Assassin's Creed

The Gameplay

Regardless of its storyline, Assassin's Creed's gameplay has been sharply defined. We know, for instance, that the game experience will be broken up into three segments per target: the Approach, the Assassination, and the Escape.

The Approach is when the player gathers information by picking guards' pockets, eavesdropping on conversations, and otherwise scouring an area to discover both the location of a mark and the best time to move in for the kill. Then there's the Assassination, when the player actually hunts through a crowd, nears a mark, and ultimately achieves a kill - usually accomplished with the help of Altair's spring-loaded dagger, hidden on his left wrist and propelled outwards with the twitch of a muscle.

Both the Approach and the Assassination are centered on what Ubisoft calls "social stealth" - the act of staying hidden, not by stalking in shadows or hiding behind walls, but by blending into huge crowds in broad daylight. Assassin's Creed's AI will allow crowds to dynamically react to the player's movements and actions; if you glide between commoners, for instance, you won't take much notice, but if you push and shove your way through to get to your target faster, you'll attract a fair amount of attention.

Finally, there's the Escape. Once a kill has been performed, a player has to get out of the area before guards close in - Altair can't withstand extended combat. Fortunately, Assassin's Creed allows a player to scramble around and over virtually any surface. Outcroppings, beams, notched handholds in walls - pretty much anything is available to Altair to help him navigate the cities of the Holy Land.

The game engine automatically marks any protrusion that extends more than two inches from its surroundings as traversable and calculates how it can be used, so the developers don't need to worry about remembering to tag a given outcropping as climbable. If it looks like you can grab onto it, the engine makes sure that you can, and you'll do it in style: Altair has over 10,000 animations fueling his every move.

The Controls

Of course, all the animations and moves in the world would be useless without a completely intuitive control scheme to govern them, and Assassin's Creed will provide just that. The game's controls are based around "puppeteering," where each button on the controller has a contextual function related to a body part. Altair's legs, for instance, are contextually manipulated by the Xbox 360's A button; his weapon hand and off-hand by the X and B buttons, respectively; and his head by the Y button. Thus, if you're running along a rooftop and need to leap off the side, you'd hit the "legs" button. Conversely, if you're attempting to eavesdrop on a conversation, you'd use the "head" button.

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