Assassin's Creed: Unity Preview GameGPU

Release date:November 13, 2014
Genre: Action-adventure, stealth-action open world
developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher: Ubisoft

Assassin's Creed is a series of games that every gamer knows about. Ubisoft, as promised, is riveting a game every year, although after the release of the first part it seemed unrealistic to us to release a full-fledged game in the universe of assassins. Well, even though the series pleased us every year with its “casual” and same type, this did not prevent the next new Assassin’s Creed from selling millions of copies. The development team allowed fans to choose the time and location of the game through voting. But everything has a limit. In Black Flag it became especially noticeable - the authors seem to have reached their peak. There is no room to increase the number of “gadgets”; everyone has become bored with the same additional missions for so many years, and no one needs the network mode. The series needs to be shaken up, the entire mechanics of the game need to be reconsidered from scratch. Why isn't the new generation of consoles a reason to do this?

Assassin's Creed Unity will be the first full-fledged next-gen game in the series. There are 10 studios involved in the development of Assassin's Creed Unity. Ubisoft Montreal is the leader among them and coordinates the work of other divisions. Of course, you don’t need to expect any fantastic restarts and radical changes from Ubisoft: the new part of the assassin’s adventures is a continuation of the same series with all its inherent elements.

Everything has been rethought, starting from the very foundations of the game. The new system will allow you to gain an unprecedented level of control over your assassin. Its key elements will define the next generation of Assassin's Creed games. Thanks to the updated parkour system, you will be able to control every step of the hero as he runs through the streets and rooftops of the city.

The stealth skill will allow you to attack the enemy when he least expects it, and then disappear into the crowd at lightning speed. The battles will be a serious test - be it a duel or a fight without rules. Ubisoft decided to change their approach to the online mode and abandon multiplayer in order to focus on single player play and diversify it with the long-awaited cooperative one.

The action begins in the real world, where the player is put into the Animus and sent back in time to learn the secrets of his ancestors. And the hero will learn these secrets in 18th century Paris. The developers introduced gamers to a new assassin of Austrian-French origin named Arno Dorian. The setting is the events of the French Revolution of 1789, ideal for Assassin's Creed. The French Revolution was not "clean". During this period of time, there were many different factions that appeared even before the revolution itself, but by its end they seemed to have evaporated, as they were destroyed for their political views. This was practiced systematically throughout the entire revolution, and the further it went, the more “extreme” the methods of struggle became.

So, the revolution - the main events unfolded over 5 years, starting from the storming of the Bastille and the march on Versailles to the execution of King Louis XVI and the Thermidorian coup. It was during this era that class privileges were abolished and human rights were first declared. While ordinary people trample each other in the squares, political games are being staged by three opposing camps at once: loyalists, centrists and, in fact, revolutionaries. And in the shadow of all this is the brotherhood of assassins, who will have a very ambiguous attitude towards the main character.

The action, of course, will take place in Paris. The city is modeled in all the breadth and beauty of nextgen. If you haven't thought about it, Assassin's Creed used to reproduce all architectural landmarks on a reduced scale. Now everything is new: the authors promise a city in proportions of 1 to 1, which means much more picturesque landscapes and much more spacious spaces. The areas will be able to accommodate up to a thousand NPCs at the same time.

In addition, houses will no longer be cardboard boxes - you can go into a quarter of all buildings and look around. And when the surface has been explored, it’s worth going down into the sewers, the underground catacombs of smugglers. For such a multi-story and detailed city there was a price to pay: no more ships and piracy. It looks like there will be no opportunity to go to another locality either. Well, at least the surrounding villages should remain...

The mission structure also promises to remain the same: a bunch of additional tasks and a storyline. So far there is little interesting in all this - once again the scale has grown, a new assassin, a new scene of action. The conversation only really gets interesting when it comes to fundamental game mechanics.

Assassin's Creed Unity features an updated parkour system that will add variety to your journey through Paris. Find yourself in an alley? Jump over the rubble and attack the enemy, or hide under objects to remain undetected. Wherever you are, there will always be several ways to achieve your goal. In Assassin's Creed Unity, you can literally choose your path. Parkour options in previous games were severely limited, such as if the player did not use poles or stands. But now the developers are more than happy to announce that they have adapted the whole of Paris for full navigation in any direction.

Battles in Assassin's Creed Unity will become more complex and varied. Every fight is unique. Combat in Assassin's Creed Unity uses three basic techniques: attack, dodge, and parry. You will have to quickly decide exactly how and in what order to use them. Moreover, each case will require unique tactics.

Another level of the combat system is the variety of enemy classes. For example, you will have to dodge attacks from certain types of enemies more often because their attacks cannot be parried. Fighting with several opponents of different classes, the player has to enter a state of continuous combat. Enemies eventually attack in groups and their numbers grow, making long battles dangerous but worth the effort. The strategy of eliminating one by one by waiting and counterattacking will no longer work. Sometimes the player will even have to flee from battle, and at this very moment the aforementioned stealth comes in handy.

As noted earlier, Paris is a large city, larger in size, as the developers say, than all the land territories of Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag combined. Crowds of people, spaces inside buildings, an underground network and other system elements make the game an adventure-rich sandbox. The atmosphere of Paris is achieved thanks to realistic buildings, recreated for the first time in the Assassin's Creed series on a 1:1 scale.

Additionally, in Assassin's Creed Unity, players will have the opportunity to explore the interiors of buildings that will be filled with characters, rewards, stories, merchants, social hubs and clubs. Interiors, which, by the way, have a quarter of all buildings in the game, also serve as new routes that allow you to escape from pursuit or avoid a skirmish. Inside the rooms you will be able to interact not only with shelters, but also with stairs to the roof, windows, barricades and closed doors - you will be able to pick locks after acquiring a special skill.

And to give the player the feeling of a living and dynamic city, the developers have added a lot of secondary tasks - murder investigations, adventures in Paris, events in the crowd, treasure hunts, and so on. For the first time in the series, we will cross paths with a variety of people and take part in their fate. In addition, the game has a deep character progression system.

Assassin's Creed: Unity uses the latest version of the Anvil multiplatform engine, the Anvil Next hardware platform is quite wide and includes all currently existing operating systems and consoles. Support for Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS, Wii and PC has been announced. The game will be compatible with all major systems of the Microsoft family Windows the bit depth of the systems is 32-bit or 64-bit, support for OS X and Linux was not mentioned by the developers. The priority and main graphics API for Assassin's Creed: Unity is DirectX 11. The game will work through the Uplay digital distribution service.

Pre-order now and you will receive an additional 30 minutes of the Chemical Revolution mission, as well as the Royal Arsenal set (2 additional equipment and 1 weapon).

The Anvil Next engine is a commercial, proprietary, cross-platform game engine designed for use on personal computers and game consoles. The engine uses HumanIK subroutine components developed by Autodesk. HumanIK is used to correctly position the animation of the character's arms and legs during pushes and climbs in real time. As a physics subsystem, the engine uses the well-known Havok physics engine, which, in addition to simulating solid mechanics, also simulates tissue physics. Some features and technologies of the new version of the engine created for Assassin's Creed: Unity:

Paris Pate is a system for automating some routine development elements, such as the placement of ready-made buildings in the game. The system allows entire districts to be built very quickly, giving designers full access and level data.

The new version of Anvil is aimed at creating unique and high-quality visual presentations, animations and cutscenes, with unprecedented detail. New system to increase efficiency and improve infrastructure. It is essentially a set of methodological and technical techniques that allow several global development teams to interact with next-gen game resources at once.

The City Lights system enhances the look of the game, bringing Paris to life, as well as bringing a very high level of detail. The game reaches a level close to CG videos, and therefore the introduction of high-resolution graphics is no longer an inconvenience. This advantage is achieved largely due to spatial cinematography, effective use of 3D environments and the improvement of all design components.

Below we publish directly the video of the gameplay from the official website Assassin's Creed:

Based on the above material, some conclusions can be drawn. The game apparently will not be very demanding on RAM resources, and the maximum it can require is 8 gigabytes of RAM. Also, the game is unlikely to use more than 8 computing threads.

Well, if we think about the graphics subsystem that will be needed for Assassin's Creed: Unity, then in our opinion, sufficient performance will be provided by video cards starting from the level of NVidia GTX 780 or AMD Radeon R9 290. Optimal performance, taking into account all the maximum settings activated, can be expected from NVidia GTX 980 or AMD Radeon R9 290X.