A new DLC for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate was recently released by Ubisoft, featuring Jack the Ripper, the most notorious murderer in English history, who was behind a series of grisly killings in the 19th century. And a new trailer for this DLC, which you can watch below, shows the infamous killer fighting a member of the Assassin order.
But the most notorious thing about this trailer is that it originally began as a VR (Virtual Reality) experiment, with Adrian Lacey of Ubisoft Montpelier stating on the Ubi blog that “the Jack the Ripper VR trailer is just a small taste of what virtual reality can bring, both in terms of storytelling and how it can help players go deeper into our worlds”. Viewers will be able to control the camera in this trailer, changing the viewpoint at will and making the Jack the Ripper vs Assassin fight an even more dramatic experience…
And it is clear that the Assassin’s Creed games would certainly benefit from VR support. After all, few video game series are as immersive, and these games do a great job of making players feel like travelling to another age, as games like Assassin’s Creed II have beautifully recreated time periods like Renaissance Italy. And support for VR devices like the Oculus Rift would certainly add to the immersion factor a lot, and clearly Ubisoft is embracing VR in a big way as it has 5 studios working on Virtual Reality projects right now according to one of their recent blog posts.
Evie is after Jack the Ripper in Ubisoft’s new DLC.
But even if the move to VR is definitely a good one for a leading game developer like Ubisoft, perhaps it would also be a good thing if future Assassin’s Creed games improved things in the gameplay department. Because the last few entries have failed to innovate, and just featured the usual parkour, searching for treasures and tired mission structure that the series has been offering since the original Assassin’s Creed game came out in 2007.
And perhaps the most noteworthy thing in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, which was a good but not great entry in the series, was that it featured two playable protagonists, Jacob and Evie Frye, with Ubisoft pleasing its critics by including a playable female character in the game. And it is Evie who is the lead in the new Jack the Ripper DLC, as she will be after the elusive killer in a story set 20 years after the original game, with Evie being able to user new skills aside from her stealth abilities in the hunt for the infamous killer of Whitechapel.
Note: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate was released on December 15 for PS4 and Xbox One. It will be available on December 22 for PC.