While other big-name gaming franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield will be hopping onto the Battle Royale hype train later this year, there’s one well-known IP that isn’t quite ready to take the plunge: Assassin’s Creed.
During a recent Q&A segment with Game Informer, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey game director Scott Phillips was asked whether he and his design team had considered implementing a battle royale multiplayer experience for the game and his answer was a clear and concise “no.” Not only that, but Odyssey will apparently not have any sort of multiplayer component period according to Phillips, taking a similar route as last year’s Assassin’s Creed Origins.
Phillips talked a bit more about the decision to focus solely on a single-player gameplay presentation, saying that having to split the development team’s efforts between single-player and multiplayer would make the overall experience suffer as a result:
“Splitting that focus for our team and the amount of time we had to make the game was, for me, not the right call. Delivering this giant open-world RPG is the way to do it and I think that’s what Assassin’s Creed should be.”
In the past, the Assassin’s Creed series flirted with the idea of multiplayer, first incorporating it into 2010’s Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. The competitive multiplayer that debuted in Brotherhood returned in subsequent games such as Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and Assassin’s Creed III. With Assassin’s Creed III Ubisoft also started experimenting with co-op multiplayer, a concept it attempted to more formally realize in Assassin’s Creed Unity. Sadly, Unity’s crippling online issues made the multiplayer more frustrating than fun, and since Unity’s release no Assassin’s Creed game has featured any sort of direct player-to-player multiplayer (though there are still online social components woven into each game).
Despite its lack of multiplayer, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will still offer an expansive and immersive historical adventure that should appeal to series fans who enjoyed what last year’s Assassin’s Creed Origins had to offer. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will launch on October 5 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.