Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed: Revelations both had competitive online multi-player modes. Leaping into costume and stabbing other players (in the back) is nothing new for the series.
But working with your fellow Assassins, instead of against them? That's going to be brand new to Assassin's Creed III.
At Comic-Con this week, Ubisoft announced the Wolfpack co-op mode for Assassin's Creed III. In Wolfpack, two to four players join together to perform a sequence of assassinations. (Stealthily closing in on their targets together like, well, a pack of wolves.) As in the series' previous competitive modes, players receive a picture of their target, and then have to correctly track him or her down in a crowded environment full of other NPCs who look and are dressed like the target, with only a handful of small differences setting them apart.
According to IGN, Wolfpack mode offers a sequence of 25 assassination waves, with each harder to complete than the one before it. Teams also gain significant bonus points for working together and syncing their (correct) kills. And time is of the essence: there's a clock running for how long a group has to find and eliminate their next target, and incorrect kills cost time.
IGN also has a video of the Wolfpack mode in action. It looks familiar to anyone who's seen the competitive online modes from previous games in the series, but the idea of working together is a welcome change of pace for some of us who don't always like stabbing our friends.
Meanwhile, Ubisoft is also promising tweaks and enhancements to competitive multiplayer modes as well. There's a Domination mode, in which teams of players compete against each other to attack, capture, and defend map zones. The teams will be flexible, with players able to join groups of their friends before and during a game in progress. They've also done some streamlining on actual game mechanics, merging the kill and stun actions onto a single button and letting players have a third active ability slot for ranged abilities only as well as adding a vault move, in order to let players navigate through the world with more precision.