Creating Your Custom Assassin in Assassin’s Creed Unity

For as long as we’ve been playing the Assassin’s Creed series, we’ve wanted the chance to create and customize our very own assassin. With the introduction of online co-op play for the just-released Assassin’s Creed Unity for Xbox One, the ability to customize your assassin becomes even more important. A large part of the appeal of online play is showing off your style and skill, and Unity gives you the canvas to do just that.

Customization in Unity means more than dyeing your assassin’s cloak purple (but, yeah, you can totally make it purple). It’s about fine-tuning your assassin to be as deadly as possible.

There are three basic areas of skill customization: Combat, Navigation, and Stealth. You can add skills to these three areas with different abilities and items that you earn throughout the game’s campaign. Different skill sets might be more beneficial in different missions, and Unity gives you the ability to play in a more specialized way.

New to the series is the ability to focus on different strengths to compliment your gameplay tendencies. Things like stealth, melee combat, and ranged attacks can be upgraded and focused on, so you can kill corrupt French thugs as efficiently as possible. Prefer to hang out on rooftops and snipe guards? Go for it! Like to jump down and get your hands dirty with some hand-to-hand combat? You can do that, too.

Likewise, the gear and weapons in Unity all materially change how your assassin plays. Heavier armor gives you more protection at the cost of stealth; light weapons do less damage, but are better at parrying attacks. The notion that you can make a tank character, then switch it up and go stealthy and nimble, is an exciting prospect for the series.

This all comes together in co-op, where having a team of four assassins with different skill sets makes your team more effective and deadly. Likewise, the skills that you earn – like the ability to heal or disguise yourself – can be used on teammates as well. The co-op missions are designed to be replayable, earning you new loot with each session… but they also tie in with the main campaign’s story, making them integral to the game.

And of course, there’s an aesthetic element to the customization, allowing you to change color schemes and other small details of your assassin. We’ll soon be trying out our hot pink and lime green color combination. Our footsteps may be quiet, but that outfit is LOUD!