Assassin’s Creed: Identity Coming to Android Next Year With Stunning Graphics in Tow

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Assassin’s Creed: Identity Coming to Android Next Year With Stunning Graphics in Tow

Yesterday, Unity soft-released Assassin’s Creed Identity into the Australian and New Zealand Apple iTunes store and at the same time, revealed that the game is being developed in parallel on Android but will only be available on iOS devices until next year. We’ve no word on the exact date or on the required minimum device specification, but for iOS it requires the iPhone 5 or iPad 3, so essentially Apple’s 2012 line up and later. Let me leave this video clip here from PocketGamer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The original Assassin’s Creed game was released almost seven years ago in November 2007. It’s described as an open world, social stealth, assassination, fighting and bombing game. The game had a minimum system specification of a 2.6 GHz Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 1 GB of RAM (2 GB if running on Windows Vista) and a 256 MB DirectX 10.0 video card (it would run on some DirectX 9.0 cards providing they had the Shader Model 3.0 or higher). It also needed 8 GB of hard drive space. We’ve heard today that a proper Assassin’s Creed game is going to be launched on Android next year. By this, I mean, it’ll have the same open world feeling although there are some caveats. The playable areas are smaller than in the full game, taken from within Renaissance Italy, and must be picked from a menu. Another key difference between the mobile version of Assassin’s Creed and the desktop version is that there’s no proper storyline or main character and missions are short, randomly generated quests from a library of sixteen different archetypes. But still, we’re taking a seven year old game and squeezing it into your pocket.

Condensing a desktop game into a mobile device means that the control system has been given an overhaul. You can either move and look around using on-screen joysticks or tap where you want to go. They’ll be context sensitive taps for actions; there are plans to include wireless controllers but watch this space. The game is also going to include in-app purchases. One area where the developers do not appear to have compromised is in the graphics department: Assassin’s Creed Identity looks stunning. The graphics engine is powered by Unity and includes custom-made textures, shaders and models based around the console version. There’s a crowd system, day, night and weather presets and dynamic lighting. It looks like we’re going to have something to stretch our quad core mobile processors and GPU cores with. Have a look at the images from the iOS version below and hit us up if you’re as excited as we are about this!