Assassin's Creed 3 features hinted at

An Ubisoft survey suggests that the publisher is looking into a number of fresh innovations for the next game in the Assassin's Creed franchise, including new customisation options, crafting features and a different lead character.

The survey, conducted by Global Market Insite, asks participants to what degree they would welcome the following features in a follow-up to the excellent Assassin's Creed Brotherhood:

• An upgrade to the assassin's blade that increases the fluidity and speed of free-running
• An enhanced Eagle Vision: see the patrol paths of guards, spot clues to complex navigation puzzles, detect when characters are lying during interrogations, etc.
• An intuitive crafting tool that lets you create custom bombs from dozens of ingredients found throughout the game world
• Tactical use of a variety of bombs suited to unique contexts and situations (smoke, poison, flash, explosive, etc.)
• An additional objective where you and your Assassins guild fight against the Templars to gain control of a city, district by district
• Playing as a new Assassin, in a different historical time period
• A continuation of Ezio's story as the leader of the Assassins, set outside of Italy
• Deeper connectivity between all the Assassin's Creed projects (eg. an action you make on the Facebook game will impact your game experience on the console; events that you read about in the comics will be related to the storyline of the videogames, etc.)
• Online Cooperative Mode
• Offline Cooperative Mode
• The availability of new maps for the Multiplayer
• A choice of additional Multiplayer characters with new skill-sets
• Playing new Multiplayer modes
• A deeper team-based Multiplayer experience (guilds / squads that have common objectives, new tools for clan management, etc.)
• A customization of the Multiplayer experience (logos, avatars, objects, team names, etc.)

Ubisoft recently revealed that there will be a new Assassin's Creed game in 2011, so you won't have to wait too long to find out which, if any, of these features make the cut.