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Assassin’s Creed Unity is a “new narrative start”; “best entry point” since the series began

Black Flag cast players as a Montreal office worker. No parkour involved.

Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag was one of the best games of 2013 – not least because it ditched the contemporary landlord antics of its predecessors completely. In their place were first-person sequences set in offices a lot like those Ubisoft occupy in Montreal. It worked, really well. But it wasn’t a meta-trick the studio could repeat twice, and Assassin’s Creed Unity marks the beginning of a new story cycle.

“It’s a new start,” creative director Alex Amancio told Examiner. “It’s a new narrative start.”

Unity will feature a “completely new context” for its present day component – which means a clean break from Desmond, who featured only in encrypted files found in Black Flag.

“You’ve seen a little bit of an evolution with Black Flag, [but] we’re not going to do the same thing,” said Amancio. “What we’re doing with Unity is really the beginning [of] this new cycle of Assassin’s Creed games.”

Amancio enjoys the fact that everybody’s new to this story – and his team aren’t left with flabby bits of lore to re-explain or secrete away in codex entries.

“Because it’s new, we can actually explain it properly because nobody is going to feel like [that’s] redundant,” he explained. “I would say that Assassin’s Creed Unity is the best entry point for the franchise since [the first].”

It sounds like Black Flag was an effective palette cleanser, as well as the best Assassin’s Creed game in yonks. Let’s hope the series doesn’t grow bloated with vague allusions to solar flares and ancient aliens a few games down the line, eh?

Ta, CVG.