Baffling new Assassin’s Creed Unity trailer sends Arno hurtling forward in time

By Will Fulton Published November 17, 2014

A new trailer for Assassin’s Creed Unity takes an unexpected turn from what we’ve seen so far of the game’s murder-y historical fiction when Arno is sent forward in time to a more modern vision of Paris.

When it opens, a woman warns that “the French Revolution simulation is collapsing,” and Arno — or presumably the modern-day Abstergo Entertainment employee reliving Arno’s existence via an Animus — needs to get out of there. A blind leap into a glowing, rift in the matrix, and suddenly Arno is dodging trains and shooting at fighter planes with a turret gun. The video ends with an energy anomaly appearing on top of the Eiffel Tower while blimps hover around it. A mysterious “V” adorns its front. Quoi?

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Related: Hang with Napoleon, Robespierre, and other famous French-folk in Assassin’s Creed Unity

The Assassin’s Creed series has always had a sci-fi framing structure with the story of Desmond Miles tapping into the memories of his forebears. Desmond’s story concluded in Assassin’s Creed III and the focus shifted to a nameless Abstergo employee in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, but this episode seems somewhat anomalous for the series. We will just have to wait a few weeks to find out what it means: Assassin’s Creed Unity hits PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One on November 11, 2014.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

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What made the series so appealing was the setup. Through the use of a fictional machine called the Animus, people could relive the memories of their ancestors to learn secrets from the past to help in the present. That opened up endless possibilities for places and time periods the series could go. With over a dozen games in the series and counting, we've been all across history at this point.

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Yasuke in Assassin's Creed Shadows fighting an enemy. He's dressed in his samurai armor.

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