Assassin's Threed + franchise spoiler discussion

[Maniacal]

I'm certainly not an AC3 apologist, but go and play Two Worlds and endure the voice acting there!

I dunno, I think the VA might have been the best part of Tow Worlds (not that I've played it).

 

[CivCube]

Very underwhelming. Ubisoft has gotten very lazy with the missions. Most of them consist of "Walk from here to there for a cutscene".

 

[Polycrates]

It's because Ubisoft (in my opinion) has continued to draw the wrong conclusions from their games. Fighting was still easy in the first game (once you got counterkill) but for the most part fighting was a lot more difficult in the first game than in subsequent iterations. Because of this you often found yourself having to employ stealth and blending more out of necessity. In more recent AC games stealth is only something you do for completionist's sake. It's an extra bonus that you can get for a 100% sync rating, but you're never in any actual danger in any AC game from 2-3. I think this is the problem. The game should be harder, or rather, it should be more difficult for you to defeat large groups of enemies, meaning you actually have to, you know, think about what you're doing rather than just plunging into any fray headfirst with the knowledge that you can just fight your way out of any bad situation.

I know I'm a bit late to the party here but yeah I totally agree with this.
For all its faults, AC1 focused on actually being an assassin. Once you were done with all the desmond nonsense and pre-mission stuffing about, you actually got left in a reasonably open area and were left to get on with it. You pretty much had to be sneaky (at least to get close) or the target would do a runner, and you couldn't feasibly fight your way to the target. And just as importantly, you had to make your daring escape across the city and hide with half the city looking for you. And those bits were awesome.
You only get to do that once in this game, and it's in a really tiny area with only one valid secret route. And there's no escape bit. Actually I think there's only the two guys in the whole fricking game that you actually assassinate. All the rest are either open fights, run ten metres after them and hack them down, or done in a fricking cutscene. The whole "victims can chat with you for a bit after you stab them because of magic assassin powers" shtick was specifically designed so that you could have the dying-chat thing WITHOUT having a fricking cutscene beforehand.

As was the case with the borgia towers in Brotherhood, the very best bits of the game are the fort sidequests, where you DO get an open playground full of guards to sneak around and find a way to stab the captain and blow something up. Except....it's still way easier to just run in the front door and fight everyone openly. But still, if the game was just a whole string of these quests tied together with some naval battles (I'm amazed how awesome these turned out to be) and some dicking around in the trees stabbing wildlife, it would have been great.

Instead it's all walking from cutscene to cutscene to cutscene to cutscene....

The most egregious bit (bit of a spoiler):
You get told someone is in New York...this is exciting, you get to go see a new city to explore and jump around and stab people in! So you go there, and get instantly locked into a follow quest...fine, it's a way of showing you the sights (in this bit, you have to chase a man who is on your master list of main villain assassination targets, a man you really want to assassinate now because he has a particular dastardly plan. But you will fail the mission if you just kill him, because you have to catch him and stuff up assassinating him in a cutscene so that you can be punished for failing to assassinate him). And so then you get yanked away for a loooooooong frustrating series of prison quests and sooooo many cutscenes, and then get yanked away again for a loooooong bit of Desmond faffing about and ONLY THEN are you allowed to actually walk around the city you've been teased with about two hours later. Ugh.

 

[CivCube]

See, I thought Brotherhood was when the series started to go downhill. It wasn't bad, per se, but one could tell that the formula was set in place. Not a bad thing if you have the content to go with it, which Revelations sorta did but AC3 clearly didn't.

 

[sophie]

See, I thought Brotherhood was when the series started to go downhill. It wasn't bad, per se, but one could tell that the formula was set in place. Not a bad thing if you have the content to go with it, which Revelations sorta did but AC3 clearly didn't.

I would agree with this characterization. 2 wasn't bad. You take away the potions and restore the health system from the first game and it'd actually be better than the first one, in my opinion. Brotherhood could've been something really good. I liked the assassin recruiting, Borgia towers, and "city restoring" aspects of the game. The problem with this aspect of the game is that it is totally useless. It's balanced at first; it's legitimately difficult to get enough money to do what you want in the early stage of the game, but eventually you hit this critical mass where you've bought and improved enough buildings that you get gobs of money and the only thing to do with it is to further improve your buildings so you enter this vicious cycle where the only way to get rid of your money gets you way more money later on. Also it's a bit tedious, but I think with just a bit more thought put into the assassins and buildings and it could have been the best of the series.

The real problem in the AC series for me, as I said above, is that stealth is no longer a necessity; it is a bonus that you shoot for if you want the 100% completion achievement.

 

[LightSpectra]

[/slithers in]

The plot in the AC series is terrible (literally ranks amongst the worst of any high budget series I've ever encountered).

[/slithers out]

 

[Polycrates]

Yeah I think Brotherhood suffered by being just more of the same of AC2. AC2 was one of those rare instances where a sequel learns all of the right lessons from the original, and ended up being a great game that was a massive step up from AC1. And then Brotherhood doesn't really do much that's new (except the awesome Borgia tower missions).
I think its other problems were that - although its Rome is an amazingly well-realised setting - it pretty much stays in the one place, which you're allowed to explore most of from the start, so it starts to feel pretty stale after a while. It really needed to restrict access to more parts of the city until later. It doesn't help that about halfway through they really ran out of mission ideas, and missions start to become "follow dudes to five different places and do the exact same set of actions at each of them". And the combat is so laughably easy that there's never any sense of danger.

But yeah it boggles my mind that they've so resolutely stuck to their guns with the Desmond nonsense despite it being the worst framing device I've ever seen. It was clearly originally dreamed up as a justification for some of the more "gamey" aspects like restricting you to certain city districts at a given time, and then somehow it turned into a monster that became more and more ludicrously nonsensical, yet with the absolute dullest character in the history of videogames.

 

[sophie]

with the absolute dullest character in the history of videogames.

No, that award goes to this new protagonist from AC3. It's funny because Haytham was actually quite vibrant and his relationship with Charles Lee was actually entertaining. And then they turned him into a villain and replaced him with literally the only character in the series more boring than Desmond.

 

[Polycrates]

No, that award goes to this new protagonist from AC3. It's funny because Haytham was actually quite vibrant and his relationship with Charles Lee was actually entertaining. And then they turned him into a villain and replaced him with literally the only character in the series more boring than Desmond.

Yeah it's certainly a close contest between the two. It must have been hard work making such a cool concept as "Native American hunter/assassin who stabs his way through the American war of independence" so dull but blimey they managed it! I get the feeling that they were utterly terrified that someone might call them racist so they went with the "noble native" archetype with an extra helping of over-the-top sanctimoniousness and made sure there wasn't a shred of actual personality that anyone could take offence to. A shame, because Haytham was easily the best character in the game and if he'd learned how to climb trees and stab wildlife I would have enjoyed sticking with him.

And the number of times he yells "oh my god you killed that guy! killing is always wrong!" without the slightest hint of irony, despite having personally stabbed about half the British expeditionary force in the neck, and despite being, you know, an official assassin from the Brotherhood of Assassins.

 

[CivCube]

Speaking of which, there was literally no time spent on actually showing how Connor became an assassin. He meets up with his mentor and argues a bit, then we're supposed to accept that he's now the leader of the American brotherhood. So many missed opportunities in this lazy game.

 

[sophie]

Ok, I'm starting to get used to the control system with AC3. It was really difficult weaning myself off of habitually locking on to anybody I had interest in (as you would do in previous games). Now that I'm used to it I must say the more streamlined controls are absolutely fantastic. It's much more fluid than older games; freerunning is an absolute dream now, just what I've always wanted it to be (No more randomly jumping in slightly the wrong direction or falling off buildings because of the stupid controls! ). It's just a shame the game doesn't take place in a sprawling urban environment anymore. I wish I could go back to Florence or Rome, or even to London or Paris and play with these controls. The frontier is just...boring. It involves long periods of just running in a straight line and nothing really happening. The treeclimbing mechanic is also fairly clunky; I have a really hard time discerning trees I can climb and jump onto from those I cannot. Here's hoping to the next game taking place during the French Revolution...The combat also makes a lot more sense once I got over the "eww this is different" impressions. They definitely did a good job allowing for firearms and melee to seamlessly gel together. That being said, the plot is atrocious, Connor is such a terrible character I can hardly stand listening to him and the main storyline plays off like an interactive movie where you move the character from place to place. It doesn't really feel like I'm playing a game anymore. I just randomly press buttons and crap seems to happen with no correspondence to what I'm doing. As with 2, Brotherhood, and Revelations, the combat is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too easy. Only this one is like Brotherhood on steroids in ease of combat. You can literally take on entire forts and not even remotely come close to dying. I was rather hoping with all the new stealth features and the fact all enemies have guns (meaning, y'know, firing lines) the game would make open combat unfeasible for the most part leaving you to really have to plan your encounters and utilize stealth and ambushes to eliminate targets, but I guess that was too much to expect from the AC series. It's a shame because I feel the stealth options and controls have finally got to the point where an urban-traversing game with heavy stealth elements could be seriously fun.

 

[Polycrates]

Interesting...I had kinda the opposite reaction to most of those things!
While I agree that the new free running system at times handles quite nicely, I found it very frustrating at many other times, especially when trying to get any sort of fine control. At least in the older ones you could run reasonably fast without jumping on everything in sight and sticking there like you've been superglued. I think the real problem - which wasn't quite so acute in the older ones - is the lack of a separate control for running and free-running (given how rarely you want to walk, I would have running on by default unless a "walk" button is pressed, and a separate button for jump on tap, free run on hold). Oh and the less said about the horseriding controls, the better.

On the other hand I really liked the frontier bit and especially the 'treetop road' thing - I thought the controls were particularly slick in the trees, and just poncing around from tree to tree and stabbing some defenseless wildlife at the end of it was one of my highlights. I also thought they did an okay job of balancing the obviousness of where you could climb up with not making it too glaringly obviously "designed". I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't more use of it in the missions actually.

Agreed on combat being too easy, but there's also the corollary that stealth is too hard, making combat the default option. The guards have particularly good eyesight and quite short discovery timers, but I think the real mistake was the double-whammy of restricted areas being "level 2 notoriety" with guards automatically going in the red alertness within a millisecond of seeing you, and that red alertness means you can't go back into cover. It means that there's only very limited circumstances where you can actually effectively stealth, and the tiniest mistake means you're almost certain to be discovered. When you're getting discovered because of unresponsive controls half the time, it's a real exercise in frustration. And when you're discovered, every soldier for miles around instantly knows about it, so you're gonna be fighting/running from a lot of dudes. And escape is so hard with the legion of fast guards on your tail and the uselessness of the rooftops, that it's usually easier just to fight them all rather than escape and hide. I felt that the stealth bits in AC2 and Brotherhood struck a good general balance (and the stealthy infiltration missions were the best bits), and it would have been nice to be able to effectively make use of the new corner and long-grass hiding.


Anyway, since they've pretty much completely given up on the whole "assassination" thing anyway, what I'd like to see is a Pirates! Creed spinoff; like Pirates! but with the AC3 engine and maybe some of the Spanish governors can be templars or something if necessary but mostly nobody even tries to have a plot, especially Desmond who maybe gets hanged from a yardarm in the intro or something. Which lets you just freeroam around the Caribbean with the very silly but fantastically fun naval combat model and lots of boarding and swinging about and swordfighting in the rigging; then do some smuggling and wander around Port Royal and Tortuga etc and tavern brawl and swordfight and do dirty deeds and sneak in and out of Spanish forts and governors' mansions and climb around jungles searching for buried treasure and voodoo priestesses and all the other piratey cliches. Of course, even if they made such a thing, they'd make it into a completely linear plot-driven cutscene-fest, but a man can dream.

 

[Polycrates]

Anyway, since they've pretty much completely given up on the whole "assassination" thing anyway, what I'd like to see is a Pirates! Creed spinoff; like Pirates! but with the AC3 engine and maybe some of the Spanish governors can be templars or something if necessary but mostly nobody even tries to have a plot, especially Desmond who maybe gets hanged from a yardarm in the intro or something. Which lets you just freeroam around the Caribbean with the very silly but fantastically fun naval combat model and lots of boarding and swinging about and swordfighting in the rigging; then do some smuggling and wander around Port Royal and Tortuga etc and tavern brawl and swordfight and do dirty deeds and sneak in and out of Spanish forts and governors' mansions and climb around jungles searching for buried treasure and voodoo priestesses and all the other piratey cliches. Of course, even if they made such a thing, they'd make it into a completely linear plot-driven cutscene-fest, but a man can dream.

So it looks like maybe sometimes a man's dreams can come true (maybe): looks like Assassin's Creed 4 will be a Caribbean pirate-themed one. I guess maybe they've realised that they've butchered the core gameplay so much now that ship fighting is their real strength. Which it totally is; the AC3 ship fighting was monumentally silly but really, really well done and easily the most fun part of that game. I'm looking forward to more of it, even if the rest of the game is a single giant cutscene.

 

[CivCube]

Will there be shark-jumping in this game?

 

[NedimNapoleon]

If you can command a ship....can you seize an island and proclaim your own Pirate Kingdom?

 

[Polycrates]

Will there be shark-jumping in this game?

Yep, it comes just after the lawn bowls mini-game and just before the pig-herding mini-game

 

[sophie]

This is ridiculous to me. I was hoping this would get its own game. But by that I meant adapt the mechanic into its own standalone franchise. Can you imagine how much fun this would be with a Sid Meyer's-esque Pirates! type game? I feel like the Assassin's Creed aspect will just distract the game. I want my French Revolution or Revolution of 1848 game already, damnit!

 

[Maniacal]

I'm very disappointed they aren't waiting until the next generation of consoles to make a pirate game, also its coming out this October... didn't AC3 come out like 2 months ago?

Trailer:http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxwp1z_fbvica_travel#.UTJh5zvE308

Also was hoping someone besides ubisoft would make a pirate game.