Something that I was looking forward to for quite some time, I was actually able to get my hands on a beta key for this thanks to a friend (thanks Dizon! =D) and get onto the ACR Multiplayer Beta. After playing AC: Brotherhood for quite some time, I wasn’t sure how the game would be different and whether or not the game would play better than what Brotherhood did for me. In this I’ll just go through pretty much everything that I saw and did within the beta in the first day or two in which it has been open.
By the time this post is going out, the beta would’ve been open for several days already, so there has been enough time for people to have enough games to form a decent enough opinion on the game as a whole. Overall I think it is looking brilliant, it looks clean, it plays smoothly and from what I have played so far, it is just a great way to continue the multiplayer after Brotherhood. One thing about the Brotherhood multiplayer that really slowed my progress right from the start was the introductory session in that game and how it didn’t really show how to work with some of the more advanced techniques in the game, and overall it was quite simplistic. For me it didn’t really give me much of an idea of how I should be going about playing this game, which kind of left me aimless from the start. On the other hand, the introductory sessions for the Revelations beta seem to be a bit more welcoming into the world of Assassin’s Creed multiplayer and just felt a little more fleshed out.
I have seen a few couple of people on Youtube that have actually posted up their runs through the introductory sessions, if you want to get an idea of how the game works. The first person is EscoBlades who I’ve been subscribed to for some time now and who is an absolute beast when it comes to the AC Multiplayer xD. Another person who has posted up the intro sessions is MagnitudeX for Gamers Beverage on Youtube. I’ll put the links to the actual vids at the bottom of this post if you want to check them out. One thing I liked about these intro sessions was that it pretty much teaches you how to play the game as stealthily as possible, and also how to defend yourself from your pursuers, which I found wasn’t really shown much in the Brotherhood intro sessions.
Another aspect that I found had a really nice upgrade was all the menu screens, they seem to be a bit more polished than the ones in Brotherhood, and they seem to be design to suit the multiplayer experience even more, which I found quite nice (after not knowing how to work it for the first few minutes xD). In the active friends hub, you can see the scores that each of your friends has in each of the modes, so I found it was encouraging a bit of active competition between friends, which I found was spurring me on a fair bit. I knew that having Escoblades on my friends list would make things difficult for me, so I just had to keep on upping my game to try and overcome his scores (^.^)
Graphically the game looks great, as is to be expected from a game that is made at such a time, in this day and age good graphics in a game is just a must, so yeah, it’s to be expected. Compared to Brotherhood, the overall colour scheme to be appears to be a fair bit more gritty in the textures used, and just overall it has a bit more of a dusty feel which is most likely done to reflect the fact that the single player story is in such a different location. In Brotherhood, the colours seemed more vibrant in the Italian setting, which I find I preferred a bit more. That’s not to say that I don’t like the actual look of Revelations when it comes to colour scheme, it is just that I found the vibrant look of Brotherhood to be a bit more inviting. This I found also affected the way the personas look, as for me they seem to be a bit too similar to each other, but I guess that can also be a good thing when trying to blend into a crowd, but from what I am seeing so far, the personas in Brotherhood seemed to have more vibrancy and personality, but hopefully Ubisoft can work on that before releasing the full game in November.
Now I suppose it is about time that I got onto the gameplay and the changes Ubisoft have made from Brotherhood. First of all, in the beta there are the two new modes Deathmatch and Artifact Capture, as well as the regular Wanted and Manhunt modes which are also in Brotherhood. Artifact Capture was not released at the very start of the beta, and I haven’t had the chance to get onto it since it has been out, so I can’t really make an opinion on it based on experience, but I have seen some vids of it on youtube and to put it simply, it is just Capture the Flag under an Assassin’s Creed banner. The way it seemed to play out in the video that I saw seemed to be perfectly symmetrical to how CTF would be played in shooter, you end up having some of the team defending the flag, while the rest try to sneak or run the opponents flag back to base. I think this match is quite a nice addition, and hopefully I could get some matches on it so that I can get a better picture of how it runs.
The other new game type, Deathmatch, comes in the form of either with or without the use of abilities/perks/etc. The map size is a quarter of the usual map size, and there are no NPC’s who are the same persona as you, so there are crowds of NPC’s and only one of each of the used personas, which makes for some fast paced action and some interesting strategy uses. Also, in Deathmatch you don’t have a compass, just as portrait of your target which lights up as your target comes into your line of sight. As per usual, you do end up with those annoying people who are content with sticking to the roofs for the entire match which just takes most of the fun out of the game, but you can also find lobbies where people decide to actually play the game the way it is meant to, with skill, stealth and a lot more subtlety. Ability-less matches are interesting in the way that you need to rely on strategy and skill to get your higher earning kills and stuns, while the matches with abilities seem to be just like Wanted matches just in a much smaller map meaning a fairly quicker pace. So far I have really enjoyed Deathmatch, and I find that because the original map size is just way too big, the smaller map size along with the higher emphasis on stealth makes me like Deathmatch more than the other game types that I have played.
I don’t think that I need to go into the other game types, as they are fairly straightforward, and play pretty much identical to how they did in Brotherhood. Although in Wanted, because of the massive map sizes, especially in the map Knight’s Hospital, you will find that a lot of people end up spending most of their time on the rooftops most likely to get around the map quicker, but all it ends up doing is just drag everyone up to the rooftops, and those matches just become annoying as all hell.
One gameplay mechanic that I have liked is that the detection meter now starts at the Discreet bonus(+150) and you need to need to use a stealthy approach to get either a Silent(+200(?)) or Incognito kill(+350) or if your kill gets contested or are even less stealthy, it drops back down to Reckless(+50). I like that this change has been made so that players are forced to work more stealthily to get the higher point bonuses, because it becomes quite frustrating to round a corner for someone who didn’t know you were there to get a surprise incognito kill that they didn’t really deserve. I also heard that there is/was going to be a roofing penalty, but I have not seen anything of the sort as of yet. I think that that sort of penalty should be introduced for all the modes, as it would most likely be the most effective way of bringing people down off the roofs and start trying to play with a little bit of stealth.
From what I have played so far of the beta, the game looks a fair bit better than the multiplayer for Brotherhood. Ubisoft seems to have addressed some of the problems that people found were quite obvious with Brotherhood, for instance the roofing problem seems to be a fair bit less of a problem, but is still apparent. Of the abilities, perks and streaks that have been available in the beta, they seem to be fairly well balanced, and I got the feeling that I could use pretty much any of the abilities to help for both offence and defence, which seemed to open up a fair amount of strategies to try out. The fact that streaks can now be attained through stuns makes playing defensive a legitimate way of working for streak bonuses. In Revelations, which wasn’t in Brotherhood, if you attempt to stun your pursuer as they are trying to kill you, you get a bonus +100 points for an “honourable death” which I find to be a bit more incentive to stick around and try to get a stun and also a reward for being able to spot pursuers. All these new additions and changes I found to be implemented into the gameplay quite well, and I think that they can help improve the quality of the way the game is played.
Overall, I find the game to be really quite well done so far, and can’t wait for the full release. Sure there are a few problems here and there that need to be addressed, like the auto select for team modes, but of course for a beta there are bound to be some problems here and there, it’s just a matter of addressing the problems before the full release. For those who haven’t really gotten into the series and is looking for a different kind of multiplayer to play, this is a good game, and the intro sessions should be able to ease new players into the experience so they should at least give it a try. I will pretty much definitely be getting the full game when it comes out, but until the then, I will continue to play the beta until it closes on Sunday.
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Okay, that should do it… didn’t really expect myself to be writing as much as I did, but I guess I just wanted to cover pretty much anything that would come to mind (^.^) Hope you enjoy it.
EscoBlades Links
- Introductory Session #1 - >Link<
- Introductory Session #2 – >Link<
MagnitudeX Links
-Introductory Session #2 – >Link<
Tags: assassins creed, beta, gaming, impressions, multiplayer, revelations, review, upcoming
