Just when you think you've figured out everything there is to know about the next Assassin's Creed game, Ubisoft throws this at you.
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The developers of Assassin's Creed Unity have just announced a new feature in the game called "time anomalies." The reveal is intentionally vague, but we can gather a few things from the accompanying trailer, which you can find below. For this feature, the game breaks Arno out of his regular narrative and throws him into a new time period through the magic of the Animus.
Arno is still in Paris, but it looks like he's thrown into a World War II time period. Arno needs to dodge trains, escape from blimps and even shoot down aircraft using a continuous-fire turret. It also looks like Arno will be able to scale the Eiffel Tower in this section of the game, a tower that wasn't built until about 100 years after Unity is set.
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It isn't clear what causes these "time anomalies" in the game, or if there will be more than one. Like most unusual occurrences in the franchise, it likely has something to do with the Animus. Before Arno is whisked off to the 20th century, we hear a disembodied female voice telling him to run as the landscape slowly changes around him.
As we learned in Black Flag, Abstergo Entertainment is trying to market Animus technology to the general public as an immersive video game experience, and in Unity, the player is supposed to be a regular customer who is experiencing Arno's story. Hopefully, all of these tangled narrative wires will make a little more sense once the game is finally out.
Back in August, alleged leaked screens from Unity seemed to show a new game mode where the player would get to experience settings beyond revolutionary Paris, although it's not known if these time anomalies are related.
A pretty vocal section of the Assassin's Creed fan base has been calling for a World War II setting for an Assassin's Creed game for a while now. This might end up being Ubisoft's little fan service to those requests, unless the developer decides to turn it into something larger.
Assassin's Creed Unity will release for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on November 11.