Basically confirming that all the people reacting and saying "omg micotransactions and the game is so grindy despite all the extremely easy ways to make ridiculous sums of cash" need to eat crow. I called this months ago when it was announced that the game would have microtransactions.
AC Unity is 70 here in Europe. There's no place for any kind of Microtransactions in 70 game.
And if they get away with it expect grinding before you know it in future games. Pure greed.
I think what they're looking for is in part the mobile model, where a small segment of players spend very large sums of money on a game to skip lengthier progression. The major downside of this is that if you want to really push microtransactions as hard as games on Android or iOS, you're going to have to make progression a lot longer, with hours of waiting or grinding that can be skipped by microtransactions.
Hi everyone - if you sent a request via the game interface to join the PC social club (Neogaf) and you have not yet been added, please send another request or pm me here. The game crashed as I was accepting people's requests to join the club this morning, so I'm not sure that everyone who wanted to join actually got in.
Alternatively, you can pm me here on Gaf to be added, but note that you'll need to add me as a friend on Uplay PC for me to send you an invite to the social club (Ubisoft's fault). There's only two ways to join:
1.) you either search for the club name, Neogaf, via the in-game interface and send a request to join.
2.) you pm me here and send me a friend request via Uplay PC (Uplay nick is luxarific) and then I'll add you and send you an invite to the club.
I understand not wanting to add people on Uplay that you don't know, so just use method 1 if you don't want to add me as a friend on Uplay.
Whoever designed that steam puzzle you need to do to get the medieval armour is an evil, evil person. I have no sense of timing, and have been trying for a bloody half hour to get there, and I haven't come close.
Whoever designed that steam puzzle you need to do to get the medieval armour is an evil, evil person. I have no sense of timing, and have been trying for a bloody half hour to get there, and I haven't come close.
Hi everyone - if you sent a request via the game interface to join the PC social club (Neogaf) and you have not yet been added, please send another request or pm me here. The game crashed as I was accepting people's requests to join the club this morning, so I'm not sure that everyone who wanted to join actually got in.
Alternatively, you can pm me here on Gaf to be added, but note that you'll need to add me as a friend on Uplay PC for me to send you an invite to the social club (Ubisoft's fault). There's only two ways to join:
1.) you either search for the club name, Neogaf, via the in-game interface and send a request to join.
2.) you pm me here and send me a friend request via Uplay PC (Uplay nick is luxarific) and then I'll add you and send you an invite to the club.
I understand not wanting to add people on Uplay that you don't know, so just use method 1 if you don't want to add me as a friend on Uplay.
Sent a request to join earlier, Uplay name is Retuobak.
Finally passed that stupid steam puzzle, mainly through luck. Medieval armour is great though, although obviously a shame it doesn't have insane stats like the unlockable armours did in previous games, but instead it's just an outfit
Whoever designed that steam puzzle you need to do to get the medieval armour is an evil, evil person. I have no sense of timing, and have been trying for a bloody half hour to get there, and I haven't come close.
Yep, it's horrific. There's the tiniest, tiniest little puff of steam to signify which valve thing is going to blast next, but it's almost completely invisible and, honestly, the platforming is so slow and unresponsive that you don't have the time to save yourself if you get into a bad spot anyway. You just have to luck your way through it.
If you think that sucks, wait until you see the armour you've just gone through that whole ordeal to unlock...
I'm messing around on the mobile app and am trying to figure out how to unlock these glyph puzzles. I have synchronized on the observation points but the app won't let me do the puzzles. Any ideas?
The social club missions are the best of the bunch in this game. Read a note, get dots on your map and finish exactly how you please. No filler cutscene, no linear pathways forcing the occasional fight when trying your hardest to be stealthy. Even has a bit of music as you start to get you pumped. Watching a newly berserk pumped heavy take down the mob guarding your target, then using the last berserk blade to have the target get done in by his own men is extremely satisfying. No one knew you were there.
Tremendous flaws in this game. But co op, when it's working, gorgeous graphics for the most part, and the sandboxy nature never quite seen in an AC before now are making up for it with me. Probably end up in my top five of the year when all is said and done. I would have laughed in your face and then slapped you had you said it would be the case only a month ago.
The thing that frustrates me most about the AC games is that the controls are so frustrating in moments when you are required to act quickly. So often you get stuck or move in a direction you didn't intend. Like climbing up a wall an coming across a window. Too often I will end up going into a window when not intended and vice versa. I swear that every assassin (in all AC games) moves absolutely slowest when they are spotted going up a wall and are trying to escape gunfire. Simple things like dropping down can be frustrating.
Ugh. All of that gets exacerbated in COOP. I can hear my partner cursing (and he can here me too) when Arno will do something you didn't intend.
I have a real love/hate relationship with Assassin's Creed. Every year I buy the new game, hate the sluggish controls and the repetitive design, swear to myself that I'm done with the series, then Ubisoft gears up the marketing engine and gets me excited again by promising amazing new features. I figured I was done after Revelations, but then they promised a complete overhaul with 3. 3 sucked, and I swore I was done, but then 4 was advertised as the boat game, and I did love those boats. I liked AC4 a lot, and I figured it was going to be a good swansong for my relationship with the series, but then Unity rolled around and all of a sudden they're promising to fix the parkour, fix the stealth, fix the combat, get rid of the tailing and eavesdropping bullshit. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in, like clockwork.
I think Unity is a decent Assassin's Creed game. If you only compare it to other AC games it does a lot of things right. The eavesdropping missions are gone, and there are only a couple of bullshit instant-fail tailing missions. You're very rarely given a game over for being spotted, which is a very welcome change. But I realised after a while that Ubisoft didn't really do anything except remove the penalties. The game's stealth mechanics aren't really any better than they used to be (all they did was let you crouch and use an awful cover system), you just aren't penalised for being spotted any more. It's just a bandaid solution to an issue that's been present throughout the entire life of the AC series.
It's a similar deal with the combat. They wanted to make it harder this time around, so you can't fight off forty guys all by yourself. Cool idea, to be sure, but they didn't actually go back to the drawing board on the mechanics and rebalance the game around a more fragile assassin. They just cut your health by about 90%, removed your counter kill, kill chain and human shield abilities and then called it a day. They still populate every mission with forty guys for you to kill, it's just much harder to kill them all now. Until you start unlocking high-level gear, that is, at which point you break the whole system and become a walking army again.
The regular 20-30 second load times after deaths gave me ample time to ponder about just how much it sucks to get spotted because I couldn't steer my tank-like assassin through a narrow space without getting hung up on geometry, or exactly how much bullshit it is that enemies will one-hit kill me from off-screen and I won't know until it's too late because the attack icons that are supposed to warn me didn't show up. This kind of shit doesn't happen in good, high-quality, well-polished video games. Rocksteady's Batman games, for example, do pretty much all the things that AC does, and I'm hard-pressed to find anything that AC does better. Stealth, combat, traversal, responsiveness of controls; obviously AC has the edge if you're looking for a beautifully-rendered historical setting, but the actual gameplay in that city is heavy, sluggish and unresponsive, and it's been that way since the very first game.
And... why? Is a character that feels like shit to control really such an important part of Assassin's Creed's identity? Would it really ruin the experience if you pushed the analogue stick forward and your dude darted off the line and you were able to nimbly guide him through a city without him ever getting hung up on tables and chairs or randomly climbing halfway up a building before you have to stop dead, take a deep breath and pull him back down again? You don't need to sacrifice the realistic animations to have a character that controls well; Naughty Dog has proved that with Uncharted and TLOU. Why does Assassin's Creed have to be synonymous with shitty controls?
*sigh* Anyway, I really like Unity's more open approach to mission design. The big Assassination missions are definitely the highpoint, and they're a welcome change from the typical 'run to this waypoint and do exactly what we tell you to do'. The game still has more than its fair share of that, of course (if you ever wanted to follow NPCs who all walk at a different speed than you do, you're in the right place), but there's definitely more freedom than a long-suffering AC fan might expect. The Paris Tales are great little side missions that often just set you a task and leave it up to you to work out how to complete it; it's definitely a step in the right direction for the series. I think the Murder Mysteries are really cool, too; it's a little thing, but I was actually taken aback when I realised the game actually trusted me to accuse the murderer all by myself. I'm so accustomed to Modern AAA Game Design, tooltips and hints and glowing markers that I really expected those missions to just be automated collect-a-thons with cutscenes of Arno saving the day at the end; getting to do it myself is awesome.
I think the story is utter rubbish.
The whole thing is about Arno taking revenge for his father and father figure, but I didn't give two shits about those dudes. It's all well and good to tell me that Arno was fond of them, but what did they ever do for me? Arno's Dad has like one line before he eats it, and Elise's Dad only a few more, so why should I care that they died? I'm not invested in this revenge fantasy at all. Elise practically had "I'm going to die at the end" tattooed on her forehead from the moment she showed up, too. It felt like they conceived her as a tearjerking death scene first, then went back and slotted her into the story to keep up appearances. Arno was never anything more than a bad accent to me, too. Connor at least had some awful character traits to latch onto and hate, but I can't even think of anything to say about Arno. I can barely even picture his face in my mind any more. Guy made no impression whatsoever.
Modern day stuff was a complete anticlimax, too. "Oh, looks like Arno already did the thing, guess we can all clock off early. Was Bishop supposed to be Rebecca with a different voice actress? Deacon was obviously Shaun, but I couldn't work out whether Bishop was supposed to be someone new or a recast Rebecca.
But, in the end, none of that matters because this shit runs at 20FPS and you should absolutely not buy it until Ubisoft fixes it. If they ever do get it running at an acceptable level then... well, it's an Assassin's Creed game. You know by now if you like those or not. I think there's a lot to like in Unity, but it's still a very small, iterative, babystep forward for the series that really does very little to fix the glaring flaws that have always been there.
Nice remarks. I bought this from a gaffer for $30 on xbox one and I'm enjoying it mainly because my expectations were so low. I love the setting and the new hold to free climb is a slight improvement.
Basically confirming that all the people reacting and saying "omg micotransactions and the game is so grindy despite all the extremely easy ways to make ridiculous sums of cash" need to eat crow. I called this months ago when it was announced that the game would have microtransactions.
if the game didnt give you some helix credits for free, i would have been tempted to buy the chest and cockade map with real money. Thnkfully it gives u some to try out. All other microtransaction stuff is pointless
The microtransaction stuff notwithstanding (haven't gotten deep enough to decide whether it is a detriment to my experience, although I am miffed that they would lock away sitting on benches in that system), I do think this is the best playing AC since Brotherhood. Black Flag sidestepped a lot of 3's issues by just making the game about boats.
The traversal is back to the quality that it was in AC2/B. To the point where they have been able to bring back some of those Tomb-like sequences which is great. The combat has never been outstanding in AC, and it's not here either, but it's much better than 3 & 4. The missions are definitely back to the quality of AC2/B (and the Assassinations from AC1), and in some cases might be even better than them. In fact, I hope they go even more in this direction of giving you a sandbox for a mission and letting you play with it, like in Hitman.
I love that the music takes cues from AC2, but am sad that the ambient music is all but gone from this game. I understand they were impressed with their crowds so they wanted the hustle and bustle of the crowds to be what is heard, but I think that gets boring after a bit.
The story's quality is TBD for me. Well at least for the Animus (Helix?) stuff. But the present day stuff sucks. I do like the performances that are given in though, And some of those faces are creepily real.
Overall, it's giving me most of what I want from an AC game. There are definitely tweaks that can be made. The cover system needs to be improved. I'd like the interaction with the crowd to come back-- for example, being able to grab and throw them, or accidentally kill them when you're trying to get a target. I'd like to also grab enemies in combat. I don't like that I can't one hit kill dudes when I throw a smoke bomb. I don't like that it doesn't seem like you can kill a target with a ranged weapon. And the game also has it's technical issues. Hoping they can iron that stuff out and not go in a completely different direction, but just fix whats wrong with Unity.
This game really does have the gameplay and reviews are quite frankly wrong about this (outside of tech issues where it deserves to get bashed in number scores, especially on consoles).
The gameplay is the best in the series. Last night I did the 2-star "Heads will Roll" co-op mission single player. A little throwaway co-op mission took me through a complex layered prison with lots of freedom, great stealth situations and secrets (there are so many ways to get into the center of the prison,sewers, windows with locks, coming from above, coming from below, etc...), then to the execution grounds, creating new challenges and an open-style huge NPC environment to stealth kill your enemies in the crowd from, then to a cemetery where it was a real challenge to get down to the catacombs below with guards everywhere.
That was one of the most gameplay meaty experiences I've had with AC...all for a single optional co-op mission.
They've created this huge detailed city complete with interiors (the interiors add good depth to the complexity of the level design and options which the player has to accomplish their goals) and given tons of missions to make playgrounds of it all. Combined with better stealth options and tougher difficulty which makes stealth+assassinations more rewarding, it's a giant gameplay experience. By my calculations, doing 100% in this is going to take me around 60-70 hours, which is the longest AC yet (ACIV was around 50-60 hours for 100%).
There are definitely weaker spots, but the amount of quality open ended stealth gameplay is great. The game took a little bit to warm up to, but I'd say AC:U is on par with AC:IV and both excel in very different areas and are both totally deserving of a play. Right now it seems like AC3 was the only actually "bad game" the AC franchise has had since it got good in AC2. Hopefully it stays that way and next years AC builds on IV & U to make a game better than both.
This game really does have the gameplay and reviews are quite frankly wrong about this (outside of tech issues where it deserves to get bashed in number scores, especially on consoles).
The gameplay is the best in the series. Last night I did the 2-star "Heads will Roll" co-op mission single player. A little throwaway co-op mission took me through a complex layered prison with lots of freedom, great stealth situations and secrets (there are so many ways to get into the center of the prison,sewers, windows with locks, coming from above, coming from below, etc...), then to the execution grounds, creating new challenges and an open-style huge NPC environment to stealth kill your enemies in the crowd from, then to a cemetery where it was a real challenge to get down to the catacombs below with guards everywhere.
That was one of the most gameplay meaty experiences I've had with AC...all for a single optional co-op mission.
They've created this huge detailed city complete with interiors (the interiors add good depth to the complexity of the level design and options which the player has to accomplish their goals) and given tons of missions to make playgrounds of it all. Combined with better stealth options and tougher difficulty which makes stealth+assignations more rewarding, it's a giant gameplay experience. By my calculations, doing 100% in this is going to take me around 60-70 hours, which is the longest AC yet (ACIV was around 50-60 hours for 100%).
There are definitely weaker spots, but the amount of quality open ended stealth gameplay is great. The game took a little bit to warm up to, but I'd say AC:U is on par with AC:IV and both excel in very different areas and are both totally deserving of a play. Right now it seems like AC3 was the only actually "bad game" the AC franchise has had since it got good in AC2. Hopefully it stays that way and next years AC builds on IV & U to make a game better than both.
I'm messing around on the mobile app and am trying to figure out how to unlock these glyph puzzles. I have synchronized on the observation points but the app won't let me do the puzzles. Any ideas?
I have a real love/hate relationship with Assassin's Creed. Every year I buy the new game, hate the sluggish controls and the repetitive design, swear to myself that I'm done with the series, then Ubisoft gears up the marketing engine and gets me excited again by promising amazing new features. I figured I was done after Revelations, but then they promised a complete overhaul with 3. 3 sucked, and I swore I was done, but then 4 was advertised as the boat game, and I did love those boats. I liked AC4 a lot, and I figured it was going to be a good swansong for my relationship with the series, but then Unity rolled around and all of a sudden they're promising to fix the parkour, fix the stealth, fix the combat, get rid of the tailing and eavesdropping bullshit. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in, like clockwork.
I think Unity is a decent Assassin's Creed game. If you only compare it to other AC games it does a lot of things right. The eavesdropping missions are gone, and there are only a couple of bullshit instant-fail tailing missions. You're very rarely given a game over for being spotted, which is a very welcome change. But I realised after a while that Ubisoft didn't really do anything except remove the penalties. The game's stealth mechanics aren't really any better than they used to be (all they did was let you crouch and use an awful cover system), you just aren't penalised for being spotted any more. It's just a bandaid solution to an issue that's been present throughout the entire life of the AC series.
It's a similar deal with the combat. They wanted to make it harder this time around, so you can't fight off forty guys all by yourself. Cool idea, to be sure, but they didn't actually go back to the drawing board on the mechanics and rebalance the game around a more fragile assassin. They just cut your health by about 90%, removed your counter kill, kill chain and human shield abilities and then called it a day. They still populate every mission with forty guys for you to kill, it's just much harder to kill them all now. Until you start unlocking high-level gear, that is, at which point you break the whole system and become a walking army again.
The regular 20-30 second load times after deaths gave me ample time to ponder about just how much it sucks to get spotted because I couldn't steer my tank-like assassin through a narrow space without getting hung up on geometry, or exactly how much bullshit it is that enemies will one-hit kill me from off-screen and I won't know until it's too late because the attack icons that are supposed to warn me didn't show up. This kind of shit doesn't happen in good, high-quality, well-polished video games. Rocksteady's Batman games, for example, do pretty much all the things that AC does, and I'm hard-pressed to find anything that AC does better. Stealth, combat, traversal, responsiveness of controls; obviously AC has the edge if you're looking for a beautifully-rendered historical setting, but the actual gameplay in that city is heavy, sluggish and unresponsive, and it's been that way since the very first game.
And... why? Is a character that feels like shit to control really such an important part of Assassin's Creed's identity? Would it really ruin the experience if you pushed the analogue stick forward and your dude darted off the line and you were able to nimbly guide him through a city without him ever getting hung up on tables and chairs or randomly climbing halfway up a building before you have to stop dead, take a deep breath and pull him back down again? You don't need to sacrifice the realistic animations to have a character that controls well; Naughty Dog has proved that with Uncharted and TLOU. Why does Assassin's Creed have to be synonymous with shitty controls?
*sigh* Anyway, I really like Unity's more open approach to mission design. The big Assassination missions are definitely the highpoint, and they're a welcome change from the typical 'run to this waypoint and do exactly what we tell you to do'. The game still has more than its fair share of that, of course (if you ever wanted to follow NPCs who all walk at a different speed than you do, you're in the right place), but there's definitely more freedom than a long-suffering AC fan might expect. The Paris Tales are great little side missions that often just set you a task and leave it up to you to work out how to complete it; it's definitely a step in the right direction for the series. I think the Murder Mysteries are really cool, too; it's a little thing, but I was actually taken aback when I realised the game actually trusted me to accuse the murderer all by myself. I'm so accustomed to Modern AAA Game Design, tooltips and hints and glowing markers that I really expected those missions to just be automated collect-a-thons with cutscenes of Arno saving the day at the end; getting to do it myself is awesome.
I think the story is utter rubbish.
The whole thing is about Arno taking revenge for his father and father figure, but I didn't give two shits about those dudes. It's all well and good to tell me that Arno was fond of them, but what did they ever do for me? Arno's Dad has like one line before he eats it, and Elise's Dad only a few more, so why should I care that they died? I'm not invested in this revenge fantasy at all. Elise practically had "I'm going to die at the end" tattooed on her forehead from the moment she showed up, too. It felt like they conceived her as a tearjerking death scene first, then went back and slotted her into the story to keep up appearances. Arno was never anything more than a bad accent to me, too. Connor at least had some awful character traits to latch onto and hate, but I can't even think of anything to say about Arno. I can barely even picture his face in my mind any more. Guy made no impression whatsoever.
Modern day stuff was a complete anticlimax, too. "Oh, looks like Arno already did the thing, guess we can all clock off early. Was Bishop supposed to be Rebecca with a different voice actress? Deacon was obviously Shaun, but I couldn't work out whether Bishop was supposed to be someone new or a recast Rebecca.
But, in the end, none of that matters because this shit runs at 20FPS and you should absolutely not buy it until Ubisoft fixes it. If they ever do get it running at an acceptable level then... well, it's an Assassin's Creed game. You know by now if you like those or not. I think there's a lot to like in Unity, but it's still a very small, iterative, babystep forward for the series that really does very little to fix the glaring flaws that have always been there.
Thank you very much. This respresents exactly how I feel in many ways. Although I am usually very excited, but I did find myself dreading to do specific missions due to the combat problems you mention. I was always bothered by those problems in previous games, but because you are built like a tank they rarely became fatal. In this game not-so-much.
I have a real love/hate relationship with Assassin's Creed. Every year I buy the new game, hate the sluggish controls and the repetitive design, swear to myself that I'm done with the series, then Ubisoft gears up the marketing engine and gets me excited again by promising amazing new features. I figured I was done after Revelations, but then they promised a complete overhaul with 3. 3 sucked, and I swore I was done, but then 4 was advertised as the boat game, and I did love those boats. I liked AC4 a lot, and I figured it was going to be a good swansong for my relationship with the series, but then Unity rolled around and all of a sudden they're promising to fix the parkour, fix the stealth, fix the combat, get rid of the tailing and eavesdropping bullshit. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in, like clockwork.
I think Unity is a decent Assassin's Creed game. If you only compare it to other AC games it does a lot of things right. The eavesdropping missions are gone, and there are only a couple of bullshit instant-fail tailing missions. You're very rarely given a game over for being spotted, which is a very welcome change. But I realised after a while that Ubisoft didn't really do anything except remove the penalties. The game's stealth mechanics aren't really any better than they used to be (all they did was let you crouch and use an awful cover system), you just aren't penalised for being spotted any more. It's just a bandaid solution to an issue that's been present throughout the entire life of the AC series.
It's a similar deal with the combat. They wanted to make it harder this time around, so you can't fight off forty guys all by yourself. Cool idea, to be sure, but they didn't actually go back to the drawing board on the mechanics and rebalance the game around a more fragile assassin. They just cut your health by about 90%, removed your counter kill, kill chain and human shield abilities and then called it a day. They still populate every mission with forty guys for you to kill, it's just much harder to kill them all now. Until you start unlocking high-level gear, that is, at which point you break the whole system and become a walking army again.
The regular 20-30 second load times after deaths gave me ample time to ponder about just how much it sucks to get spotted because I couldn't steer my tank-like assassin through a narrow space without getting hung up on geometry, or exactly how much bullshit it is that enemies will one-hit kill me from off-screen and I won't know until it's too late because the attack icons that are supposed to warn me didn't show up. This kind of shit doesn't happen in good, high-quality, well-polished video games. Rocksteady's Batman games, for example, do pretty much all the things that AC does, and I'm hard-pressed to find anything that AC does better. Stealth, combat, traversal, responsiveness of controls; obviously AC has the edge if you're looking for a beautifully-rendered historical setting, but the actual gameplay in that city is heavy, sluggish and unresponsive, and it's been that way since the very first game.
And... why? Is a character that feels like shit to control really such an important part of Assassin's Creed's identity? Would it really ruin the experience if you pushed the analogue stick forward and your dude darted off the line and you were able to nimbly guide him through a city without him ever getting hung up on tables and chairs or randomly climbing halfway up a building before you have to stop dead, take a deep breath and pull him back down again? You don't need to sacrifice the realistic animations to have a character that controls well; Naughty Dog has proved that with Uncharted and TLOU. Why does Assassin's Creed have to be synonymous with shitty controls?
But, in the end, none of that matters because this shit runs at 20FPS and you should absolutely not buy it until Ubisoft fixes it. If they ever do get it running at an acceptable level then... well, it's an Assassin's Creed game. You know by now if you like those or not. I think there's a lot to like in Unity, but it's still a very small, iterative, babystep forward for the series that really does very little to fix the glaring flaws that have always been there.
I couldn't agree more. It is an absolute mess in places with both the traversal and stealth mechanics feeling incredibly poor. I'm only half way through but it's already the worst in the series by a long way in my opinion.
As someone who has always had fun with the series, I'm a little surprised just how poor I think it is.
I'm messing around on the mobile app and am trying to figure out how to unlock these glyph puzzles. I have synchronized on the observation points but the app won't let me do the puzzles. Any ideas?
I have encountered this a few times, the app and game says you're linked but doesn't show the updates. Try restart either the app, or the game, or both. Make sure you're just standing still in the game world when you start the app, synchronising correctly seems to be quite finicky.
I have a real love/hate relationship with Assassin's Creed. Every year I buy the new game, hate the sluggish controls and the repetitive design, swear to myself that I'm done with the series, then Ubisoft gears up the marketing engine and gets me excited again by promising amazing new features. I figured I was done after Revelations, but then they promised a complete overhaul with 3. 3 sucked, and I swore I was done, but then 4 was advertised as the boat game, and I did love those boats. I liked AC4 a lot, and I figured it was going to be a good swansong for my relationship with the series, but then Unity rolled around and all of a sudden they're promising to fix the parkour, fix the stealth, fix the combat, get rid of the tailing and eavesdropping bullshit. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in, like clockwork.
I think Unity is a decent Assassin's Creed game. If you only compare it to other AC games it does a lot of things right. The eavesdropping missions are gone, and there are only a couple of bullshit instant-fail tailing missions. You're very rarely given a game over for being spotted, which is a very welcome change. But I realised after a while that Ubisoft didn't really do anything except remove the penalties. The game's stealth mechanics aren't really any better than they used to be (all they did was let you crouch and use an awful cover system), you just aren't penalised for being spotted any more. It's just a bandaid solution to an issue that's been present throughout the entire life of the AC series.
It's a similar deal with the combat. They wanted to make it harder this time around, so you can't fight off forty guys all by yourself. Cool idea, to be sure, but they didn't actually go back to the drawing board on the mechanics and rebalance the game around a more fragile assassin. They just cut your health by about 90%, removed your counter kill, kill chain and human shield abilities and then called it a day. They still populate every mission with forty guys for you to kill, it's just much harder to kill them all now. Until you start unlocking high-level gear, that is, at which point you break the whole system and become a walking army again.
The regular 20-30 second load times after deaths gave me ample time to ponder about just how much it sucks to get spotted because I couldn't steer my tank-like assassin through a narrow space without getting hung up on geometry, or exactly how much bullshit it is that enemies will one-hit kill me from off-screen and I won't know until it's too late because the attack icons that are supposed to warn me didn't show up. This kind of shit doesn't happen in good, high-quality, well-polished video games. Rocksteady's Batman games, for example, do pretty much all the things that AC does, and I'm hard-pressed to find anything that AC does better. Stealth, combat, traversal, responsiveness of controls; obviously AC has the edge if you're looking for a beautifully-rendered historical setting, but the actual gameplay in that city is heavy, sluggish and unresponsive, and it's been that way since the very first game.
And... why? Is a character that feels like shit to control really such an important part of Assassin's Creed's identity? Would it really ruin the experience if you pushed the analogue stick forward and your dude darted off the line and you were able to nimbly guide him through a city without him ever getting hung up on tables and chairs or randomly climbing halfway up a building before you have to stop dead, take a deep breath and pull him back down again? You don't need to sacrifice the realistic animations to have a character that controls well; Naughty Dog has proved that with Uncharted and TLOU. Why does Assassin's Creed have to be synonymous with shitty controls?
*sigh* Anyway, I really like Unity's more open approach to mission design. The big Assassination missions are definitely the highpoint, and they're a welcome change from the typical 'run to this waypoint and do exactly what we tell you to do'. The game still has more than its fair share of that, of course (if you ever wanted to follow NPCs who all walk at a different speed than you do, you're in the right place), but there's definitely more freedom than a long-suffering AC fan might expect. The Paris Tales are great little side missions that often just set you a task and leave it up to you to work out how to complete it; it's definitely a step in the right direction for the series. I think the Murder Mysteries are really cool, too; it's a little thing, but I was actually taken aback when I realised the game actually trusted me to accuse the murderer all by myself. I'm so accustomed to Modern AAA Game Design, tooltips and hints and glowing markers that I really expected those missions to just be automated collect-a-thons with cutscenes of Arno saving the day at the end; getting to do it myself is awesome.
I think the story is utter rubbish.
The whole thing is about Arno taking revenge for his father and father figure, but I didn't give two shits about those dudes. It's all well and good to tell me that Arno was fond of them, but what did they ever do for me? Arno's Dad has like one line before he eats it, and Elise's Dad only a few more, so why should I care that they died? I'm not invested in this revenge fantasy at all. Elise practically had "I'm going to die at the end" tattooed on her forehead from the moment she showed up, too. It felt like they conceived her as a tearjerking death scene first, then went back and slotted her into the story to keep up appearances. Arno was never anything more than a bad accent to me, too. Connor at least had some awful character traits to latch onto and hate, but I can't even think of anything to say about Arno. I can barely even picture his face in my mind any more. Guy made no impression whatsoever.
Modern day stuff was a complete anticlimax, too. "Oh, looks like Arno already did the thing, guess we can all clock off early. Was Bishop supposed to be Rebecca with a different voice actress? Deacon was obviously Shaun, but I couldn't work out whether Bishop was supposed to be someone new or a recast Rebecca.
But, in the end, none of that matters because this shit runs at 20FPS and you should absolutely not buy it until Ubisoft fixes it. If they ever do get it running at an acceptable level then... well, it's an Assassin's Creed game. You know by now if you like those or not. I think there's a lot to like in Unity, but it's still a very small, iterative, babystep forward for the series that really does very little to fix the glaring flaws that have always been there.
This makes me really glad to be playing on PC. No real load times after death (2-3 seconds on SSD) & having full smooth control over your character at all times is a big deal.
I'm purposely keeping my gear level low so I never become a "walking tank" because the stealth challenge is the most satisfying.
Keeping your gear low sounds like a good idea but is shit in practice. The only thing that seems to matter is enemy level, and if you're level 1 going up against level 4 guys, you're going to be insta-gibbed pretty much. Have fun getting sniped by off-screen assholes on rooftops while you fight with the controls.
To be fair, AC1 had two other major cities, one mini city, plus a hub world. In Unity they jammed everything into one big city. And also, AC1 had barely anything to do. AC2 struck the right balance. But I am intrigued by just having one city which is densely populated with stuff to do. Unfortunately I don't think there's enough meaningful stuff to do in Unity. There are some random events, but none are elaborate as the stuff in Red Dead. And I don't think there's any games to play in the world? But I haven't fully explored everything yet.
Keeping your gear low sounds like a good idea but is shit in practice. The only thing that seems to matter is enemy level, and if you're level 1 going up against level 4 guys, you're going to be insta-gibbed pretty much. Have fun getting sniped by off-screen assholes on rooftops while you fight with the controls.
Thanks to everyone who ridiculed and downplayed this game. It totally caught me off guard how incredibly amazing it is. Technical issues aside this is what I wanted as a follow up to 2/Brotherhood. It reintegrated the amazing open world assassinations from the first game, retained all the strengths from those 2 iterations and did away with all the bullshit that got introduced in the follow ups.
I get why people want streamlined "press A for awesome" games that are polished to death out of their AAA games. And while I would have like for Ubisoft to take the time to actually finish the game before delivering it I love the ambition, the scale despite its rough edges. I like that they actually listened to consumer feedback.
Also to be fair, the collectibles were more worthless and you had to the same pointless repetitive tasks over and over and over every single time just to unlock a mission. Remember jumping for feathers?
Thanks to everyone who ridiculed and downplayed this game. It totally caught me off guard how incredibly amazing it is. Technical issues aside this is what I wanted as a follow up to 2/Brotherhood. It reintegrated the amazing open world assassinations from the first game, retained all the strengths from those 2 iterations and did away with all the bullshit that got introduced in the follow ups.
I get why people want streamlined "press A for awesome" games that are polished to death out of their AAA games. And while I would have like for Ubisoft to take the time to actually finish the game before delivering it I love the ambition, the scale despite its rough edges. I like that they actually listened to consumer feedback.
Yeah those were basically my thoughts, summed up in a more concise manner. It's more what I want than 3/4 were (although 4's boat stuff was good in it's own way)
That being said I think there's still a lot of stuff missing from 2 which they need to bring back. The Truth stuff, being able to interact with crowd NPC characters again, heck you can't even do bench assassinations anymore.
Wish there was better ways to keep track where you are inside buildings. Just so random which paths are open. And most co-op missions is just us running in circles trying to reach the objective. Kind of just wish the indoor maps were more open and not so maze like.
I haven't messed around with this stuff in Unity yet (do I need to get to a certain point in the story?), but from what I remember in Black Flag, you're foolish to do a mission if you don't have a 100% chance at success.
I haven't messed around with this stuff in Unity yet (do I need to get to a certain point in the story?), but from what I remember in Black Flag, you're foolish to do a mission if you don't have a 100% chance at success.
brotherhood management is entirely done from the smartphone app and can be done from the start. you might need to complete sequence 2 to be able to obtain and use rewards in the real game though.
However, they make the screen and map even more of a mess. Did one that had 8 clue locations so there were magnifying glass icons and Accuse dots everywhere. And if you interact with a clue it gives you an Update to check the case file over top of the information the actual clue is giving you so you have to wait for the Update to go away before you can read the clue. But if you turn off Updates on the HUD, it will not tell you the names of characters you are talking to so you have to seemingly keep the Updates on to know that information.
I'm glad I realized it was pure shit and deleted the app after spending maybe 40 minutes across a few sessions with it. Such a ridiculously poorly made piece of software. I have a hard time believing that human beings were involved in its creation.
Keeping your gear low sounds like a good idea but is shit in practice. The only thing that seems to matter is enemy level, and if you're level 1 going up against level 4 guys, you're going to be insta-gibbed pretty much. Have fun getting sniped by off-screen assholes on rooftops while you fight with the controls.
Yeah, but as was said, if you get in a bad situation - smoke bombs. If you have snipers it's satisfying to figure out a way to sneak around the perimeter and take them out.
You don't have to kill everyone usually, or fight everyone. There's been plenty of times I've thrown a smoke bomb into a room of guys with 1 target, rushed in while they're coughing, eliminated the target and jumped out a window and took off.
I mean so far I've done 1-5 star missions with ~lvl.2/3 equipment all focused on stealth and nothing on health or damage and it's been a challenge, but everything's been doable with some creativity and it's been fun. The thrill of surviving something like the paragraph above knowing anything can kill you in 1 hit (like real life) is some of the best stuff I've experienced in AC.
Just finished the main story (basically touched none of the side stuff), started it on Friday (UK release). The game does seem to suffer from that "new gen" thing, a lot of resources went on the new engine and other new things to the series, which typically leaves stuff like the campaign feeling a little empty.. not very substantial.
Dragon Age: Inquisition doesn't unlock until Friday here in the UK so I'll probably go back in and do some of the side stuff, but I purposely ignored it through my campaign play through because.. all those icons on the map is just so overwhelming!
As for keeping your gear low. I pretty much unintentionally did this, every mission was warning that I needed to make upgrades, but I just ignored them. But I generally liked to sneak around and take out any threats stealthily that could be a problem when it came to my low gear. I died very few times through my play through.
On sequence 5 and I love this game, reminds of ACII mostly and way better then IV which isn't hard.
Social missions are great, murder mysteries are fantastic and It love the customization.
And Paris...Wow
So many details.
The question is, can they adress it? Looks like their engine is still in early stages and developing it takes more than enough time... I expect the next AC games to run much smoother.
Well there is a reason why it was only 89% and not 100%. As someone said above, doing these missions in Black Flag with less than 100% was almost suicidal.
Also to be fair, the collectibles were more worthless and you had to the same pointless repetitive tasks over and over and over every single time just to unlock a mission. Remember jumping for feathers?
Controls are incredibly clunky and laggy in this game (a by product of having such extreme animation priority), so having that level of punishment is just annoying to me.
Just sticking to a goddamn wall is an ordeal.
I don't have problems playing games that have decent controls and gameplay at higher level of punishment, though (Dark Souls, Bayonetta or, to have a stealth example, Blacklist).
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Anyway, i tried doing a coop mission and half way through it, the game made its classic "freeze for 5 seconds" bug, that i've been getting a lot post patch, and once it unfroze, i was stuck in the geometry.. had to wait for my companions to finish the job alone.
Not a big deal since they were dramatically over leveled for the mission, but just frustrating how every two steps this game shits the bed somehow.
I'm thinking of waiting for them to fix it a bit more, instead of ruining myself the experience, because i kind of dig the story this time around.
Ok, I'm at sequence 5 now, and the story, (yeah I know, but I like to follow the story in the games), I just am not following, not sure what I'm missing but this is what I've gotten so far:
So Arno's "adoptive father, for a lack of a better word, gets killed, turns out he was a Templar, Arno joins the assassin's to learn the ropes, as his father was an assassin, so uhm, wouldn't the assassin's be the prime suspects for the killing of de Lassere? But no, apparently not, other Templars did the deed, but why in all hells are the assassin's pursuing the killer, are they going to thank him? why are they so interested in finding a Templars killer, I just am not following. I mean I get why it's important to Arno, but why is the Brotherhood so interested?
Also spoilers for Letter 2 you can read in Arno's apartment, this isn't as much "I don't get the story" more like "who the hell wrote this crap?":
Elise is appalled Arno's joined the assassins, thinks the Templars are much better, etc. etc., and then finishes the letter saying the order has turned against her... what? I mean... The order has turned against her, but the Templars are still better?
Someone tell me I've missed something, but please, no spoilers for sequences after 5.
