Assassin's Creed Brotherhood Rant

{sidebar id=1}“Enough” is the amount of time any gamer can spend with this game. I’ve reached that point with the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood multiplayer and I’m ready to tell the AbleGamers audience that in terms of accessibility it is almost a game for all interested parties… and yes, I do mean all interested parties.

Hearing impaired AbleGamers that want to play the multiplayer aspect of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood won’t have any problem. Those AbleGamers with visual impairments won’t experience too many problems. Similarly, AbleGamers who have issues with color won’t experience too much turbulence. Finally, AbleGamers with mobility issues don’t have too much to worry about either.

Don’t misunderstand, there are improvements that could be made, and hopefully this article will aid in rectifying them, or at least prepare you for a game you might be interested in - here’s hoping for the former as opposed to the latter, and I would very much hope that Ubisoft breaks out their notepads.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood multiplayer is/was only available on the Playstation Network, everything will be in reference to the Dualshock 3 controller - the game is going to be available on XBOX 360, Playstation 3, and PC, but I’m going to stick to things as they are/were on the Playstation 3.

It’s important that you know you won’t be an Assassin in the multiplayer aspect of the game, you’ll be a Templar/Abstergo Agent. If you’ve played both Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II, you’ll know that the Assassins only had one version of the Animus for Mr. Desmond Miles to use whereas in Assassin’s Creed II while escaping Abstergo, there was a multitude of Animus’ for use by multiple Test Subjects/Abstergo Agents.

There are eight character models for players to choose from. That is definitely not to say that there are only eight character models on the map at the same time - there are hundreds of character models on the map at a time.

This makes it easier to blend into the crowd and harder for you to stick out like a sore thumb, unless of course you’re the kind of player who can’t help but run around like a chicken with its head cut off. If you’d rather look at the numbers, 12.5% of a map’s population will look exactly like the character you chose to play as, and 87.5% of the map’s population will look different.

So how do you tell players from non-player characters? Sometimes you don’t.

There is always a compass at the bottom of the screen that will point you in the direction of your target; the closer you get to your target, the more of the compass fills in, and when your target is in sight, the compass glows brighter than it usually appears. All of this is very well done, though the real trick is actually assassinating your target, and this is done by being on the subtle side of things - the more you move like an NPC, the more likely you will be to not alert them.

If you should alert your target, a little reddish-orange indicator will show up on their compass. This is fairly easily seen, but at the same time it isn’t - this is one of those times where having keen eyes is beneficial.

A few things can happen if the alert is noticed; you can hunt down your would-be killer and humiliate them, which I never had any luck at doing. This is done by letting them get close enough to you and beating them to the punch, which I mean very literally as the animation used is punching their character in the face, knocking them to the ground, then washing their face with the sole of your boot.

This wasn’t the easiest thing to do as it becomes a game of “can you hit the square-button faster than I can hit the O-button?”

The other way it could go is a chase where you try to outrun your would-be killer. This is not so easily done for a few reasons; if your killer has the gun perk turned on, all that person has to do is target you, wait for you to get into a relatively still position and shoot you - this more often than not seemed to be my demise when I’d run.

Should they not have the gun perk turned on, all you have to do to get away safely. Never once while playing with a single hand did I manage to do so, and that is a perfect segue to talking about the controls.

I’ve mentioned the ability to play using a single hand a couple times now, so let’s talk about that; it’s entirely possible to play with one hand and still be competitive to a degree. This only takes the use of the left stick (character steering, of course), the square-button (assassinate control), O-button (humiliate control), and X-button (walk faster).

There is also the matter of the right stick which controls the camera. Under the right circumstances, one handed players can control is quite easily, but in the heat of the chase, it’s no good at all.

This makes for an adequate control scheme, but not quite adequate enough; Free-running is a huge part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise yet in order to free-run, players must be able to hold down the L1-button, but without nimble enough hands, one-handed gamers are left out in the cold and are basically just there to be picked off.

This is very discouraging as I was assassinated more than just a few times when the ability to free-run would have come in very handy. Should I call attention to the triangle-button being vacant now, or should I wait a paragraph or two and just wait to make the case I shouldn’t have to make for complete remap-ability?

Onto the rest of the fun stuff done with the shoulder buttons; as I mentioned, there are perks like guns, morph, and disguise, but they’re associated with the L2 and R2 buttons leaving them quite out of reach of one-handed players. The L1-button also knows a trick; it can lock onto a target, but only seemed to me to be beneficial while using the gun.

The D-pad also did a few things, but the only things I remember it being good for is cycling through locked-on targets.

The Dualshock 3 controller has the potential to make use of fourteen buttons: X, square, triangle, O, R1, R2, R3, L1, L2, right, left, up, and down, plus there are the right and left sticks. With the Dualshock 3 Six-axis controller, there are six more available controls.

As I stated above, the triangle-button is an open slot, and I believe that the up and down buttons on the D-pad are also empty slots, and you can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. Instead of making poor choices in filling them and giving your audience a badly put together control scheme, why not break a control scheme wide open and make it fully remap-able?

Just to break things up a bit, I want to hit on the coolest perk in the game which ends up turning the victims screen green and leaves the corpse in a very uncomfortably crumpled heap of flesh.

I’m talking about poison.

I never made it to level 20 where the perk was unlocked, but I did make it to a high enough level to get the gun perk, and it’s presumable that they work nearly the same with the exception being close quarters versus just about anywhere on the map (really, who‘d expect that kind of range from a wrist rocket?).

Since my train of thought derailed, why don’t we finish things out by talking about the maps?

There were only three maps: Rome, Castel Gandolfo, and Siena. Let’s start with Castel Gandolfo - in my opinion it’s the easiest to navigate from a one-handed perspective because navigating the map can be done largely without having to use the free-run button to climb from level to level, though it is completely possibly.

There’s no jumping from chandelier to chandelier without the free-run button, but the only thing I seemed to be good at in my attempts was getting to one then falling all the way to the ground. Thinking about it, I might not have ever got shot in Castel Gandolfo - not sure if there was something to that, but this would definitely be my one-handed favorite of the game.

Moving on to Siena - I really liked this map; it kind of reminded me of one of those maps that really annoy a good player because there’s not all that much to it. It’s just a bunch of tents surrounding a promenade surrounded by benches. The cool thing about this map is that players don’t need the ability to free-run to get on top of certain places to be able to score points for acrobatic kills, all it takes is walking up some benches, waiting for your target to be in the right position and then pressing the assassinate button.

As for Rome, it’s big, and if I would have had the option to skip it, I would have. It’s a great map if you’re playing with both hands firmly on the controller, but if it’s a one-handed affair; players might as well just consider their time on the map as time spent helping to level other players. The big strategy here seemed to be taking the high-ground, and pick off targets as they come.

One-handed gameplay seems to have taken over this article. That’s not a bad thing even if it wasn’t what I was going for. Everyone should be very excited about this, and more so if Ubisoft does anything about it.