(Los Angeles) French video game publisher Ubisoft announced on Monday that a virtual reality version of Assassin’s Creed, one of the most popular series in its catalog since its launch in 2007, will be available by end of the year.
“Being able to feel what it’s like to become a master assassin is going to be a huge draw for gamers,” David Votypka, creative director for games, told AFP during a presentation for Ubisoft Forward in Los Angeles.
“It’s a good fit for VR,” where the games that work best “obviously are the ones with a lot” of physical challenges, allowing “to do something different and better in some ways,” said esteemed Mr. Votypka.
Playing Assassin’s Creed means lots of climbing, jumping from one building to another, running, fighting and many other opportunities to have adrenaline rushes.
A team at Ubisoft worked to ensure that people prone to nausea or easily disoriented weren’t too pushed around, adding features that allowed characters to “teleport” from place to place, for example. .
The designers also tried to soften the violence of the murder scenes, so that they were fast, by controlling where the victims could be hit, and by excluding any use of torture.
The Assassin’s Creed saga has already been adapted into comics and cinema in 2016, illustrating Ubisoft’s strategy to adapt its productions for other media.
The game will be available on Meta’s latest virtual reality headsets, known as Quest, formerly Oculus.
Virtual reality is supposed to give relief to the plot of this successful game, which already often centered around modern protagonists entering their own virtual historical world, via the memories of their ancestors.
Players will see through the virtual eyes of Ezio Auditore Ezio Auditore, who died in 1524 in Florence, Italy during the early Renaissance, one of the series’ main characters.
They will also find Kassandra in ancient Greece, and Connor in colonial America.
Ubisoft also presented Assassin’s Creed Mirage on Monday, a new episode to play on video game consoles and personal computers, which is scheduled for release on October 12, when it was initially expected for the end of 2022.
Mirage is an homage to the first Assassin game and is played in medieval Iraq, 9th century Baghdad, as “Basim” fighting against “the Order of the Ancients”.
