With today being the day our most anticipated game of the year (Mass Effect 3) launches onto store shelves, it's had a tough time fighting for the spotlight thanks to the Game Developer's Conference seeing major announcements and reveals for Halo 4, Forza Horizon, and even moreso because of Ubisoft's long-awaited Assassin's Creed III dominating the headlines with reveal after reveal, after leak.

The game's new setting and protagonist hit online before Ubisoft had planned, and it was immediately followed up with details and images from Game Informer's cover story, leaked screenshots, official box art, and yesterday, the first ever Assassin's Creed 3 trailer. Today, more leaks share exciting details about the addition of co-op play to the Assassin's Creed franchise.

Even though AC3 has reportedly been in the works for three years, between Assassin's Creed II and now, two games filled the gap to allow the series to support annualized releases. They continued the story of Ezio and from a gameplay perspective, added a major component to the series: multiplayer.

Multiplayer returns for Assassin's Creed III with 8-player competitive play as before, but it also looks to be adding 2-4 player co-op, at least according to not-careful posting by Microsoft on Xbox.com.

CVG managed to screen grab the listing before Xbox secretly edited it to remove that feature, but this marks yet another fail from Xbox services, who also leaked a major Mass Effect 3 spoiler through posting DLC early on the Xbox Live.

We at Game Rant always support and encourage developers to add co-op play so this is a welcome addition for us and many fans of the series. Playing an Assassin's Creed game is a lengthy time investment, but doing those repetitive side missions in the last three games would have been much more fun with a friend, especially considering Brotherhood and Revelations let Ezio recruit additional Assassins to send on missions and to call upon for reinforcements. Now, players can presumably play them.

We're still waiting on word from Ubisoft regarding the new mode but this is something they wanted kept under wraps for the time being. Information overload!

If you're a fan looking for even more details, check out the Assassin's Creed III character and story spoilers list we put together.

Assassin’s Creed 3 releases on October 30, 2012, for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.

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Source: Xbox.com