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The problem with Syndicate is that the grappling hook makes it too obviously a poor man's Arkham City. e: ps looking for that christmas sale discount
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Nov 28, 2017 12:48
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AC4 was a fantastic pirate game, but nothing beats Brotherhood for the 'hunt down an organisation and take it apart person by person' story of actually being an assassin.
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Nov 28, 2017 22:17
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Okay so the specific thing that's good about the Ezio story is that the behind the scenes suspense-of-disbelief is actually kept to a minimum. Ezio wants to take down the Borgias. He has to find out where their money, funding, and soldiers are coming from and work out who specifically he has to kill to cut off those resources. Even though there's a lot of hooks handed out by members of the supporting cast, the story feels like Ezio is in charge and can only progress at the pace Ezio works out his plan of attack. Jacob and Evie Frie on the other hand kill people because they're told 'that guy's a Templar, kill him please'. Part of this is the Ubisoft open-world concept naturally pushing against having a solid central narrative, but Ubisoft have also consciously moved away from telling this kind of story. Black Flag is the only one that really works.
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Nov 29, 2017 00:27
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Harrow posted:I wonder what from Origins can really be carried forward into future AC games in less-open settings. For example, I'm not sure this style of combat would work that well in a setting like Syndicate's London, with fewer melee weapon types around and no huge, deadly animals to fight, for example. Or a more modern city setting might be kind of an awkward place to have the random loot you can get in this one. One of the things that Ubisoft have done right with the AC series is that they only spend 2-2.5 games with the same set of mechanics, then launch off to a different era and a different set of gameplay rules (all based around the same theme however). I'd expect 1 more game like Origins, then a leap back to a dense, focused city map.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:48
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Shalebridge Cradle posted:Not sure how they'd do a couple of those settings. At a minimum Hannibal, Alexander, and the Peloponnesian War take place hundreds of years before Origins. Oh they can do anything they like with justifying a setting, just as how Origins doesn't have any difficulty with being set before the Templars exist. Japan is by far the best option - Japanese architecture is different to the Mediterranean-European stuff we've had thus far while being great for Parkour, the ninja thing means there's a host of opportunities to explore new gadgets etc etc. I'd take Imperial Rome.
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Dec 7, 2017 14:32
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Fart City posted:I mean, it's a series whose trademark mechanic is jumping ten stories into a pile of hay and not dying. Just once I want my character to dive into a haystack and go "ow! a needle"
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Dec 7, 2017 16:32
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Fart City posted:It's not a full game, but AC3's Tyranny Of King Washington is pure batshit crazy alt-history, complete with a pyramid being erected in the middle of New York City. It's also far more enjoyable than the base game itself. That's not a high bar though.
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Dec 7, 2017 23:27
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Carlosologist posted:I think by the time of Unity, in-universe the genetic memories of people had already become researched enough to be sold as video games as meta-Assassin's Creeds. Except you still have to unlock the memories in sequence because DON'T THINK ABOUT IT. e: the grim meta-narrative is that because being an Assassin appears to be a largely hereditary thing, the 'source' of any memories is probably someone the Templars have caught and dissected. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Dec 8, 2017 |
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Dec 8, 2017 15:05
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Ainsley McTree posted:I liked revelations and never really understood why people like to dunk on it. It’s fun for the same reasons brotherhood was. The worst thing I can say about it is that the new stuff they added to the game (hook thing, tower defense, bomb crafting) is pretty underwhelming but outside of some introductory tutorials you can pretty safely ignore all of it and treat it like brotherhood: old man edition. Istanbul is very pretty and fun to run around in. Gameplay wise Revelations just doesn't have a reason to exist and Brotherhood is the absolute pinnacle of Assassin's Creed storytelling (Black Sails being a close second). It gets grief because it's a game that doesn't really move the series forwards and it's a waste of time talking about how bad AC3 was because everyone already agrees.
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Dec 23, 2017 23:56
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I don't understand how someone can complete the 1-2 hour tutorial in AC3, then get plunged immediately into a second 1-2 hour tutorial, followed by a cutscene where you are told it is time to begin your training and not go 'I might finish this game, but I've decided it is a bad game'.
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Dec 24, 2017 17:08
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Origins finally nails the fact that the USP of the Assassin's Creed series is that you set your game in a specific time and place and say to the player 'this is what people were like here and then'. Beyond the grand conspiracies and the meeting famous figures and the climbing and jumping off tall things, the game gives you a window into what the world looked like, how society was structured, and what people cared about in their lives. That's pretty cool.
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Dec 27, 2017 00:11
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Video game convention would have you choose between an exposition-dumping cutscene between your character and the antagonist, and giving the player the freedom to in gameplay sneak up on the antagonist and insta-kill him without being detected. Ubisoft Montreal said "gently caress you we're doing both" and that's a good thing and it's one of those times where you don't ask questions about what exactly is happening because it's more fun not to.
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Dec 28, 2017 17:01
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Like all AAA games, the series is a power fantasy and that spell falls apart quickly if the player character considers whether murdering people is the best way to make the world better. Connor is the only character who is genuinely struggling with his place in the world and is terrible as a result. Before you object - Kenway is different - he's driven by greed until he loses everything, and then he's driven to be something better (but at no point questions the rightness of murdering everyone who gets in his path).
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Dec 29, 2017 02:30
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The problem that AC creates as a series though is that you can't have every single protagonist go through the same arc starting with 'Conspiracy between Templars and Assassins? That's nonsense' because then the first third of every game will be identical in tone. You do it the first couple of times, then it's just an established thing that the audience is familiar with so the characters just have to accept the exposition without comment and move swiftly on to the unique story you want to tell. I think it's a credit to the Ubisoft writers that by and large each game does have a recognisably distinct main cast.
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Dec 29, 2017 16:37
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Zaphod42 posted:Better yet once you've got the series properly established as being lots of similar Assassins throughout time, you can just drop future games into the story after the "what's going on?" phase. Just begin the game in-media-res already. Problem is that both games that have done that (Unity and Syndicate) ended up protagonists who just didn't have a character arc. Jacob and Evie Frye are memorable and distinct, but their personal drama is just a bit of forced tension in cutscenes and doesn't come into the real story in any way. By far the best characters (Ezio and Kenway) have stories built entirely around their initiation into the Assassin order. They are just doing riffs off 'the hero's journey' but its a trope for a reason and is perfect for video games. Origins practically begins the game in-media-res and I've only just met Cleopatra so I'm not far in enough to decide if it works out.
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Dec 29, 2017 18:19
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Okay one thing I definitely don't like is that the game is designed on a 'travel from map zone to map zone in this linear sequential manner, never going back' path. It's unnecessary MMO-like design and it breaks my immersion.
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Dec 30, 2017 14:37
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Zaphod42 posted:Yeah, its an interesting idea to so closely design it as a single player MMO, but its kinda like, why? Its nice they give you an option in the menu to say "enemies level with me" so you don't completely out-level lower zones, but its always really jarring when I waltz into an enemy base and I'm about to assassinate some dudes and then I do like 10 damage and realize they're level skull-gently caress so I have no choice but to GTFO and come back when I'm 3 levels higher... that feels really artificial. It's necessary to have gear progression exist to the degree they want to. But for that really minor gain nobody asked for (and the result of enemy/gear scaling working well is that it should always actually be just as hard to kill every enemy you come across), you completely lose that sense of a lived in world that you get a chance to explore and become familiar with.
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Dec 30, 2017 21:15
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My complaint as I play though remains the same - the locations might be gorgeous but you ride through them once and then never again, so you never really get a chance to appreciate or establish a sense of familiarity with them.
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Jan 7, 2018 18:03
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Zaphod42 posted:All games built around fast travel suffer from this. But its also way more convenient. Its a tough thing to balance. The other thing is that the game is massively inconsistent about whether quests will send you to the interesting locations in a zone or not, so you don't know whether exploring will have you doubling back later or not. I'm still really enjoying the game, it's just frustrating to see the lazy Farcry/Ubisoft content techniques marring something that could be Witcher 3 quality.
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Jan 7, 2018 19:46
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Okay It's starting to grate how literally every person Bayek meets has some parent-child tragedy going on. I get it Ubisoft, he's on a personal journey. You know what other major RPG game character was on a quest relating to his missing daughter but who's game world wasn't a constant hamfisted reference to that motivation?
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Jan 15, 2018 17:11
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Without 'games as a service' pc gaming would very likely be dead so you pretty much couldn't be more wrong.
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Jan 18, 2018 09:44
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The thing about Origins is that it drops the last vestiges of the uniqueness of AC gameplay to become Ubisoft-open-world-game:Egypt (gimmick, Dark Souls easy-mode combat). That still makes it a good game, but there is a fundamental break with previous AC games that was really long overdue but makes it possible to consider Syndicate a better game for actually being an Assassin.
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May 14, 2018 12:38
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Discendo Vox posted:Arkham Origins was a trash fire from a development and design perspective, though. Knight's trashfire was mostly on the high-level writing side, with a generous helping of forced vehicle inclusion. It's fair to compare City/Knight with Asylum and say that the open-world elements changed the nature of the game. Personally I thought each game was better than the last and they were all fantastic, but a lot of people had the opinion that Asylum felt like a traditional Batman comic story being told in a way that was lost in subsequent games.
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May 14, 2018 15:00
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Is there an AC game where pick-pocketing has a point?
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May 17, 2018 13:38
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Alter Ego posted:Pretty sure it was crazy successful. I'm proud of Ubi for clawing their way out of the mess that was Unity--Syndicate was good, Origins was great, and I hope Odyssey is amazing. Really it's just inevitable that with the pace they were setting and the multiple teams working on multiple games at once and the need to periodically shake up the mechanics that the AC series has been a bit hit and miss. Popular and profitable enough that they can power through the misses and correct the flaws for the next round.
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Jun 1, 2018 12:35
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The mechanic just doesn't have anywhere to go. What they should do is be really loving bold and make future-AC in a Mass Effect style setting.
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Jun 1, 2018 17:33
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Dapper_Swindler posted:Seems like it’s expands a ton on origins, gameplay and rpg wise along with adding black flag stuff. Also it seems to be adding a bunch from wildlands. Individual target in different regions all at once, faction stuff. Etc. either way day one. Wildlands' 'every map region has a target you need to take out' was more AC than AC:O's 'every map region is like an MMO map region which may or may not contain some plot relevant stuff'. The inventory hunter/warrior/assassin damage distinction is more consciously reminiscent of Splinter Cell Blacklist's Assault/Ghost/Panther scores and is good if they're building gameplay around 'there should always be three viable ways to do this'. All good and I'm sure I love it, but Ubisoft are forgetting more and more the magic that early AC's and GTA catch, which is that open-world games are immersive if they get the player to criss-cross the same location over and over again so that it becomes familiar. I don't want to ride over an area once, clear out the quests and never come back. I want to spend some time in a single location and try to achieve something there like a real person would.
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Jun 10, 2018 17:11
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Lobok posted:It was also cool in the older GTAs and Assassin's Creeds when you would get to know an area well and that helped you evade the law. Nothing like those Vice City chases when you knew which corners and shortcuts to take. Yeah, GTAV is absolute genius for having you spend most of the game driving across the same locations in Los Santos - while very rarely actually doing something at the same spot unless there's a good reason for it. You learn the map and it becomes familiar and that both adds to the immersion and makes car chases more interesting.
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Jun 10, 2018 18:45
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The actual Odyssey is pretty rich with source material, I hope they steal liberally from it. I also hope the tutorial consists of you breaking out of the wooden horse and clearing the guards from the walls of Troy.
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Jun 11, 2018 11:02
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Calaveron posted:I mean the reason origins took so long was because they essentially rebuilt the series from the ground up, now that they have the foundations they can make new entries quicker Yeah, same engine, probably a bit of iterative tweaking but fundamentally the same new combat and parkour systems, the naval stuff already trailed the way it was in III for Black Flag. Ubisoft has always been able to pump out a second game a year after the first one with a big graphics and gameplay revision has come out. And the second game has always been much better.
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Jun 11, 2018 17:36
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AC3 and Black Flag. Unity and Syndicate. Origins and Odyssey. Ubisoft have done the 'rush new game engine, use the same engine to put out a proper game the next year' thing several times over. Origins is actually the outlier as they managed to pull everything together without it being a horrible shitshow.
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Jun 11, 2018 23:02
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Harrow posted:Before Origins came out I really wanted Assassin's Creed to take a hard turn towards stealth and focus on really advanced crowd stealth with less of a focus on being a one-person army who can kill dozens of dudes in a direct fight. I was very skeptical of this RPG direction. I think it's more that AC always tried to firewall off the stealth and the kill-everyone-in-sight gameplay sections and so got more and more wildly inconsistent (and having to use insta-fails to avoid having to answer 'why doesn't protagonist just kill everyone in their way'). From Origins they've gone 'yeah just pick your playstyle' and it works much better.
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Jun 14, 2018 18:56
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I really want Ubisoft to one day spring a modern day Assassin's Creed on us where the Assassins and Templars pull out all of the precursor mcguffins you've been chasing though all these games and tear poo poo up with them. e: or even better, if they do a crossover and that's the plot of the next Splinter Cell.
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Jun 17, 2018 00:16
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I'm replaying Origins on Nightmare and it's a very different game to the one I remember on hard. It feels a lot more like Batman - there are real payoffs to using all the gadgets at your disposal and really thinking about how you are going to make your approach, rather than taking on every fort with an 'up over the wall and hey ho we go'attitude.
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Jun 18, 2018 14:23
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Palpek posted:That's how I understood them letting the player use the apple of eden. It's basically a lore-friendly way of introducing spells to their RPG. Basically inevitable given the need to reconcile going backwards in time with the need not to shut down gameplay mechanics because you've established the gadget responsible for them hasn't been invented yet.
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Jun 18, 2018 15:36
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e: ^^ what's an ancient greek fulton look like?exquisite tea posted:I will say it is kinda funny to name your franchise reboot Origins and then have its sequel go back to a time 400 years before Origins. If this series just becomes Historical Murder RPG then I'm not gonna complain too much. I mean it's the Origins of the Assassins. Whereas the Order is already established at the start of the game and is heavily implied (and probably implicitly stated somewhere in the lore) to have been brought to Egypt by the Greeks. Next game is set even earlier in Greece. The implications for what the story will be about are a bit obvious.
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Jun 18, 2018 16:28
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Sindai posted:I'm sure it would be something minor that would only directly relate to stopping whatshername the evil internet woman, since major changes to history would destroy one of the big selling points of the series. Nah the selling point of the series is 'parkour ninja in historic setting'. But the change history setup is so they can make RPGs where you decide if the character does templary things or assassiny things (ie. the 'your choices impact chaos/order of the region' thing their trailing).
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Jun 18, 2018 20:54
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Friendly Fire posted:The broken spear is a Piece of Eden so giving an enhanced lifespan isn't out of the question. Basically do a Black Flag modern-day reveal except the guy who shows up at the end to meet your modern day character is the guy you are playing in history.
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Jun 19, 2018 12:58
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That shore battle in the gameplay trailer made me remember there's one team at Ubisoft that loves setting you up with a brotherhood/crew/gang and having content where you fight in a big battle with them, and another team that just doesn't care about it and they alternate games.
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Jun 24, 2018 18:22
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exquisite tea posted:Looking forward to visiting that whole big island full of lesbians. Unironically they could do this and it would be great: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho
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Jun 25, 2018 12:05
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