• News

Assassin's Creed Unity creative director talks about combat changes, Arno's story, and more

The Shacknews video crew recently had the opportunity to talk to AC Unity creative director Alexandre Amancio about the tweaked stealth system, improved parkour, and changes to the game's long-time combat system.

Ozzie Mejia

August 4, 2014 2:00 PM

3

When the Shacknews video crew hit the Big Apple last week, one of the first games they made sure to check out was the long-awaited Assassin's Creed Unity. Ubisoft was on-hand to offer a walkthrough of the game and creative director Alexandre Amancio took some time to talk to our own Steven Wong.

Amancio spoke about the French Revolution setting, slight tweaks to the stealth system, the improved parkour mechanics, the character progression system, Arno's story, and much more. One of the more interesting topics that was brought up was the change in combat, which revamps the game's formula significantly.

"Combat is much more challengning," Amancio told Shacknews. "It's more fun. It's based on sort of a strike/dodge/parry/block type of mechanic where you need to figure out what enemy you're facing and then adapt your strategy to that enemy. For example, if somebody's wielding a heavy axe, maybe blocking might not be the best answer. You cannot automatic counter anymore, so it's a lot more challenging. The reason we're doing this is because if combat is the path of least resistance, this is how every mission will end up. Because the fail state of stealth is discovery and the outcome of discovery is often combat."

For more on Assassin's Creed Unity, you can watch the full video interview below. For more interviews and features, like our 8-Bit Cuisine and The Last of Us graphics comparison, be sure to subscribe to Shacknews on YouTube.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?