Keeping up with the yearly updates of Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft is offering up a new iteration this year that moves the action from pirating to the French Revolution. Given how uneven the Assassin’s Creed series has been, I went into this meeting, which ended up being a private gameplay demo, with a lot of trepidation. I came out very optimistic but it is hard to get the memories of how excited I was for AC3 out of my head given how much ended up really not liking that game.  Still, there are a lot of positive changes that could end up being pretty awesome if done well.

At the various and sundry press conferences we have seen the reveal that there is four player in game co-op and not much was really touched on in addition to what we were shown in the private demo. What I saw there was part of level that was shown prior to the all-male co-op characters’ reveal. Going through this environment I got a much greater sense of the scale and detail that is going here and it is very impressive. Unity is only for new gen consoles so the amount of fidelity and processing power allows it to offer very intricate detail and a lot more characters on screen at one time.

As the driver of the demo stood at the top of a building looking at a huge crowd he told me that there were 1200 different characters in the crowd and that these civilians function as kind of a faction in and of themselves because of how reactive they are to things that other characters do. This allows for more options when hiding and trying to generate diversions but can also create more issues as well.

The game largely takes place in Paris so it is mostly city based. The overall area of Paris is the equivalent of the frontier from AC3 stacked three high. This means that in addition to a wide area the city has a lot of verticality as well. Because of this Unity has an added mode of free running that governs controlled descent. This is a very welcome addition because one irritation I have had across the board is if you are doing a leap of faith, getting down from anywhere is extremely hazardous. With a hold on the right trigger and the B button (on Xbox One) Arno, your character, will find the fastest and safest way down.

Another welcome movement addition is the dedicated crouch button that streamlines stealth a little more. This allows for similar sorts of stealth situations to hiding in a bush. If you stealth behind some piece of furniture or something like that you will be effectively hidden. Likewise moving with stealth eliminates a great deal of sound when you move. This should help me not get overly excited and rush into somebody’s blade like a dumbass.

One of the other enormously exciting things is the seamless transition from exteriors to interiors. If you are crawling along outside a building and need to go in an open window you can just pop in with no load at all. In fact, everything in the world is connected and there are no transitional load times. Further, everything is rendered in game. Not only does this further the illusion of the living world but it also erases the irritation of the frequent load screens in previous games. To take another step further toward maintaining this illusion, if you climb high enough you can look down at the city and see all of the objectives and important locations in the city without jumping into a map screen. Obviously it is enhanced in so far as the HUD information but the seamlessness of the whole thing is very impressive.

The combat has had some drastic changes made to it as well and I think if it is executed properly it will be a great thing. In the past the combat has relied almost exclusively on countering so much so that special enemies had to be introduced to force the player to do anything else at all. In Unity there is no counter at all and the focus is shifted to parrying and using that to take control of the flow of combat in a more active way than just hitting the counter and watching your character execute the enemy. This make for more fluid combat as you are in control and are not really button mashing. Even still the parry isn’t too far removed from the counter in that when you do it successfully it creates an opening that you can capitalize on but it is not an automatic kill. Combat is given further variety by offering heavy and light attacks.

As mentioned above the multi-player wasn’t really a part of the demo but I was told that the co-op is something you can go into and out of by accepting multiplayer missions. These missions have difficulties that can change as skill levels and numbers of players change so there is a dynamic element of that as well. Rather than having a different character for multi-player, you go in as the one you are playing in the game and everything you have including costumes, weapons and upgrades go into the multi-player with you. This is presumably the reason that the multi-player characters are all men given that they are all just your player character from the single player game but I think it is pretty clear that a lot of players want a choice in the matter.

Given the amount that I loved ACIV, I asked about pirating and sailing opportunities and was told that there were none in this game as it is all based in Paris proper. The development team is the team from Brotherhood and they have been working on it for three years so there is not a ton of crossover between the two games. I have mixed feelings on this mostly because I really enjoy how ACIV played but at the same time Brotherhood was a strong entry in the series and I think it is best to let the team focus on what they are up to here without having to shoehorn anything else in just cause it was rad last time around.

Seeing this game in action I have a lot of high hopes for it. I really like what I saw and I am intrigued by the additions and changes. At the same time, I have been burned by this series before and coming back from E3 singing its praises only to have to choke those words down after an inferior product was delivered. I am cautiously optimistic here, though, and I hope it all comes together. I am always pulling for this series and it breaks my heart when it stumbles.  Assassin’s Creed Unity launches October 28, 2014 on Ps4, Xbox One and PC.