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Assassin's Creed Unity |OT| Liberté, égalité, parité

quetz67

Banned
I almost folded and bought digital...until I found out it isn't in the (german) store. Only some stupid gold edition...WTF???
 

ymgve

Member
Yeah the map is awesome. Being able to see at what altitude each item is comes very handy.

I just wish it remembered my zoom level between each time I brought it up. I'm a little tired of zooming in to an acceptable detail level every time I open the map.
 
The combat feels like you're fighting underwater at times. I often feel like I can't even get a hit in before I have to block or roll again; not because the opportunity isn't there, but because Arno fights exclusively with giant haymaker sword-swings that take forever to come out. It's not a matter of control responsiveness, because you can parry and roll the instant you press the button (at least as 'instant' as you can get with 20ish FPS), there's just like a second and a half of animation priority on every attack. You don't press the Square button to attack, so much as to politely suggest that Arno might like to think about maybe getting around to attacking at some point in the near future.

Remember in the pre-AC3 games they had that system where you'd hit the Square button at the moment your sword hit the other guy's sword, and if you kept that rhythm you eventually broke his guard and killed him? They should have brought that back. They took it out for 3 and 4, because those games were just about keeping your kill chain going, but now with Unity there's no rhythmic swinging and no kill chains, just sluggish, unsatisfying monotony until someone kills you from off-screen with no warning.
 

Namikaze1

Member
I've been trying to quit a group for the past 5 minutes to return to single player but shit won't let me. Had to close the game just so that I could continue single player missions.
 

kanuuna

Member
I played quite a bit more of the game yesterday.

I've really started to enjoy the ambiance, and I'm time and time again impressed by the way the game looks. Resolution and dodgy framerate on PS4 aside, this is probably the most impressive looking game I've seen this gen. All of it makes me wonder about whatever comes out the next year, with the teams (or PR) claiming that this is the most they can do. It's definitely a lot at display here, but I don't think I want to the next year's game if they have to make further compromises in the scale and fidelity to get a stable framerate or bump the game to native 1920x1080 on the consoles.

All praise for the general aesthetics aside, I really can't say I'm a big fan of the game. To use mild terms, the P2P co-op play is absolutely awful. Animations, especially in combat never keep up with actions (which is a problem to a lesser extent in SP), and the AI which is inconsitently horrible to begin with doesn't keep up with the action either. Even in the singleplayer, the AI awful. Guards posted on rooftops will notice and leave your last known position on screen if they see you from a block away, but will never investigate the source of gunshots, even if person shot was standing right next to them. Pathing is also problematic, especially during set missions like heists. Guards will sometimes return on their routine paths, other times they'll get stuck on a ladder, with two NPCs on each end of the ladder standing there like idiots with the one in the middle is stuck in ladder purgatory. While all this takes place, paths of every other guard in the building remain the same and there are zero remaining safe routes left. Cherry bomb lures too, only work so often.

Combat then? I've been playing the game for maybe 7 hours, and I haven't found a weapon wheel, stumbled upon a prompt to pick up enemy weapons from the ground, disarm enemies or have succesfully been able to take my sword and stab someone unaware in the back. All of these features had been in the game since AC2. Either I'm blind by medical definition, or the combat is really pared back from what it once was. The only good contribution from ACIII to the series, the charging and moving-on-to-the-next assassionations seem to be absent, too. Having to enter combat when they ready their weapon a second before you reach the stab-your-throat range is annoying, and only serves to slow down the game. Getting spotted when you're above your target sucks even more, where performing an air-assasination actually knocks the target down, but you can't stick a knife in him while he's on the ground for that brief amount of time - instead, enter duel.

If these features do exist in the game, please do correct me, because I really want to like this game.

Finally, a quick touch on the acrobatics. It's great when it works; when it doesn't, it's not good. I never really got used to the changes that ACIII made to the parkour, and further automization of climbing really rubs me the wrong way. Wall ejects never seem to work, and the game's insistence on stopping you from taking a manual leap into what the game thinks is a fall to your death takes away too much control. I'd like a manual jump and grab buttons from AC through AC:B again.
 

charsace

Member
Its pretty bad even at 60 on pc. I think the combat is just worse in general.

Combat movement and transitions from one enemy to another seems to have been slowed down. Probably has to do with making the combat harder. You can invest in combat though and still slaughter, just not as much as the first games.

I have played some coop missions with combat focused guys and some of them have been straight up motherfuckers. I played with one guy who had good levels and was a tank with a big fucking hammer. He just raged on motherfuckers, destroying waves, while I played my stealth character with the disguise skill which I used to walk into a crowded room to kill the target. Then I dropped like 3 smoke bombs on my way out. I only wish I could have given the AI two middle fingers before jumping out of a window.
 

zkorejo

Member
Completed Sequence 7 and this has easily surpassed Black Flag and officially become my favorite AC title along with AC2.

Everything about this game is amazing. I am absolutely loving this one. Even the side missions like Paris stories are really well done.
 

Mogwai

Member
I played quite a bit more of the game yesterday.

I've really started to enjoy the ambiance, and I'm time and time again impressed by the way the game looks. Resolution and dodgy framerate on PS4 aside, this is probably the most impressive looking game I've seen this gen. All of it makes me wonder about whatever comes out the next year, with the teams (or PR) claiming that this is the most they can do. It's definitely a lot at display here, but I don't think I want to the next year's game if they have to make further compromises in the scale and fidelity to get a stable framerate or bump the game to native 1920x1080 on the consoles.
...
The problem is that Ubisoft is willing to sacrifice playability to let us see beautiful still scenes. The PS4, and Xbone for that matter, just can't cope with the amount of stuff happening on the screen. In some of the segments where you play in an almost empty city you really get the sense of how great this game could have been in motion. I think it could have been a good compromise to decrease the amount of NPCs by 25% or so.

Also, I have never seen worse level of detail pop ins in a game. It's hillariously bad in Unity. If you start to pay slight attention to it the immersion is just gone. I don't understand how Ubisoft were satisfied with the NPCs changing textures even when you're standing 1 meter next to them. Flags and other items also seem to appear and dissapear quite randomly.

To sum up my post: It's not difficult to make a pretty game. The key is to make a game play well. Otherwise we might as well just watch some screenshots or a trailer and then be done with it.
 
I've been playing the game for maybe 7 hours, and I haven't found a weapon wheel...

Dude, the fucking weapon wheel! I can't believe they got rid of it. The D-pad weapon-switching menu was terrible 4, and it's still terrible in Unity. You just can't use it under any kind of pressure. Got into a fight without the right item equipped? Forget it, there's nothing you can do. You've got like six different things accessed by pressing Right on the D-Pad different numbers of times, and if you tap it one too many times you have to go back from the start like you're opening a fucking combination lock.

It's rubbish both in usability and just plain old controller button mapping. What used to take up one button (the weapon wheel) now takes up the entire D-pad. And fucking sucks. And saps your will to live because you're sitting through another 20 second load screen because you died trying to switch items.
 

Nemesis_

Member
Finding it baffling that I want to return to Rogue after a few hours of play compared to this, but I love the setting of this so much more and it feels so much more dense and alive.

I'm really surprised at how scaled back Arno's design is once he gets his robes too, but I guess that's more of a "blank slate" to make way for the customisability and such. Reminds me a lot of Altair.
 

Huh?

Neo Member
The combat feels like you're fighting underwater at times. I often feel like I can't even get a hit in before I have to block or roll again; not because the opportunity isn't there, but because Arno fights exclusively with giant haymaker sword-swings that take forever to come out. It's not a matter of control responsiveness, because you can parry and roll the instant you press the button (at least as 'instant' as you can get with 20ish FPS), there's just like a second and a half of animation priority on every attack. You don't press the Square button to attack, so much as to politely suggest that Arno might like to think about maybe getting around to attacking at some point in the near future.

Remember in the pre-AC3 games they had that system where you'd hit the Square button at the moment your sword hit the other guy's sword, and if you kept that rhythm you eventually broke his guard and killed him? They should have brought that back. They took it out for 3 and 4, because those games were just about keeping your kill chain going, but now with Unity there's no rhythmic swinging and no kill chains, just sluggish, unsatisfying monotony until someone kills you from off-screen with no warning.

I was never very good at that rhythm kill, mainly because I thought that was only in 1 and I only realized it was in 1 towards the end, how did you get the hang of it?
 

Lrrr

Member
The PS4, and Xbone for that matter, just can't cope with the amount of stuff happening on the screen.

To be fair to both consoles, Ubisoft is also infamous for being, arguably, the worst company when it comes to optimizing their games.
 
tap on a mission icon to open the menu with 3 missions and then look at the top at that screen for rewards, usually there are 2 chests and 1 AC icon meaning a mission. If you do all three missions in that tab once you unlock the first reward icon and so on until you do the entire set 3 times and unlock the final one
Thank you!
 
Dude, the fucking weapon wheel! I can't believe they got rid of it. The D-pad weapon-switching menu was terrible 4, and it's still terrible in Unity. You just can't use it under any kind of pressure. Got into a fight without the right item equipped? Forget it, there's nothing you can do. You've got like six different things accessed by pressing Right on the D-Pad different numbers of times, and if you tap it one too many times you have to go back from the start like you're opening a fucking combination lock.

It's rubbish both in usability and just plain old controller button mapping. What used to take up one button (the weapon wheel) now takes up the entire D-pad. And fucking sucks. And saps your will to live because you're sitting through another 20 second load screen because you died trying to switch items.

I really expected a weapon wheel for some reason. I'm not a fan of the current system.

In other news, I'm still unable to do any Nomad Brotherhood stuff :(
 
I was never very good at that rhythm kill, mainly because I thought that was only in 1 and I only realized it was in 1 towards the end, how did you get the hang of it?

I guess it helped that you only really had a couple of different attack animations in the early AC games, so you could get a feel for the rhythm with a bit of practice. From 3 onwards it feels like every time you press the attack button you're asking the game's random number generator to pick out one of a hundred different animations, which adds to the overall sluggish feel.

It really boggles my mind that the combat has been so slooooow and ungainly for the past three games. I'm not looking for Bayonetta here, but I don't think it's too much to ask for my character to swing his sword as I press the button, rather than a second or so later. Ubisoft started trying to copy Batman as early as AC Brotherhood, but they're still just so far off the mark. I appreciate that they don't want you killing forty guys on your own any more, but the only changes they've actually made are taking away abilities you used to have. They still populate every mission with forty guys that need killing, you just can't kill them any more.

For me, the worst thing a game can do is make me feel like it wasn't my fault that I failed, and in Assassin's Creed I feel like it's the game's fault pretty much every single time. I got caught up on geometry because the parkour system broke. I got killed from off-screen because the icons that show when enemies are about to attack don't show up when they're off-camera. I got spotted in a stealth sequence because my assassin is as graceful as a tank when I'm trying to crouch-walk around corners, etc etc. No one gameplay sequence in an AC game is particularly difficult; the challenge comes from having to fight the controls all the time.
 

SJRB

Gold Member
I'm not the only one here who feels like the load times are long, right?

They're quite long indeed. I like that, after a certain time, a loading bar pops up to notify the player that the game is still actually loading and the game didn't just freeze.
 
Thank goodness there doesn't seem to be any playable modern day guff in this game. Sadly there are still cut scenes... which thankfully are skipable.

And loading times are painfully long.

Have to say though the graphics (like Killzone: SF) are making the game. If it wasn't such a looker, I'd have probably given up on the game. It's nothing too exciting. Black Flag's hook (no pun intended) deviated from the tired and tested AC formula enough to make it fun. This so far doesn't have anything like that, bar it looking amazing. Though the bustling city is really nice (except for those darn frame rates). Cities feel alive. It's one of the first open world style games I've ever felt that.
 
My favorite reproducable bug is kill enemies and loot while putting sword away

Sword goes nuts, had it happen a dozen times, doesn't break anything it's just funny
 
Thank goodness there doesn't seem to be any playable modern day guff in this game. Sadly there are still cut scenes... which thankfully are skipable.

And loading times are painfully long.

Have to say though the graphics (like Killzone: SF) are making the game. If it wasn't such a looker, I'd have probably given up on the game. It's nothing too exciting. Black Flag's hook (no pun intended) deviated from the tired and tested AC formula enough to make it fun. This so far doesn't have anything like that, bar it looking amazing. Though the bustling city is really nice (except for those darn frame rates). Cities feel alive. It's one of the first open world style games I've ever felt that.
As an AC fan (modern day lore included), I hope this isn't a common sentiment that Ubi takes note of. Black Flag did nothing much in the way of deviating from the formula. It was a collectathon with some pirating. The pirating should not count as being part of the AC formula. With that said, it offered NOTHING to AC that wasn't already there and actually felt a bit lacking in comparison.

And I hope they get back to a modern day setting without the Abstergo entertainment BS. Feels too cheap and meta.
 

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
To be fair to both consoles, Ubisoft is also infamous for being, arguably, the worst company when it comes to optimizing their games.
Watch Dogs, Valiant Hearts, Child of Light, Rayman, AC4 all had locked framerates that barely fluctuated. And you can add Far Cry 4 to that list as well. This game is the exception when it comes to Ubisoft game performance on next gen so far, not the rule.
 

Skyzard

Banned
Fucking awesome looking game. All the NPCs make it look so real, even their reactions are fine for the most part (not suprised they glitch quite often, must be really complex to handle all the content).Thanks Ubi for going all out and deliver such a true next gen game. Amount of detail and lighting is on par with initial Alpha reveal.

I think so too, it doesn't seem downgraded much if at all, if you can power it.
Sure it should have been/should be tweaked to perform on the systems it's on, but damn, they've made something very impressive.
 

SJRB

Gold Member
Watch Dogs, Valiant Hearts, Child of Light, Rayman, AC4 all had locked framerates that barely fluctuated. And you can add Far Cry 4 to that list as well. This game is the exception when it comes to Ubisoft game performance on next gen so far, not the rule.

Anvil engine has always been a poorly performing engine, none of the AC games have been technical masterpieces.
 
Thirty seconds of a pure black screen, no matter how far you're going. Between that and the framerate, it's obvious this is a 2015 game that nobody had the decency to delay.

My favorite part is the progress bar that randomly appears toward the end of the load time, already almost filled.
 
The best part of this game is that there are no more fucking guards on rooftops. Like, they'll appear during certain missions, being snipers or whatever, but just as you're roaming around or whatever, I never really run into them.

Which is awesome. I fucking hated that.
 

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Anvil engine has always been a poorly performing engine, none of the AC games have been technical masterpieces.
If AC3 was able to run on next gen I'd bet that it would also run at a stable 30fps 99% of the time like AC4. If they scaled back the scale of Unity it'd probably run at a completely stable 30 too. The game has several factors that depend on each other. Take away the npcs and the world would probably feel too empty since the city is much bigger and denser than before. Reduce the size of the buildings and it probably wouldn't feel as next gen and the missions wouldn't have as many choices etc.
 

SJRB

Gold Member
The best part of this game is that there are no more fucking guards on rooftops. Like, they'll appear during certain missions, being snipers or whatever, but just as you're roaming around or whatever, I never really run into them.

Which is awesome. I fucking hated that.

There are in certain parts of town. If you go to the map and press R1 to toggle to the difficulty areas, all the red zones have rooftop guards. Red zones are pretty harsh in general, loads of "red" guys walking the streets.

But that's a good thing. It adds some extra challenge without getting frustrating.
 

Skyzard

Banned
I haven't played an Assassins Creed game since the second.

Did they remove the ability to kill innocent people? I know you could kill 1 or 2 without getting desynchronized.

Also can you no longer grab and throw people?

Not sure about grabbing and throwing people.
With the usual stealth assassinations, I don't think it lets you target civilians (which is probably a good thing with how many there are even during fights sometimes).

You can kill with the pistol though - first time it happened to me by accident as I wasn't quite used to the shooting mechanics (which seem perfect for an AC game that has guns) and I felt so bad!

3 civilian deaths and it de-syncs afaik.
 

Corgi

Banned
Really wish these side missions weren't all so half assed.

Go across the city and kill a guy. Or steal shit.

That's about it.

Murder mystery is OK. But they are rare.

Maybe better ones are later.

Also no whistle makes cover kills near impossible to pull off.
 

ufo8mycat

Member
Played for about 6 hours on PS4 and I must say this typical AC gameplay formula that we have had for like 5 games, is rearing its ugly head. I was worried about this. The first 1 to 4 hours was fine. Interesting city to explore, but once I got over that, the same old AC formula showed itself. Just getting boring.

The graphics are out of this world but the gameplay is getting boring.

I am currently watching a YouTube playthrough of AC Blackflag and it just reminds me how more interesting that game was. It just introduced some freshness into the AC formula which I enjoyed.
 

cackhyena

Member
I'm not very far in, only just got the Phantom Blade, but I can't seem to equip it. I hit the d pad and go left to mark what I want, but it just stays on default gun. What am I missing?
 

fernoca

Member
Yeah. Because of the problems with Uplay, rewards are unlocking later. I just got all the weapons I unlocked along the Helix Points ...from 3 days ago.
 
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