Assassin's Creed's online showing was crafted with big city boys like me in mind. Over the years I've spent in London, I've evolved a quietly sizzling hatred of fellow commuters, a belligerence born of sheer sensory attrition. This banker needs to switch his phone off and start thinking about other people's feelings, the bastard. And that guy in the hoodie's standing too close - must be a gang leader, trying to rob me. And this woman wouldn't meet my eye when she passed me on the stairs. She must think I'm a serial killer. What an utter cow.
In Assassin's Creed: Revelations, this level of misanthropy isn't irrational - it's sensible. Besides a flawed but respectable campaign, the game offers a slew of new and returning modes, ranging from the objective-capture shenanigans of Steal the Artefact (in which players must hold onto a treasure for as long as they can) to the homelier, rapid-fire thrills of Deathmatch and Simple Deathmatch. As with Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, the one constant is that you'll never know for sure who the enemy players are.
There are tools to help with the spotting, and they vary with the mode. In Wanted, an elegant circular radar points you toward your target, the directional wedge fattening as you near. The closer you are, the harder it is to know which ostensible innocent bystander you're after. There's no radar in Simple Deathmatch, though the target portrait still lights up in stages when you're facing the right way (in concert with smaller maps, this increases the bodycount massively). In Artifact Assault (capture the flag), you'll be flagged on HUDs as soon as you enter the enemy's spawning area, so grab that trinket quick unless you enjoy having your neck snapped.
Whatever the mode, interfacial tips will only get you so far. Observation is the be all and end all. Knife the wrong chap, and you'll have to wait while the game picks out a new target, sweating at the thought that you've just advertised your murderous agenda to the world at large. Revelations online is ruthlessly asymmetrical: in all the head-to-head modes save choose-your-own Assassination, you can only kill the person you're contracted to kill. Your sole defence against pursuers is a sound thump to the face, either stunning or, nowadays, disabling the attacker at the cost of your own life.
There's a beefed-up tutorial to teach you the basics (and you can always delve back into 'bot matches to hone your skills), but Assassin's Creed online remains a steeper, less intuitive curve than most. Unlockable perks, streak rewards and abilities can be devastating, till you work out how to counter them - poison is an unmatched offensive weapon, while smoke bombs inconvenience both pursuers and targets. Echoing the campaign's bomb crafting, skills can now be "crafted" for different ranges, cooldown times and so forth using match winnings.
If you can crack it, however, Revelations online is the perfect antidote to military-FPS desensitisation. It's still the place Assassin's Creed's stealth pretensions come together, and while as in single player there's a sense of diminishing returns, the new modes and tweaks keep things fresh. Recommended.
Read our full Assassin's Creed: Revelations review - our thoughts here are reflected in the score.
22 comments so far...
Dowgle on 26 Nov '11 said:
Only just got this yesterday, havent had a chance to play it yet, but I loved Brotherhoods multiplayer so this should be good fun.
wishface on 26 Nov '11 said:
I have no idea how the assasinate mode works. You have no target...?
CunningSmile on 26 Nov '11 said:
Isn't that the CoD fan pleasing free-for-all? No specific target, just kill anything that isn't an NPC.
OXM ETboy on 26 Nov '11 said:
Yeah, you have to identify other players, lock them and kill them with almost no assists. There's a proximity indicator, but that's it.
wishface on 26 Nov '11 said:
I don't really get how you find a target though.
OXM ETboy on 26 Nov '11 said:
Via your powers of observation
People don't act like NPCs.
wishface on 27 Nov '11 said:
Isn't that the deathmatch mode? What's the difference.
OXM ETboy on 27 Nov '11 said:
In Deathmatch you're given a single target - you can't kill anybody else, though you can stun other players or hit them with secondary abilities. In Assassination, you choose your own target.
wishface on 27 Nov '11 said:
ok that makes more sense, thanks. the online interface in the game is somewhat esoteric.
OXM ETboy on 27 Nov '11 said:
No worries
I'd love to see an optional drop-in competitive feature for Assassin's Creed single player, sort of like the Dark Souls phantom system. Imagine popping into another player's Constantinople and tracking them down, for shizzles/gizzles.
wishface on 27 Nov '11 said:
Unfortunately there are two things that spoil the online: lag and the rank system. Players of a higher rank have a ridiculous advantage because of the unlock system. They simply have access to more stuff while low rank players don't.
Lag kills the ability to respond quickly (ie stun) and makes it unplayable. You won't notice connectivity issues outside of these situations, but it is there (depending on who's host and where the other players are located - again MS needs to get dedicated servers for all online games if the publishers themselves won't, we are paying for this ffs!).
Right now it's just unplayable. I've stunned countless opponents - and I know i pressed the button way before they even moved, only to find i've been killed. The same with escaping through crashbreakers.
CunningSmile on 28 Nov '11 said:
Again with lag issues. You sure you don't just have a reaaly bad internet connection?
wishface on 28 Nov '11 said:
Online connectivity doesn't work the way you think it does. If my connection was poor then the game, which explicitly tells you the measure of your connection/nat, would tell me so. It doesn't; quite the opposite. The problem is p2p matchmaking with a bunch of people hundreds of miles apart. People making comments about an individuals' connection are people that haven't understood how these things work. There are strict timing issues with the stun move in AC that are made very problematic with lag.
The game is also not helped by an unlock system that gives the higher ranking player a huge advantage with stuff only they can access, like killstreak bonuses to their point score. Low ranking players don't have that.
CunningSmile on 28 Nov '11 said:
I only ask because you constantly complain about lag issues in online that no one else has experienced. I very rarely have a problem with the stun move on AC, you just need to time it right. Some times it works other times it doesn't, but when it doesn't I'm happy that it's because I miss timed it exactly the same as if I mistime the counter in the main game.
As for more experienced players having better perks, that's just life. With any PvP game the people who put in the time/have no life will always be better just because they have practiced. I had my first game of Revelations the other night and came second, so the experience thing obviously isn't that bad because I'm pretty crap.
wishface on 28 Nov '11 said:
And AC has lag.
And that's not it's only problem. As I said, the ranking system produces a ridiculous degree of advantage. Also the assigning of targets is flawed; you can spend far too long without an actual target (in the relevant modes) so you can't score though you will have pursuers. Low ranking players are often assigned the same target (usually the player in first place) as several other players and is therefore handicapped when it comes to scoring points especially if he spawns farther from that target than the other pursuers. INstead the low scoring player should be assigned th next highest scorer and so forth. It's stupid, arbitrary game design that makes it far harder for a player to score. And if you don't score, you don't rank up.
On top of that the stun move is just broken (or the other players, being higher level, have access to perks and abilities that make it far harder for them to be stunned and far easier for you to be stunned by them). 99% of the time i use that move i still get killed, no matter what. It's ridiculous.
I don't know what's changed between Brotherhood and this, but they've f**ked this right up.
CunningSmile on 28 Nov '11 said:
But you say that about everything, regardless of what other people are experiencing. Therefore I can only reach one of two conclusions:
1) You have the most pin point reflexes known to man. Jet fighter pilots and Formula 1 racing drivers pale to insignificance next to your reflexes and therefore you notice lag that is measured in microseconds that us mere mortals do not notice. If that is the case I don't really think the developers can be blamed as they are again merely human and would not notice the lag.
2) You simply aren't very good at games and are looking for excuses in order to cover this up and continue living in denial.
I really hope it's option 1, as I've never met a full blown Xmen style mutant before and it would be cool!
Bezza89 on 28 Nov '11 said:
lol CunningSmile, I fear you are talking to a wall.
wishface on 28 Nov '11 said:
Because the truth is that most games do lag; very few are dedicated servers. Even GoW3 didn't have it setup as advertised and half the time they weren't working. P2P is a poor excuse for online gaming in 2011. Your points are irrelevant: in this game if i stun someone first i can see this verified by the animation, my character slaps the attacker who then suddenly turns around and stabs me. Now how does that work? The game has registerd that my move went first yet i lose. What's the point of having the move then?
comabob on 28 Nov '11 said:
But Gears 3 WAS Dedicated Servers they ev -
wait. No - f**k it not gonna bother
OXM ETboy on 28 Nov '11 said:
That's a Contested Kill - it's when you don't quite get the stun attack off quickly enough. You still wind up dead, but you'll also earn points and part-disable your killer. And your killer won't get a bonus. I'll check when I get a moment, can't quite remember off the top of my head.
wishface on 28 Nov '11 said:
Gears 3 used a dedicated serveR that wasn't always active.
wishface on 28 Nov '11 said:
That's how it is scored. But the problem is the timing. Latency makes it impossible. The move is also far too random.