Next year's Assassin's Creed game will be set in Victorian London and is being led out of Ubisoft Quebec, according to a Kotaku report.
The game, codenamed Victory, will allegedly release next autumn on PS4, Xbox One and PC, and take players "through the dirty back alleys and rattling stagecoaches of London during the Victorian era" - a period, Kotaku points out, that has been requested by fans for quite some time.
It will also be the only Assassin's Creed game to release next year, the site claims, with no Xbox 360 or PS3 versions in development.
The site also claims to have seen a seven-minute video of "target gameplay footage" that reveals a new dark-coated protagonist who is able to leap onto horse carriages, swing through railway stations using a grappling hook and continue the fight on a moving train.
"The takeaway from the footage isn't just that Assassin's Creed is in a new place and era yet again. It's that, apparently, Ubisoft is pushing for some gameplay innovation," the site says. "We can see that in the multiple fights on moving vehicles. And we can see that in the introduction of the grappling hook, which seems, at least when used inside a massive, covered train station, to allow the player-controlled character to create literal jumping-off points on the fly.
"If that grappling hook works the way we think it does, then players would be able to walk into any covered space in Victory, shoot at the ceiling to drop a rope from it and then swing over to assassinate a target—or maybe escape into a crowd? This could significantly change how these games play and how gamers move through an Assassin's Creed world."
Ubisoft has said that it is "disappointed" by the leak of Assassin's Creed Victory and confirmed that Ubisoft Quebec has been working on the title "for the past few years".
"It is always unfortunate when internal assets, not intended for public consumption, are leaked. And, while we certainly welcome anticipation for all of our upcoming titles, we're disappointed for our fans, and our development team, that this conceptual asset is now public," Ubisoft told IGN.
"The team in our Quebec studio has been hard at work on the particular game in question for the past few years, and we're excited to officially unveil what the studio has been working on at a later date. In the meantime, our number one priority is enhancing the experience of Assassin's Creed Unity for players."
Source: kotaku.com