So as I said the other day I got an email from UbiSoft that had my multiplayer beta key for Assassins Creed: Brotherhood, I was a bit confused as I thought I wouldn’t see it till the 4th when the beta was officially suppose to launch. Either way I said whatever and proceeded to try and redeem the code and I was pleasently surprised that it all worked and I was able to download the Beta a week early. So after the long download and install then patch install (really?) I was able to jump in and play.
When I first logged in I was asked if I wanted to go through the tutorial I thought it would probably be a good idea (it was and I highly recommend it) so I went through the whole thing and once I felt I had a good understanding I decided it was time to try my hand against real players. Now it did take a little while to finally get into a match but I am assuming it is because it was in fact a week early from the beta launch and it was about 11pm at night. After I finally got matched up with some other people we were able to play – I could barely contain my excitement.
The match type we got to play was known as free-for-all basically what that means is that you and 8 other people are thrown into a map and given a target to assassinate. This may sound easy but it’s not you have to watch your back constantly for other players. The kicker is that all the NPCs are dressed in the same clothing as the other assassins. Now I know some of are you still probably saying “oh you can still easily pick out a player based on their movements” this is somewhat true. I have to give Ubisoft credit for how they did the AI on the NPCs , they run around and they run into other people as well so it makes it even harder to spot another player. You have to be quick on your toes and look at any and every sign possible. There were times when I swore I was following a real person only to come up and stab them to lose points because it was just a “civilian”. Also keep in mind when you make that type of mistake you better move your ass because you can bet someone spotted you killing some random NPC.
Needless to say it did take me a little while and a few stabs in the back to fully get the hang of things and really learn to watch my back and move like the computer as much as possible. Like I said I am very impressed so far with how Ubisoft has handled the NPCs in multiplayer. And while I’m sure there are going to be kids running around just randomly stabbing people and causing problems I think after a good week or so they will all have given up and moved on. It really seems to me that it is going to take a little bit of skill and patience to be successful in multiplayer. I can’t wait to explore more and play more over the next month before release. I didn’t get a chance to really play for a long time so I still don’t know what happens when you level up if that allows you to unlock better weapons or if it allows you unlock more costumes or what.
Stay tuned for another and final demo impression review that will be more in depth closer to the actual launch of the game and I have more than an hour under my belt. As of right now it is awesome and I can’t wait to play more.
