PSN Magazine "AC:Brotherhood" preview!

Thanks to Hewkii9, I was able to get my hands (metaphorically speaking) in the new issue of Playstation Magazine, and this month's edition has an exclusive six-page feature with lots of info, pictures and other things never seen before about AC: Brotherhood.

Putting in bullet-points:

• The Villa Upgrades system will be back. Except it won't be just a villa, but a whole sprawling city.
• Rome will be 4 times larger than Venice was in ACII
• The new villain will be younger, stronger and as skillful as Ezio. But the new villain isn't so new. He's a Borgia. Rodrigo's son. Cesare. Yep, Cesare Borgia, the new baddie who is almost a darker version of our Auditore hero
• The game starts in 1500 with a 45-year-old Ezio
• Tiber Island (a round island in Tiber river in the premises/center of Rome) will be the Rome Assassin's headquarters
• Altough the player won't be able to leave Rome, it is possible to send assassins to places all over the world, like Madrid, Paris or Frankfurt (and I know that those examples were Europe-only)
• Recruits can be customized by players with weapons, armors and clothing; after they acquire experience points, those recruits can be upgraded with abilities
• It will be possible to choose an yet unknown/undefined number of assassins (possible four) to act as personal sidekicks
• Machiavelli will be back, Rodrigo "Fat Pope" Borgia might be back, Leo Da Vinci will be less plot-important but will act as an tech/armorer go-to-guy (yep, he's definitely our "Q"), and Desmond "Why-no-one-tells-me-anything-let-me-out-of-the-bloody-Animus" Miles will be back, but instead of our true hero and centerpiece, he'll probably be more of a secondary/main-supporter, only appearing later in the game
• Remember those rows of Animi (plural of Animus, the magazine confirmed it) in Abstergo Offices? That's the multiplayer system, an Abstergo-designed module for the Animus for training killers to chase Assassins and, well, kill.
• Five more characters have been named: the Nobleman, the Courtesan, the Doctor, the Priest and the Executioner. Each characters has unique moves, clothes, animations and assassination styles. The Doctor kills with a poison-syringe, the priest with a knife, and so on. One other character who likes like Ezio (he uses a hood and a hidden blade) has been refered to as a "Prowler", but it's not known if it's his official designation.
• Multiplayer modes will have adversarial, team-based and objective focused structures. The one revealed, called "Wanted", sets 8 players in a sized map, and each one is assigned a target, and a killer. Like a cat-and-mouse game, but where cat chases mouse, then dog chases cat, then supermutant mouse chases dog, who chases cat, who chases mouse, who chases dog, who...
• Horsies! In the city! Also, horseback assassinations.
• The multiplayer character creation will be abilities and special weapons customizable (like "Disguise", "Morph" and the beloved Hidden Gun). In the magazine's words, "similar to Rainbow Six Vegas 2's PEC system", where you created and stored your character with your account. If I may say so, that's a fantastic character customization feature.

In another note, the editors in PSN described the multiplayer experience as "cerebral, intense, exciting and kind of sexy". So read the last scanpage for the full test multiplayer report ;D

So, what you guys and gals think? More excited now? ;D

Source: PSN Mag - July 2010 edition, brought to me by User:Hewkii9

posted on: 02:09, May 30, 2010 (UTC)