Assassin’s Creed Syndicate won’t have a multiplayer component, Ubisoft Quebec developers told GameSpot.

According to creative director Marc-Alexis Cote, developers wanted to bring the stealth-action series back to its roots and focus on the core single-player experience. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is narrative-driven and features a handful of new elements as well as major tweaks to combat and stealth; Ubisoft Quebec chose to hone and polish these aspects over adding in any sort of co-op or online play.

All activities in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, main story events as well as side missions, have been tailored to feed back into the narrative and in some way, however small, contribute to your goal of overthrowing Templar control of London. The game is built to define and deliver a very clear fantasy: the tale of Jacob and Evie Frye. Adding a multiplayer mode would disrupt this delivery and pull away from the experience Ubisoft Quebec wants to create.

"The reason we are doing this is to really focus on the roots of the franchise," Cote said. "That’s why all nine studios are focused on delivering this single-player experience."

Executive producer Francois Pelland corroborated that Ubisoft was looking to return to the roots of Assassin's Creed, which meant pouring all resources into a tight single-player campaign. But he also noted that Syndicate's emphasis on intimate melee fights and the addition of systemic vehicles you can hijack was something that wouldn't work well with online play.

"We felt like, especially with the type of fight that we have, a very hand-to-hand, very close combat fight, that we needed to have very high responsiveness on the system," Pelland explained. "That's one thing. It's navigation as well. When we decided two years and a half ago, we said, let's do London of 1868. You cannot have vehicles that are just cosmetic. You cannot have vehicles that are just there to look good. Players would have said, I want to drive those things. That adds complexity to the thing. It's more technical reasons [for leaving out multiplayer.]"

For more details on Assassin's Creed Syndicate, read up on everything we know about the title.

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