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Alchenar posted:So how's the overall quality of the story in Odyssey? Because I'm doing my replay of Origins and oh my god it's so bad - I'm at the point post Cleopatra taking the throne where Bayek gives his big BROTHERHOOD and CREED speech to the room of people and I realized I barely recognized half of them and cared about none of them. The story is mostly fine as written but in certain places it feels like cutscenes are missing and they didn't even fill in the gaps with some incidental world dialogue. Spoilers for the Between Two Worlds quest chain: The way the Sphinx stuff plays out is genuinely incomprehensible to me. I suppose I can infer that while you're gone Pythagoras's student activates the Sphinx and is killed, but I thought the statue vanishing was a glitch and the fact that Kass goes "ah, I must have to come back at night" made zero sense. It also runs into some pacing issues, where characters get rushed from place to place to wrap up historical narratives in as little time as possible and the game doesn't devote any time to their reasoning or behavior. Spoilers for the main questline: The way the game goes "join Brasidas to fight Deimos" -> "wait now we have to go back to Athens for about two seconds" -> "okay go join Brasidas to fight Deimos, this time on the other side of the world and also Brasidas is mad at you now for unclear reasons" is really poorly structured, and when the second Deimos-Brasidas fight cutscene started I thought the game had glitched and was showing me the old cutscene again. e: oh and if you aren't a huge fan of stories about how these poor mistreated slaves actually LOVE their lot then you may have some issues with AC Odyssey. Valentin fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 05:09
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minor end of cultist questline question: when the game suddenly decides to introduce this silly "order vs. chaos" framing to what's going on, why is team chaos called the "cult of kosmos?" "here's my conspiracy devoted to creating chaos throughout the greek world, the cult of order." edit: I guess the idea is that the chaos stuff was them falling away from Aspasia's totalitarian goals? I'm overthinking this stupid plotline. exquisite tea posted:I finished the artifact questline first, but in relief of the other two plotlines, I really think it makes the most sense for it to be resolved last. Even though they can be completed in any order, Cult -> Family -> Artifacts seems like the most logical sequence. Something to keep in mind if I ever replay the story on NG+, most likely yes! Isn't this order impossible? Doesn't resolving the cult necessarily mean dealing with Deimos, which effectively ends the family plotline? I agree that this makes the most sense, though I don't think it'll help cohesion much. They wanted this weird patchwork three-tracked story so none of these endings get to inform each other properly. Valentin fucked around with this message at 10:02 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 09:53
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Empress Brosephine posted:This game reminds me of New Vegas. It was seen as mediocre by the press but t really had a great fan base and once you get deeper into it I get a lot of New Vegas vibes; it knows it’s a assassins game and takes advantage of it in ways that aren’t assassinating. Does anyone else agree Odyssey has generally gotten glowing reviews and NV's strengths are all in story and writing where this game's are decidedly not so I can't say I understand this take at all, no.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:00
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just started this game and it's so glitchy I wish they'd just played into the animus stuff. obviously you can't really anticipate a game being glitchy in that way but since the game opens with a glitch, it's fun every time a cutscene opening plays twice or fire is invisible to be like, drat, animus problems again. enjoying male eivor more than I expected after playing kass in odyssey. tbh given that the game opens with "eivor is kind of a weirdo consumed by revenge and their father's failures in a patronymic warrior honor culture," the first time you see them as an adult they're being sexually menaced, and there's kind of a recurring thing where people imply eivor's kind of a sensitive weirdo with problems who's a little vain and honor-focused, I think think I much prefer dude eivor. opening with kjotve beating the poo poo out of lady eivor and being like "DO I WARM YER LOINS" woulda sucked actually even if he's obviously marked for death. Valentin fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Dec 28, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2023 19:00
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:That reminds me: what was the point of the male+female option? Did it have a point? the post origins games operate as pseudo- or lite-RPGs, and one way in which they advance that feeling for the audience is by providing the scantest amount of customization and dialogue choice, along with quests with multiple outcomes, etc. e: and I think this totally works for what I think is the goal, which is to get people more invested in the game's story and lend (the appearance of, depending on how cynical you are) depth to the game's writing. I think Kassandra would've been well-liked either way, but alexios provides a safety valve for misogynist assholes terminally afraid of "wokeness", and making her something players chose instead of having assigned to them made people identify with and root for her more strongly. Valhalla reportedly sucked (I've only just started but early signs aren't promising) in various ways that tamped down this sentiment but post-odyssey there were definitely people, including on SA, suggesting that AC could pick up a consumer audience usually more interested in bioware and similar devs. Valentin fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 07:17
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the aliens are the best parts of the game because no one really wants them and no one seems happy about them. extremely check a box-rear end poo poo. it's "part of the brand identity" except they never figured out a way to integrate that felt normal and real and, for all that it's part of the brand, they have never ever ever been stupid enough to use it in marketing, lmao.
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Dec 29, 2023 20:21
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i like the goofy aliens poo poo but definitely on an ironic level. but i could see why they could be fun unironically. it's just crazy to me that they've made like fifteen of these games and despite the ancient aliens poo poo being increasingly important through valhalla the marketing hides it like it's shameful. the nearest thing i can think of is that it's like if every star wars movie ever had been advertised as a gritty space adventure and they just straight up pretended there were no jedi in the marketing. it's extra weird because at maybe the height of the series' cultural impact, back in 2, everyone playing was really unironically hyped to fight the pope empowered by alien tech and it became like, a word-of-mouth selling point for how weird the game got. but frankly the weird integration of stone-faced pretension to historical accuracy with literal ancient alien immortality nonsense, and taking both sides absolutely dead seriously, is one of the franchise's charm points. anyways just did my first monastery raid and accidentally hit a monk, triggering a "killing civilians will result in desynchronization" message and i've never rolled my eyes harder at a game in my life. don't make the loving viking raiding and pillaging game, then! Valentin fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Dec 30, 2023 |
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Dec 30, 2023 22:06
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dual spears is so funny. who designed these weapons generally. why did they do it like that (bad) e: is rome a reasonable place to go from saxon-era england? i assume so since every saxon who lives is like "well, guess i'll go to rome," but i truly don't know the history so i can't tell if they're throwing it out as a far-off mystical kingdom or as a place with ongoing commerce to england. Valentin fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Jan 4, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 21:48
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valhalla is kind of incredible because you can feel a sort of vaguely (vaguely) interesting idea in there that's just crushed beneath the weight of everything else. like i honestly thought kassandra as a character was always just okay and pretty much carried by 1) the vocal performance and general energy and 2) bringing a "i'm a video game protagonist i can do whatever i want" energy to a series that can come off as a little dour. and her issue doesn't really have anything to do with her setup, it's just that when you have four (iirc) different main storylines you can complete in any order there isn't really gonna be much room to write a compelling arc unless you're willing to write ten million dialogue variations (which AC is not for a variety of reasons, perhaps most important being they would then have to record and animate them all). she's just fun enough that it doesn't matter. similarly, you can actually kind of see all the strings there for them to try to do something interesting with eivor (one of the most important side conflicts the game thinks it has going on is the gay longing and/or affair between you and your brother's wife!), it's just not possible for any kind of coherent idea to emerge of who eivor is as a person with the way the game is structured and the number of cooks in the kitchen. nothing can matter when i have to sit through like *sixteen* storylines where the only characters who can change are eivor and sigurd, and then only change at certain points so it's mostly just a CYOA of which order you want to see the disjointed cutscenes. also eivor is already more dour than kass just right off the bat. still not entirely done with the game but the biggest example of this so far is the isle of skye dlc. entirely built around the idea of kassandra and eivor meeting and then whoops kassandra's an rear end in a top hat now and eivor randomly is too for no reason, in part because they could be anywhere in their story. enjoy! e: also just generally kind of insane to make an open world game where you can't actually use the open world aspects in any meaningful way. the core AC gameplay has always been and remains perfectly fine (though the parkour in valhalla feels pretty bad, i think that's just because AC's parkour needs like a ground-up redesign to make sense. the first game is actually pretty specific to its time and place aesthetically and mechanically and they've been doing their best to messily stuff those stealth mechanics into other contexts and it just doesn't work), but this idea of "here's a mercenaries-style list of targets except whoops a bunch of them are location-gated by RPG mechanics and a bunch are locked behind story missions" is just like...what's the point. the feeling of vastness and infinite content, obviously (you're supposed to open the order page for the first time and be like oh my god, so many targets!), but they're not satisfying to track down or assassinate. it doesn't help that these "approach from any direction" forts have no real feeling or structure built into them. their "this is kind of a defined stealth area with a limited number of approaches" set pieces always work way better because of course they do. double e: and it does always feel a little pointless to devote any amount of brain energy to thinking about ubisoft games. i feel like i just criticized ant man quantumania for like. being a poorly made effects showcase with a bad slugfest ending and slapdash writing by committee and wished it had a clearer vision. totally unrelated triple e: they should just be doing animus VO way way more often. like why isn't layla asking questions about "oh god we're going to jorvik. what the gently caress is a jorvik. that's york???" so people can contextualize anything. i feel like these games put a genuinely astonishing amount of work into the history stuff every time (especially from an art angle) and then try to pretend really really hard that the game has nothing to do with it. it's baffling. Valentin fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jan 14, 2024 17:39
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i mean, elden ring is a very instructive comparison as an open world because it's really just an overworld with a bunch of smaller dungeons and setpieces throughout it (this is a huge part of why consecrated snowfield is annoying in a bad way for people, because it makes the process of pingponging between bite-size dungeons too difficult for no meaningful payoff). it would not be too different if it were a JRPG overworld that you got into random encounters on and then had an explicit swirling screen transition into dungeons for it. it's totally fine for things to be big for the sake of being big as long as you leave space for designed elements that are actually good. horizon zero dawn is somewhat similar to elden ring, though paradoxically a lot less graceful because it goes to more lengths in aesthetic design and cutscenes to try to justify the way the world is laid out, and it still suffers from some "yeah just wander in from anywhere" segments. if assassin's creed was a big overworld linking smaller designed fortresses and towns it'd be great. i don't think there's anything wrong with making your overworld just one big level. people love breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom and those are basically just "one big level with lots of mini puzzles" design much like valhalla (so many valhalla puzzles and stuff feel like BotW/TotK style "oh i found a random puzzle in the world" with voice acting and a map marker for no reason, with comparable rewards). but there's a lot more going on from a ground-up level there to make the design work (not least of which is that the combat mechanics and the ways you engage with enemies and the world and puzzles are actually quite simple). again unrelated e: it's just crazy to be like "our games have to line up with modern western sensibilities and we have to make it clear violence is BAD and conversation and agreement is GOOD. in fact this whole game is about building alliances! wow, we're all working together!" and making a viking game. just an absolutely deranged worldview on display. "we have to make a viking game and for some reason we HAVE to set it in 9th century england AND there have to be stone castles" what are we even doing Valentin fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jan 14, 2024 18:21
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yeah dodge & fire strike seems like a winning combination and unfortunately nothing in the game even remotely touches it so far (playing on drengr at this point) you usually need something pretty specific to make dodge roll with i-frames not always the best defensive option in basically any video game. here dodges are even more powerful than usual because they create new dps windows, do so reliably, and can be chained without respect to anything except stamina Valentin fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Jan 16, 2024 |
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Jan 16, 2024 03:47
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it's kind of incredible how not a stealth game valhalla is lmao. it's not a question of "well it's not the only route," it's simply not a stealth game in any real meaningful sense (it's at like a horizon zero dawn level). there is afaict literally no option for handling two guards near each other from stealth without getting into combat. the advanced stealth tree you unlock has 11 new skills and exactly one relates to assassination or stealth, the rest are either archery or literally intended for combat. and it's not like the combat's good! e: since we're discussing the modern games generally i'll chime in to say odyssey also has basically no stealth gameplay but the sailing and combat are better than valhalla by a country mile. double e: i do wonder what people will think of red if it keeps to this model. japanese myth is not exactly resonant for western audiences the way greek or norse myths are, and the reason everyone wanted a japan game was to be a ninja. but that kind of stealth gameplay really hasn't been part of the game since 1, or maybe the ezio games if you're really generous. and we already did a major ubi-style open world game that was pretty well received about being a samurai. Valentin fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 08:10
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stealth game design is pretty much entirely down to level design, enemy layout and behavior, and responsive, understandable mechanics. it straight up does not matter how complex or involved your stealth systems are if those aspects fall down and in odyssey and valhalla they fall down pretty reliably. there are many games that tout the complexity or realism of their detection/stealth system and often those claims are true and they result in an absolutely garbage game, because complexity of systems really has nothing to do with stealth feeling fun. i do not want rush assassination or heroic strike. i want ways to engage with enemies that aren't just killing them, and level and game design that incentivizes me to do so. this is clearly intended as part of the experience in 1, gradually drops off over the course of the later games, and by the time of the modern rpg titles it is basically gone. ilitarist posted:It's hard to name any game in any series that would have as many stealth options as Odyssey. great news: MGSV is real and you can play it right now! Valentin fucked around with this message at 09:52 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 09:35
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"social stealth" in valhalla is pretty much broken, yeah (because social stealth in AC has often just been differently modeled bushes, and in valhalla your stealth doesn't go much further than "in bush" and "not in bush")ilitarist posted:It's fair to say you don't find the stealth system fun or engaging, but you started talking about the number of skills relating to stealth. Both you and Alchenar here seem to not understand how stealth works in these games. It's probably a fault of the designers - the series historically made stealth a gimmick where you find the intended path and one-click enemies for victory. They should have better explained there's a proper stealth in the game now, but they failed to do that and people are under the impression that there are enemies with a lot HP that can't be killed (there are bosses that you can't approach in stealth but there are few of those and it's a staple of the series) or that there aren't enough tools in the game. Valhalla walked back on it and indeed became simpler (and also more effectively ), but Odyssey was the most fun and engaging stealth in the series for me, and it has enough depth and connectivity with the other mechanics to not feel like just a gimmick. i would honestly love to hear how stealth works in these games now if it is apparently different than what i've gleaned from beating odyssey and (oh god i'm hope i'm like) getting about halfway through valhalla. i named skills because they are, as far as i am aware, almost always the only different verb i have in these games that is not "attack" or "run" (god, i miss AC2's coin; e: i did forget odyssey had a whistle command that works! making it basically infinitely better than valhalla). i would sincerely be happy to have the stealth in odyssey explained to me. Valentin fucked around with this message at 10:22 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 10:12
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Thank you for this! I found it quite interesting and am continuing to digest. My initial thought is that the route and kill-planning you describe is definitely adjacent to what I am talking about in a stealth game, but they are not quite the same. It may be mostly a matter of design (particularly level and objective) rather than mechanics, though. also I just got to Lincolnshire in Valhalla and while I should've seen the possibility of something like this happening with a UK voice cast, it was extremely funny to be in the middle of a cutscene and be like "hang on, who's that abbess...Y'shtola????" e: I'm running around these loving enormous sewers in Lincolnshire and like...why did they choose "pre-1066 England" as a setting if they were going to remove literally everything that might distinguish it from any other point in time? also the Roman fetishism in the game is frankly loving weird Valentin fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 18:51
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yeah "climb anywhere" has really hosed the traversal. It's all the worst elements of BOTW climbing with none of the charm or ease or the part where the game eventually lets you bypass it entirely
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Jan 18, 2024 12:42
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the parallel stories are fine but they feel very clearly like an artifact of trying to make a big game with many parallel workstreams at different studios more than something they would've chosen of their own accord. They still make it work but I think a game more built towards it would've gone more stuff like the Ceolbert and Ivarr stuff (and used more than two provinces to do it). It could've been much ameliorated by the addition of more people to travel with eivor imo (or again more of a sense that the animus side people are engaged with the memories at all but I get the sense they'll never do it bc people would complain). I don't think you'd even need that much; use various people for different points in the story and have e.g. dag or valka or basim provide additional flavor and develop their storylines a little with appropriate barks when you're going around sailing and whatever. They don't have to be super involved in each story, just enough to give a sense of progression and travel. I realized as I'm writing this that I'm basically describing what odyssey did with Herodotus.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:33
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man I can't believe you do the whole obvious final return to Norway thing and there's like three different boss fights the game could have and then it gives you all of them but they ALL suck and aren't real fights. Just incredibly disappointing stuff at a point where the game genuinely could have still stuck some kind of landing. I made a point of getting Excalibur for THIS? it's incredibly stakeless. the fight against odin comes more or less out of nowhere and tries to conclude a thematic point the game never once made, the fight against basim is equally contextless and meaningless. the sigurd stuff is like the one part that actually works, especially eivor convincing him to leave the simulation by pointing out that while he may feast and fight here forever, it is not true glory, which can only be found in how people speak of him after he is dead. it's like the one thing in the whole sequence that works and tries to do anything with the Viking stuff, the characters that we've "developed" over the story, and the specific characterization of eivor as a skald as well as a vikingr. e: generally this ending really has been pretty terrible but holy poo poo if basim's wolf t-shirt doesn't go a long way towards making up for it. Valentin fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Jan 26, 2024 |
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Jan 26, 2024 19:20
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Earwicker posted:i don't think the game needs more people to travel with Eivor so much as giving the existing people any kind of personality at all. oh yeah to be clear i'm counting literally zero of the existing boat people as "characters that travel with you," they're nothing but NPC combat allies and an explanation for why your ship plays (the same) songs every time you sail. the only characters you could be said to "travel with" are each zone's specific npcs, and most of those only join for a mission or two. some further thoughts as i close things out: valhalla's kind of insane because i'm pretty sure you could have taken like half of the assets that went into this game in terms of art and writing and quest design and enemy design etc. and built like a really cool focused game with a main story that i think people would have really liked. you can feel that game trying to get out, here (like i feel like the basim boss fight probably was a functional real boss fight and not a cutscene delivery mechanism at some point, because if it were just supposed to be story delivery it would have been different from the ground up (probably)). but the problems with how it's designed on a structural level to my view obviously emerge from some kind of external factor (most likely, building 16 mini arcs with the same basic building blocks was the easiest way to parallel-build the game across 15 studios, and the fact that each team was only responsible for a certain subsection of the game probably speaks to why no one had the ability to do anything interesting with the mechanics). most of all i just can't fathom why the game is built as sort of a budget rockstar game when part of the point of the rockstar open world model is that if it were even like 10% less fancy everyone would hate it. utterly strange game. rare to play something so completely and obviously designed by committee, where the game spins out so many different subsystems (the size of that loving stats page!) only to consciously negate the impacts of each and every one in case the slightest bit of friction interferes with a seamlessly boring play experience. Valentin fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Jan 26, 2024 |
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Jan 26, 2024 22:22
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very weird and interesting playing through hamtunscire now. on the one hand i think this sequence genuinely does a lot of stuff pretty well; often games will suggest that you're facing overwhelming odds, but fail to follow through, whereas (on very hard, whatever it's called) this is the first time in the game i've been like "ah yeah we're hosed, huh". also some of the surrounding stuff like e.g. ljufvina's mourning scene i think actually works and finally kind of successfully hits the viking saga tone/register they want. it's super weird though that 1) we're briefly kind of attributing the responsibility for the historical defeat of the great heathen army in wessex on eivor for no real reason because for about five seconds you're actually in charge of guthrum and 2) we actually sort of are concluding on a note of "the rock-solid christian faith and ethnic brotherhood of england's native saxons repelled the fractious and violent pagans." between the hollowness of sigurd's valhalla and guthrum's final turn towards christianity i feel like we uncritically repeat a pretty obviously biased narrative about the viking age without reflecting on it much at all. and i don't know much at all about the period, i just mean they seem to be accidentally replicating an energy. it ends up having the same tone as interpreting ragnarok as a cultural story about how the eventual historical victory of christianity was inevitable. it just clearly is intended to be a sad and bittersweet ending where the characters suffer personal loss, eivor completes her personal arc away from violence that the game kind of vaguely gestures at, and it's clear that alfred will actually successfully repel the danes and the age of raiding and war that eivor knows is coming to an end. but they also feel like they have to make eivor a victorious leader of men suddenly so there's an obvious inconsistency in tone. also you bounce right before a lot of the actually interesting stuff happens! there's this great tone of the end of (this phase of) the viking age in england as at last the great heathen army hits a wall and the sons of ragnar lothbrok all are dead. but we don't actually engage with the history of it at all. honestly, playing hamtunscire gives a much clearer picture to me of what the initial pitch for valhalla could have looked like. given the game's interest in the passage of time, the emphasis on kingdoms and shires, the fact that e.g. what you do in mercia directly reflects specific historical events, and the fact that we open and close with the great heathen army, i think there could have been a really compelling version of this game where you're explicitly following the progress of the great heathen army. you can arrive after york is already occupied you could even use "sigurd goes crazy and flees to norway" as a reason to pull the game's focus away from the campaign for a bit and return just in time to participate in the final defeat in wessex, and then eivor leaves for the americas as her people either assimilate and leave behind raiding or are driven out of england. but if the game was ever more interested in that stuff it clearly fell by the wayside pretty early. Valentin fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Jan 27, 2024 |
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Jan 27, 2024 00:16
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Ytlaya posted:The thing that bugged me about the Odin stuff is that I kept trying to figure out "what actually happened," since you're basically seeing Eivor's "Norse mythology" interpretation of all the Isu stuff. Like Fenrir is presumably a person, etc. It just feels a bit muddled in a way that's hard to explain. yeah i got to the end and i was like oh okay. so loki hated odin and piggybacked on his resurrection immortality to kill him and ruin his plans (because it seems like this resurrection only operates once unlike the other precursor human resurrecting in the earlier games?), and he did that because of his kid fenrir, who's....the result of a precursor human love affair? which was taboo for unclear but i guess political reasons given what the jotun-aesir divide symbolizes? anyways odin had the kid imprisoned or maybe killed because....i guess implicitly the computer that predicted the solar flare that would destroy their civilization also predicted loki's love affair kid would somehow kill odin? also at some point in all this baldr gets murdered in retaliation (with poison from a berry in a reference to the mistletoe myth?) except odin never reacts to that and never mentions loki in the present day because he still thinks he died permanently? the central idea of the ending works okay but all the scaffolding the whole game builds around it doesn't amount to much in the end. Valentin fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Jan 29, 2024 |
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Jan 29, 2024 09:47
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