Assassin’s Creed fans will soon be able to perform ruthless stealth kills and daring rooftop vaults in immersive virtual reality.
Ubisoft, the French developer behind the long-running series, revealed the first trailer for Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR at an event on Monday.
The new game lets you play as several characters from older entries as you climb, parkour, and snuff enemies in open environments. Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR will arrive on Meta’s Quest headsets in the winter.
You’ll even be able to perform the iconic “Leap of Faith” in VR, which sees players dive from a high structure to land safely in water or hay.
While the high-flying antics will be a blast for some gamers, those who suffer from VR motion sickness may turn green at the thought of vertigo-inducing stunts.
Fortunately, Ubisoft appears to have taken that into account. To accommodate players with weaker stomachs, the developer is using techniques including teleporting, blacking out your peripheral vision in select areas, and using a subliminal grid to give you a firmer sense of your grounding on rooftops.
Whether the preventive methods will stop players from spewing up their lunch remains to be seen.
The other major concern for players will be the scope of the game. Generally speaking, story-driven VR titles tend to have smaller durations compared to lengthy console or PC games. But that is changing, with Meta recently announcing that its fantasy sequel, Asgard’s Wrath 2, has the scale of a traditional blockbuster game.
Ubisoft, too, is promising a more fleshed-out game than just a throwaway VR experience. “We’re creating a proper Assassin’s Creed game that maximises the use of VR to immerse the player into becoming a Master Assassin more deeply than ever before.”
The developer behind other hits, including the Far Cry games, also has big plans for VR. Ubisoft’s chief executive Yves Guillemot told AFP on Monday that virtual reality is “eventually going to happen”.
He added that the release of the Apple Vision Pro headset will be the catalyst for VR’s mainstream adoption, and that Ubisoft is keen to build games for the device.
