User blog comment:Master Sima Yi/Assassinews 31-03-'15 — Assassin's Creed Chronicles announcement trailer/@comment-5174994-20150509161130/@comment-1888015-20150510045049

I don't particularly agree with the idea that the multiplayer aspect of the games are a plagued limb and need to be hacked off for the main story to be better again. If Ubisoft want their main story to be any better, they need to stop repeating the same old main stories and actually make them interesting.

Multiplayer in Brotherhood was amazing. It was simple and had an easy premise, the characters in it had a solid base in the main story (they're all Cesare's shadow army and you take most of them out) and it was fresh and exciting, with exterior support in the form of Project Legacy with Fiora's interactions with them. Then, over the years, the Ubisoft teams did a shit job of keeping it relevant and convoluted it to the point where it was just an "accessory" feature of their new game that you could get some skin if you pre-ordered the next one in the series, and dumbed it down and made it less rewarding because the developers or executives thought they knew how to play better than the community who built itself up out of mutual love for the MP.

Co-op is only considered to have failed because Ubisoft have put more emphasis on cramming as much shit into a game to make it seem more "fun", than to actually support the infrastructure of their game. This represents itself in a genuinely good feature that falls to the sidelines because they're warping the game out of shape trying to fit too much in. Co-op was good, but people didn't want to play it because no-one was playing Unity at release for the co-op, they wanted to know the ending. Then, you were never tempted to join co-op as much as you should have been, you'd join half-way through a mission and not know what you were doing, and who'd do that when there were so many collectibles on offer.

If multiplayer is to return, it needs to be new, fresh and be supported, with the experienced players' view in mind, people who take the time to understand the mechanics of the game and use that to strategize, and the characters you play as need more personality than a paragraph of voice acting, and not snippets stuck in map files or other characters' biographies (AND NO PALLETE-SWAP MICRO-TRANSACTIION CUSTOMIZATION BULLSHIT). Co-op isn't bad, but it needs to be hand in hand with the main story and make you feel needed, because one faceless Assassin with other faceless "Assassins" because the Assassin Council sicced you on a bad guy is dreary. There needs to be more engaging side missions in regards to the story, and they need to be triggered at the right points in the story to be relevant, and not just crammed in the moment you can actually move about the world in some sort of mired, bottle neck fashion. (*cough* Trigger the content after Mary Read's Assassin contract/Mayan Stelae explanation *cough*)

So basically, it's not the fault of the side content that the main content is crap. It's the writers' fault the story is bland, the developers' fault that they don't fix the bugs, and the executives' fault that they make shit management decisions because they have no creative inkling but think they know how to make a game.