Assassin's Creed Unity coop mode is four years in the making

The foundations for Assassin's Creed Unity were being built up to four years ago, according to lead producer Vincent Pontibrand.

Many Assassin's Creed critics have complained about franchise fatigue in recent times, with a new instalment arriving every year since 2009.

However that doesn't mean Ubisoft is paying less attention to the quality of the product, says Pontibrand, and the coop mode in this year's Unity is an example of innovation in the series.

"People have been asking for coop for a very long time," he told ArabicGamers. "This was part of our post-launch research, we know people would like to be able to share their experience with other people."

He went on to say that Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was the first step towards having a connected game with the debut of a multiplayer mode, and that it was "technically" hard.

"It was a separate mode, it was PvP-only, and you had limited interactions with the other players. It was basically cat-and-mouse type of gameplay and was very successful for us and we learnt a lot of things doing that.

"But in order to go beyond that and go to the next step, which was to actually unify that with the single-player experience, we had to start everything from scratch.

"So four years ago this was our mandate, to create the first fully-online and next-gen Assassin's Creed. That's where the name comes from. We unified our code base for multiplayer and we started to look at everything we needed to do in order to meet that expectation of being able to share the experience."

Recently Pontibrand also told us his "dream" was to create an Assassin's Creed MMO, and you can read up on more of his thoughts here.

Assassin's Creed Unity launches 28 October on Xbox One, PS4 and PC.