Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood Enters Second Beta

The PS3-exclusive multiplayer beta of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood launched on Monday, and yours truly got to take a stab at it (see what I did there?).

In a further display of Ubisoft’s penchant for storytelling, there is actually a plot behind the multiplayer beyond “go in and kill some people until the timer runs out”. The player is an employee at Abstergo Industries sent into the Assassin training program to practice against other agents. However, you only have ten minutes before you are ejected from the Animus. Not much of a story, but it’s an interesting little bit to throw in to the experience.

What makes the multiplayer more than the standard deathmatch fare seen in most multiplayer games is the targeting system. With the help of an on-screen compass showing the general location of the intended target, the objective is to assassinate a specific player. At the same time, however, someone is trying to do the same to you, and the game provides little help in assisting you evade your pursuer outside of a message on screen informing you that you have been spotted – and “spotted” can range from anywhere between “across the board” and “hey, check out this animation of you being assassinated from out of nowhere”.

That’s not to say it’s impossible to survive. Much like with the Assassin’s Creed games a player can hide in the swarms of NPCs milling around the board, or simply make a run for it. In order to keep the matches from being ten-minute races, Ubisoft has seen fit to include a sort of chase timer – if you don’t catch your mark within a certain time frame, a new mark is assigned.

The game size is generally between six to eight players per ten-minute round and experience is not just assigned per kill, but by type of kill (pulling someone off of the roof requires more finesse than walking up and stabbing), level of stealth (bonus if they never see you coming) and other factors. Like many multiplayer games experience is used to unlock character boosters and new abilities, such as morphing to look like a completely different character for a brief period of time or morphing an NPC to look like your character in order to better blend in.

There are two play modes in the beta: Wanted and Alliance. I already described Wanted above. The other, Alliance, is a group-based five-minute deathmatch, wherein one team is assigned to take out the members of another team, with an emphasis on cooperative assassinations. I haven’t actually played this one yet, for one reason: it’s hard enough finding enough people to play Wanted this early in the beta; finding more members (three teams of six) to play Alliance seems like more time wasted in the matchmaking lobby.

Despite my few gripes with the multiplayer (the compass seems to be a little off, and if you’re close enough to your target that the game states, “your target is directly in sight; HE’S RIGHT THERE!” then it should have the courtesy to specifically point out my target, a la Assassin’s Creed II, because I’m really tired of accidentally killing civilians), I am excited to play the fleshed out version when the game releases in November. Hopefully, other people will start playing too, so I can spend less time waiting for matches to start and more time actually playing.