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Casimir Radon posted:Valhalla wasn’t the grindfest that Odyssey was so that’s nice. Also not constantly changing out gear for gear with slightly better stats. I hate that Diablo poo poo. i mean you dont.. have to play it that way. i loved having all that gear available in odyssey simply because i was constantly changing my look purely for fashion purposes. the fighting in these games is so simple paying attention to stats seems like a huge waste of time, but there was all kinds of stuff in that game that looked cool in different combinations
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May 7, 2021 19:29
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Counterpoint Valhalla has better combat than any other game in the series (this isn't exactly complimentary since the combat was awkward at best for most of the series) and, at least to me, made visiting the gross bog land of England marginally more interesting than visiting a Greek island paradise (Egypt is better than both of these though). Like, the most glaring design flaw in the entire game is the Asgard/Jotunheim bit, and that's the part that felt the most like Odyssey to me: just a big nice-looking landscape with almost nothing to do but fight generic forts full of generic enemies to collect a generic loot item. All it needed was a randomly generated NPC to tell you to kill five archers in the generic fort and to give you a bandit's bow with +2% ranged damage afterwards to fully complete the experience.
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May 7, 2021 19:30
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Wolfsheim posted:Counterpoint Valhalla has better combat than any other game in the series (this isn't exactly complimentary since the combat was awkward at best for most of the series) and, at least to me, made visiting the gross bog land of England marginally more interesting than visiting a Greek island paradise (Egypt is better than both of these though). strongly disagree. the combat in terms of what the player can do feels fairly similar throughout the "trilogy" but in valhalla its worse because the ai sucks. in origins and odyssey they actually fight back in more interesting ways and also chase you around in the landscape, in valhalla they forget you exist once you are like ten feet away and ive seen a lot of both allied and enemy ai just standing around doing nothing in the middle of a fight i do find the "raid mechanic" more interesting than odysseys "battle mechanic" but feel that both games would be better without either of these things or at least if they were handled in less of a gamey way
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May 7, 2021 19:40
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Earwicker posted:i mean you dont.. have to play it that way. i loved having all that gear available in odyssey simply because i was constantly changing my look purely for fashion purposes. Valhalla felt a lot more natural when it came to progression. I was a little annoyed when I saw the recommended level for the final territory, but it turned out to be perfectly completable 50 levels below where it tells you you should be. Goodwin ended up being one of the easier bosses in the game
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May 7, 2021 19:44
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yea its true the meat shield thing was kind of annoying. i think if odyssey simply added the "one hit assassinate anyone regardless of level" ability from valhalla it would have gone a long way towards addressing that
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May 7, 2021 19:49
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Odyssey really, really wanted to force you into hyper-specific builds. Like. Even on the hardest difficulty and highest levels it was still possible to ohk targets with assassinate if you built specifically for it but it also then meant you were absolute garbage at open combat unless using the assassinate-damage skill or chance to deal assassin damage trait. Also it made the spear throw even more wildly op.
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May 7, 2021 19:55
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Having played all three and finally finished Odyssey, i think it's definitely the Best One and actually a Good Game period, even with its weaknesses (throws too much useless blue gear at you, enemy HP scaling being my two bugaboos). Valhalla does a good job of making ye olde britannia mysterious and beautiful but mechanically was one great lurch in the wrong direction. The story markers especially, god that poo poo is lame
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May 7, 2021 20:01
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I feel as though Origins was a great template that they chose to expand on rather than refine, and it makes for polarizing opinions and experiences since neither Valhalla or Odyssey do things better, they just do more of different things at the expense of other elements.
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May 7, 2021 20:08
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Odyssey does pretty much everything Origins does and better tbh
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May 7, 2021 20:19
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Fuligin posted:Odyssey does pretty much everything Origins does and better tbh Mechanically....mmmmaybe. Like, the combat is better but Odyssey throws six randomly generated MMO quests at you for every one that has, like, writing and some relevance to the plot so you'll burn out a lot faster. It also has the same annoying level-gating but outside of a few high-end late game areas the plot follows a straight-line so you're always kind of appropriate to the level, whereas Odyssey gives this illusion of an open-world (but only these 2-3 islands where you won't immediately be OHK by a wolf). In terms of plot and art direction its, uh, very tonally different? I can't say other than a playable lady it has any distinctly better qualities.
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May 7, 2021 20:54
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Fuligin posted:Odyssey does pretty much everything Origins does and better tbh It really doesn't. Odyssey's story isn't as character-focused; it sacrifices that to try and give players agency, and at times this causes some severe, severe disconnects. It also leans heavily into the gear system from Origins to the point of flooding your inventory with hundreds of useless items and demanding you spend more time making tighter builds. To facilitate this it also throws in much more locations across the map, but does nothing to personalize or vary them. You could also make the case that--production cycle completed--it gives too much to do, the quest bar can be incredibly overwhelming coming into the game right now, but I'm not really inclined to try and argue that because I don't really believe it. Odyssey doesn't really improve on any systems, it just gives more of them--the notable and significant exception being the Abilities system, which was a natural focusing of the way the game had slid towards being less stealth-focused and more combat-focused. If these things it expanded on are things you enjoyed about Origins, checking off boxes, fiddling with gear, freeroam parkour, all of that, yeah, you'd enjoy it more and see it as a great addition. But a player is just as likely to not want to have to juggle and dump more inventory items, or be disappointed that while there are more checkmarks on the map there's even less reason to want to do them, or with how Odyssey's near-eradication of climbing and traversal boundaries frequently means you're just running in straight lines from place to place. These aren't my complaints with the game, these are ones echoed by players in this thread. Which of the three games you enjoy more largely depends on what systems and ideas you enjoy the most, because each of them tends to focus more strongly on specific ones rather than be content with refining a formula. Even to the point of whether you enjoy the diversity of locales in Origins vs. the colorful vistas of Odyssey. I'd mention the rolling hills of Valhalla, but it seems the general consensus there is that they made it accurate to the countryside and landscape and it was comparatively boring for it.
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May 7, 2021 21:03
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Fuligin posted:Odyssey does pretty much everything Origins does and better tbh Origins has a much more interesting map imo as well as better integration of world and story. Odyssey is pretty but gets very repetative feeling after a while, whereas in Origins i never tired of exploring the world also while the difference in the combat between those two is pretty minor, I like the "feel" of Origins a bit better. Ironslave posted:I'd mention the rolling hills of Valhalla, but it seems the general consensus there is that they made it accurate to the countryside and landscape and it was comparatively boring for it. i thought it was very pretty, but they had to make a lot of ahistorical decisions to fill the landscape with interesting enough architecture to climb around and battle on. like all those big stone castles from every set piece battle, none of that poo poo existed in england until centuries later imo at its best valhalla had the kind of look of a 19th century romantic vision of viking age england, but then you sail around a bend in the river and the spell is ruined by a big glowing yellow raid marker that you cant turn off and the songs and stories are interrupted every 20 seconds by some kind of notification. imo one of the biggest failings of the game is just a lot of small bad quality of life decisions like that which constantly remind you that you are not in the viking age you are in an ubisoft videogame Earwicker fucked around with this message at 21:52 on May 7, 2021 |
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May 7, 2021 21:42
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TjyvTompa posted:Unity Hate question For me I felt hoodwinked, baited and switched, and absolutely bamboozled by expectation. Marketing material aside, the setting was ripe, RIPE! to show a good Templar/assassin story. But it was largely squandered. More than that this opening cinematic and prologue introducing the protagonist man and love interest lady was SOLID GOLD that was not followed up on well. Coulda had a sexy bodice ripping charming but nah, just kinda dumped you in a Division style open world lobby queueing up for heists nobody knows the routes to. Best childhood tutorial of the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tunfUToB6_g At 6:15 you get a hella sexy cat an mouse with love interest then she goes away for a long while, the things get stoooopid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8-dsjXH0QU
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May 7, 2021 21:53
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I didn’t do any of the coop stuff in Unity. Not sure if I’d have even had someone to play with. Makes me wonder how much I missed out on.
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May 7, 2021 22:40
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I pre-ordered Valhalla, but had to walk away from it after the main quest line was broken for over a month after release. I came back briefly for Yuletide, but had to walk away because it was also miserably broken. Killing time until the Mass Effect remaster, I figure I'll re-install and see if the river raids are as bad as everyone says. Couldn't tell you. It won't load. Assassin's Creed games should come out every 4 years, like the Olympics. Maybe then they would actually finish making one. Edit: And I see the hunting quests are still asking for items that don't actually drop because Europe has no black bears. Nameless Pete fucked around with this message at 23:07 on May 7, 2021 |
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May 7, 2021 23:03
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It has two black bears. Sometimes three. They only spawn in one place in the entire game. You need to keep going back to that one spot.
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May 7, 2021 23:29
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Ironslave posted:It has two black bears. Sometimes three. They only spawn in one place in the entire game. You need to keep going back to that one spot. There shouldn't be, though. It's like asking for a kangaroo pelt. It's deliberate design decision that got mistaken for a bug and a a kludgy workaround got added because whatever team was in charge of the hunting stuff didn't communicate with whatever team was in charge of Vinland stuff. Left hand never knew what the right was doing, since the director got shitcanned for being a sex pest a half year before release. Most of the parts are here, but goddamn was this thing mismanaged. Nameless Pete fucked around with this message at 00:36 on May 8, 2021 |
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May 8, 2021 00:23
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Why do you need the black bears? There’s no quest that requires it and do you really need some run from the hunting lodge?
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May 8, 2021 04:33
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Earwicker posted:probably an unpopular opinion but i think the Worst Assassins Creed is the first one your right. one is a very good tech demo/pilot episode but its never been a good game. i like its story but the writing is very of the time, not in the problematic sense but more in the "writes just discovered rod serlings style dialogue and copies it heavy"
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May 8, 2021 04:44
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Casimir Radon posted:Valhalla wasn’t the grindfest that Odyssey was so that’s nice. Also not constantly changing out gear for gear with slightly better stats. I hate that Diablo poo poo. I understand not liking Diablo-style layer on top of the game. But Valhalla doesn't go back to the pre-Diablo gameplay or invents something new, there's a hole in place of grind and gear and character development system. Doing tombs gave you skill point and it was cool in Origins and Odyssey, but in Valhalla you get 400 skill points by the end and none of them feel relevant. They left all the Diablo-style incentives in the game, just made a progression useless. It's like a fan patch on top of Odyssey system. Wolfsheim posted:Counterpoint Valhalla has better combat than any other game in the series (this isn't exactly complimentary since the combat was awkward at best for most of the series) and, at least to me, made visiting the gross bog land of England marginally more interesting than visiting a Greek island paradise (Egypt is better than both of these though). Yeah, combat is good in Valhalla. But it's not good enough to support hundreds of hours the open world wants you to spend in the game. And yes, what you've jokingly said about auto-generated quest would indeed make the game better. Any reward and progression system would be better than what Valhalla does.
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May 8, 2021 06:52
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I liked Unity well enough, but drat I really wanted to play as Elise over Arno. As for spicing the franchise up, I'd be interested to see it take a cue from Ghost of Tsushima (at least on the higher difficulties anyway) where getting into fights is dangerous. You're meant to be a sneaky stabby person, let's get back to that. Big brawls and attacking forts in Valhalla is fun and all, but dang I miss the whole "oops you got spotted you should probably run now oh crap" antics previous games got into.
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May 8, 2021 06:57
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Earwicker posted:Origins has a much more interesting map imo as well as better integration of world and story. Odyssey is pretty but gets very repetative feeling after a while, whereas in Origins i never tired of exploring the world Having just finished Origins I lay a hard disagree on this. World and story are very disjointed. Bayek personality varies a lot depending on a region. In one quest he says he doesn't care about helping people with bandits who terrorize them, he just wants to pursue the order. In another he goes out of his way to do some humorous errands. The game system and some quests require you to hunt while other quests paint Bayek as a friend of all animals. The story gets a lot of praise because of generally OK writing and some powerful touching cutscenes, it also brings up interesting themes of clash of cultures. But it's very forced and badly thouhgt-out. There's a lot of B-movie plot with writers going over check-list of cliches. The world itself fails in many ways. They made it so that greatest landmarks - the lighthouse and the Pyramids are visible from any point of the map as soon as you switch to eagle vision. Oh how horrible, I'm in a desert and seeing mirages - but wait, you can never go somewhere you are not in a direct view of civilization. You are never in Egypt, the game always reminds you that this is Disneyland with some thematic landmarks. Early on you find some interesting locations but bottom part of the map is as boring as it is. Location design is very basic. I liked big imposing fortresses of Odyssey and Origins only has like 3 big ones. Even location names are boring, it's "sunken trireme" repeated 10 times on a map, or bandit camp, or hyena lair. There's also literally nothing important in the world not marked on the map, except for hidden treasures and maybe rare animals. Both Odyssey and Valhalla make their worlds much more interesting as historical places and gameplay sandboxes. Origins has better atmosphere of individual locations and more consistent world but it's also very artificial.
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May 8, 2021 07:10
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The integration of story and gameplay in Origins was basically nonexistent for me, because Origins has no story that isn't told outside of two cutscenes in the game. You kill four dudes, Aya comes by to make some plot stuff happen, you kill four more dudes and Aya backstab crits Caesar. Aya decides respeccing rogue is really cool and forms the Brotherhood, the end. It's almost kind of hilarious how little Bayek influences the narrative despite him being the player character for 45 hours out of 50. It's definitely better than Valhalla though for being 1/3rd as long.
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May 8, 2021 09:34
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Even within those cutscenes there are huge problems. Like Caesar and Cleopatra are suddenly evil, what a twist! Except why? Because it's a powerful trope, just like accidentally killing your own son. It's a dun-dun-DUN moment that is not earned at all. Same for Bayek and Aya deciding to split up even though they love each other. I watched that split up cutscene again and again and it still doesn't make sense. It's all decent writers having to work with elevator pitch of "but then Caesar and Cleopatra are evil and Aya kills Caesar and Bayek and Aya split up but they still love each other so it's a tragedy". So when you say that Origin story is the best out of trilogy it's still a bad story with some disconnected touching good scenes. The other too games in the trilogy are less ambitious and it's a right approach. You can probably make a great story for an open world game but it's very hard with all the limitations that open world puts on the story. You can probably make a porn with a great story but first and foremost you have to write story that wouldn't make the porn bad. Odyssey too has weird clash between story and gameplay (the hero doesn't like war yet they participate in it on both sides. Curious), Valhalla less so. Origins gets points for trying to tell a more powerful story but it fails to do so and makes you go against the logic of the story if you play the game "properly".
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May 8, 2021 09:51
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ilitarist posted:Even within those cutscenes there are huge problems. Like Caesar and Cleopatra are suddenly evil, what a twist! Except why? Because it's a powerful trope, just like accidentally killing your own son. It's a dun-dun-DUN moment that is not earned at all. Same for Bayek and Aya deciding to split up even though they love each other. I watched that split up cutscene again and again and it still doesn't make sense. Uh, I had the opposite reasons for the same conclusion. I thought it was extremely obvious from the start that Aya no longer loves Bayek (since she never wants him to talk), and her new friends were never our friends, so there was no twist. Story weak either way.
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May 8, 2021 10:03
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Oh dear me posted:Uh, I had the opposite reasons for the same conclusion. I thought it was extremely obvious from the start that Aya no longer loves Bayek (since she never wants him to talk), and her new friends were never our friends, so there was no twist. Story weak either way. That's the same reason. We are informed of whatever happens without the rest of the game really supporting it. The game tells us they still love each other but their goals and paths are different now. The game can't support it by showing us proper affection beyond some flirting. And said goals and paths are... to be assassins and kill bad people. For both of them. That's a story that looked nice as a pitch for a book, not for an expansive open world game that has to spend most of its cutscene budget on dead people talking about how they are actually not that bad.
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May 8, 2021 10:19
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I feel like explaining to goons that emotions aren't a binary is impossible so I won't make an attempt but I will say that Bayek's intense and sometimes abrupt switch between avenging religious fanatic killer, kindly dad and wife guy is extremely good and vastly better than Odyssey's PC being "what if Joss Whedon character but ancient Greece"ilitarist posted:Even within those cutscenes there are huge problems. Like Caesar and Cleopatra are suddenly evil, what a twist! Except why? can't believe the caesar or cleopatra characters would betray two random egyptians, now to take a big sip of water and learn anything else about their historical counterparts exquisite tea posted:The integration of story and gameplay in Origins was basically nonexistent for me, because Origins has no story that isn't told outside of two cutscenes in the game. You kill four dudes, Aya comes by to make some plot stuff happen, you kill four more dudes and Aya backstab crits Caesar. Aya decides respeccing rogue is really cool and forms the Brotherhood, the end. It's almost kind of hilarious how little Bayek influences the narrative despite him being the player character for 45 hours out of 50. It's definitely better than Valhalla though for being 1/3rd as long. you could kind of describe them all this way if you were trying to be trite though? -two british assassins go to london to kill a guy, stab about eight guys, then they kill that guy -a greek person leaves an island to find their parents, stabs 20-30 guys, and then finds their parents -a viking leaves home to settle in england, stabs a lot of people along the way, briefly visits america -an italian guy finds out his father was an assassin after he dies, also becomes an assassin, stabs a lot of people in italy, punches pope -an italian guy continues being an assassin, stabs more guys in rome this time -an italian guy's turkish stabbing vacation -a native american is tricked into helping the english genocide his people, stabs his father actually that last one makes AC3 sound way better than it is Wolfsheim fucked around with this message at 15:48 on May 8, 2021 |
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May 8, 2021 15:36
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Wolfsheim posted:I feel like explaining to goons that emotions aren't a binary is impossible so I won't make an attempt but I will say that Bayek's intense and sometimes abrupt switch between avenging religious fanatic killer, kindly dad and wife guy is extremely good and vastly better than Odyssey's PC being "what if Joss Whedon character but ancient Greece" Yeah I like it and I think it's perfectly fine, the problem with Origins is that Bayek starts as a complete character, has no arc, and the 'starting the brotherhood' grand plot moment falls completely flat because I can barely recall who any of the people in the room are.
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May 8, 2021 15:50
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Bayek's arc is in realizing that his relationship is over and he's been chasing a fantasy the entire game. Except he doesn't realize that, Aya tells it to him on the beach. Which... maybe there's something to that, the story was as much about him coming to terms with the loss of Khemu and all the things he was doing to try and do that, even forming the Hidden Ones, and it's less about what a character realizes and more what the audience does. By the time you hit Memphis it's becoming painfully obvious there are fractures in their relationship that neither are working with the other to repair, instead chasing different unhealthy ways of coping with it.
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May 8, 2021 15:57
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Ironslave posted:By the time you hit Memphis it's becoming painfully obvious there are fractures in their relationship that neither are working with the other to repair, instead chasing different unhealthy ways of coping with it. Feel like people are missing the point that this was kind of the theme of Origins? The whole Assassin’s thing is a coping mechanism for them? The game is not about an unhappy divorce but rather a bittersweet distancing as a result of trauma. You’re not supposed to go “CLEOPATRA WAS BAD????” you’re supposed to go “drat grief makes people do some crazy poo poo.”
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May 8, 2021 16:02
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Wolfsheim posted:you could kind of describe them all this way if you were trying to be trite though? The main problem with Origins' story is the pacing. Bayek is a completely passive protagonist who by the dictates of the plot cannot advance the story in any meaningful way, so the act of playing as him is rather unengaging once you start to realize this. He goes places and does stuff totally unrelated to the main storyline until Aya swoops back in to actually move the narrative along, his grand revelation over being tricked by the Order is some two-minute cutscene where he says "you know somebody really oughta do something about all this" and then you're back to killing four more sub-bosses while assembling a ragtag group of characters I've completely forgotten existed until Alchenar reminded me. Compare that to say Black Flag which is hardly a masterpiece in storytelling of itself, but you can see Edward's gradual disillusionment with his life of piracy happening in real time, after greed and opportunism thwarting everybody in his life he starts to understand serving a higher purpose than himself, and he ends up in a very different place both physically and emotionally from where he begins. There's something going on there. I totally believe all those behind-the-scenes stories of Origins initially having Aya as a dual protagonist because she's the character you'd actually want to be playing as in this story.
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May 8, 2021 16:05
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Wolfsheim posted:
Again, it feels right if you describe the situation as simple as that. If you look what actually happens in the game it's you fighting back to back with Caesar against Septimus or whatever is his name (evil dude of the order) and Caesar sends you to kill that bad guy. But when you about to do it Caesar changes his mind and his guards capture you as Caesar watches as the guy who just tried to killed him beats the guy who just saved his skin. Killing that dude would leave the order with just one person in Egypt who holds no power here, so we needed Caesar to somehow betray Bayek before he kills the second to last dude in the order. That way rulers of Egypt and Rome join the organization that tried to kill them but at least has two dudes among them, not a single subordinate of one of those rulers. It's not about characters being complex or anything. It's a scene that exists to make a player go wow I can't believe he did that, but it makes no in-story sense at all. I can list a lot of scenes like that in the game. Any complexity you might see is not a well thought out complex character but a lack of consistency and writers disregarding the plot and trying to somehow connect the points that the story needs to have.
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May 8, 2021 17:43
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One thing I love about Odyssey in 2021 is the sheer amount of content. The autogenerated stuff I do t really care about as it can easily be avoided /done as it's signposted. The number of legit quests is massive, much like the game world. And quite a few of them tie into each other, which is not easy to pull off. Some games find it impossible to add a lot of content based on limitations of their engine/workflow but Ubisoft did a fantastic job optimizing for building decent content. Now not all of the quests are awesome and they make it hard to have one consistent Alexios/Kassandra, but there's just so much fun game to get through that it's the most played game for me since Breath of the Wild. I've put 80h in the game and am halfway through Fate of Atlantis and haven't played the First Blade yet, nor become the top mercenary, not visited about 1/3 of the Greek world.
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May 8, 2021 17:50
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Ironslave posted:Bayek's arc is in realizing that his relationship is over and he's been chasing a fantasy the entire game. Except he doesn't realize that, Aya tells it to him on the beach. Which... maybe there's something to that, the story was as much about him coming to terms with the loss of Khemu and all the things he was doing to try and do that, even forming the Hidden Ones, and it's less about what a character realizes and more what the audience does. I'd also want to remind you that sidequest in Memphis allows you to say goodbye to Khemu and achieve inner peace. But wait, you can also say goodbye to Khemu and achieve inner peace by visiting all stargazing locations. Oh wait, no, you actually say goodbye to Khemu and achieve inner peace by killing Flavius. Only some time after that the spirit of Khemu manifests again. So it's either several writers not talking to each other or a very subtle psychological commentary in a game that is very careful about explaining everything so that 5-year old could understand it.
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May 8, 2021 17:53
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Having three big quest lines in each game now really fucks with any natural flow of the story. Origins and Valhalla have both felt anticlimactic in their end games because of it.
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May 8, 2021 18:16
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ilitarist posted:I'd also want to remind you that sidequest in Memphis allows you to say goodbye to Khemu and achieve inner peace. I wanted to be an rear end in a top hat and say something like "we all know getting over grief is like leveling up, you look at the right sunset and BOOM no longer sad about your dead child" but if I'm being honest character development in an open world game is tricky. Valhalla actually has a pretty good character turn near the end where Eivor, who has been a 'trust in the gods and my axe' model viking is disillusioned after rejecting Odin and has a conversation with Halfdan where he talks about feeling faith in Christianity and she bitterly says there is nothing after death, only the time with our loved ones while we're still alive. It's about as poignant as Valhalla gets, but because it happens at the end of the game and you can do all the little sidequests whenever you want she has to revert to being the same plucky carefree viking she was when she arrived in England in all of them. The only solution to this would be either to just have the main character have no personality (every Elder Scrolls), have their personality stay fairly static (Odyssey), or to have every sidequest have slightly different writing based on when you do it (Origins does this a couple of times based on if you killed that regions' main target yet but it misses it more often than it hits, Rockstar does it but they put like 10x as much money and dev time into every game). It's a tough one, but I still prefer the way Origins/Valhalla do it than Odyssey, even if there's a couple inconsistencies.
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May 8, 2021 18:18
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exquisite tea posted:The integration of story and gameplay in Origins was basically nonexistent for me, because Origins has no story that isn't told outside of two cutscenes in the game. You kill four dudes, Aya comes by to make some plot stuff happen, you kill four more dudes and Aya backstab crits Caesar. Aya decides respeccing rogue is really cool and forms the Brotherhood, the end. It's almost kind of hilarious how little Bayek influences the narrative despite him being the player character for 45 hours out of 50. It's definitely better than Valhalla though for being 1/3rd as long. yeah. its very loose story. i just personally like bayek and aya. but honestly i like Valhalla's story more even if its dumb at times. eivore is fun and i like her dealing with culture clash and realizing that alot of the vikings are dumb loud assholes. odyssey is still the "worst" overall story despite loving kass and alyxios is because it suffers ending multiplication effect. origins has a bit of that too but its way less damning. origins issues is the big points of the story can be summarized in a paragraph and the pacing is all over the place.
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May 8, 2021 18:34
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exquisite tea posted:The main problem with Origins' story is the pacing. I mean, that's a problem with Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla. There's maybe three or four hours of story spread across potentially a hundred or more hours of gameplay. By the time the brotherhood is established in Origins, at least one of the founding members was someone I don't think I'd seen for 30 hours of gameplay since I'd been just exploring and messing around before finishing up the main quest. Similiar in Odyssey, I went something like the same without seeing Deimos after one of their early appearances, and whoever that Spartan guy is that you meet at one point and becomes friends with - by the time I next saw him, I'd forgotten who he was because it had been so long.
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May 8, 2021 18:53
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:The assassination setups in AC1 were the most repetitive tasks in the series. They definitely were repetitive, but they were also pretty dang cool. Altair had no idea how to tackle assassinating his targets without the info he gained from those repetitive tasks. This was also before the free-parkour days Origins started, so he couldn't just climb, Eagle, stab, assassinations had to be planned out or fail spectacularly, and that's a thing that should have been brought forward to subsequent games. Earwicker posted:i mean you dont.. have to play it that way. i loved having all that gear available in odyssey simply because i was constantly changing my look purely for fashion purposes. I'm sorry, are you actually suggesting someone have a suboptimal build!?!? I'm literally shaking. ilitarist posted:I'd also want to remind you that sidequest in Memphis allows you to say goodbye to Khemu and achieve inner peace. Bayek's a little whiny pissbaby, I only had to say goodbye to my dead son once, amirite?
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May 8, 2021 18:58
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Wolfsheim posted:I wanted to be an rear end in a top hat and say something like "we all know getting over grief is like leveling up, you look at the right sunset and BOOM no longer sad about your dead child" but if I'm being honest character development in an open world game is tricky. Valhalla actually has a pretty good character turn near the end where Eivor, who has been a 'trust in the gods and my axe' model viking is disillusioned after rejecting Odin and has a conversation with Halfdan where he talks about feeling faith in Christianity and she bitterly says there is nothing after death, only the time with our loved ones while we're still alive. It's about as poignant as Valhalla gets, but because it happens at the end of the game and you can do all the little sidequests whenever you want she has to revert to being the same plucky carefree viking she was when she arrived in England in all of them. That's where I agree with you and agree to disagree. Origins has a better pitch for a story and it's a story that can be much more impactful and interesting than Odyssey or Valhalla. They tried to do a very hard thing and they probably wrote and recorded a lot of this story before they knew how many sidequests will there be or how many crocodiles do you have to kill to upgrade your left bracer. I do understand that Origins is not that bad considering the task at hand, but I think that less ambitious approaches you've listed are the way to go. Creators have to understand what tools are at their disposal; if you write a play in a theater you need a complex emotional story with a limited number of actors and without any action scenes; if you make an open world action game it's very hard to combine deep complex character with varied side content. If the devs say that I'm playing as a mighty bastard who fights for freedom then it's fine, I don't expect open world action game story to blow my mind. But when devs promise me a story of a sad dad and his wife then it's their fault the bar is high now. CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:Bayek's a little whiny pissbaby, I only had to say goodbye to my dead son once, amirite? The point is none of those events acknowledge each other. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 19:31 on May 8, 2021 |
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May 8, 2021 19:24
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