise the main hook that will define Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, in the way that naval exploration and skirmishing put Black Flag on the map, or the way basically everything in the genre-defining Assassin’s Creed II felt so fresh and well-executed. It’s all well and good to have a game with two main characters, but the game itself still needs to carve out a singular identity for itself. Is Syndicate destined to be another fun but less than fantastic entry in the series, or like Evie are its strengths hiding in plain sight, waiting to be uncovered? We’ll find out this October. Tristan Ogilvie's talents are mostly hidden. He's also an extremely reluctant user of Twitter.