Assassin's Creed

Also what's up with the caveat at the beginning about the game having been made by people of all ethnicities and religious backgrounds? Is it because the good guy's a muslim and most of the bad guys are 3rd-crusaders? Or does the story get crazier? I'm not into some threads that look like they might turn into Dan Brownery in the plotline.

Here's a couple specific questions I have...

When you're gathering intel for an assassination attempt, eavesdropping, etc - as you gather that info does it mark it off on a menu as you collect it, or do you have to remember (write down?) the various info?

What's the game's save system like? Can you save at any time, or just at the end of missions or specific locations?

If it ever gets to the point where you're pursuing the information through your own research, I haven't gotten there yet. So far it tells you who to eavesdrop on, you get information to pursue, and the location of your target shows up on the HUD. I was a little disappointed at how conventional this is, but maybe it gets harder.

And it's an autosave system. The framing device kind of justifies where the saves are in the narrative, and once or twice it's been a little awkward, but in general it's saving as often as you need it to, and you don't need to do much backtracking.

Thanks

So it looks like Ubisoft is threatening SA with a lawsuit again, since somebody reposted some comic on the forums depicting EA/Assassin's Creed producer Jade Raymond sucking off gamers in order for them to buy the game.

Got this last night and so far I'm enjoying it (just got to the outskirts of Damascus). Very different in feel from the other games out right now - seems to be all about going slow, taking you time and blending in and exploring. The look of the game is amazing, except for some slight v-sync problems and small glitches, which is forgivable when dealing with such a large, detailed, crowded world. There are so many people on the streets - walking around does feel more like your in a living place than any other game I can remember.

So far, the little combat there has been has reminded me of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time - which was the worst thing about that game - but fortunately - it seems like you can avoid a lot of the combat here

Every crack and crevasse is filled with gorgeous, subtle details

gansha?

DAAAAANNNNNNN

thank you, urbandictionary.com, for explaining what that meant

I seen a review that makes this look dead sexy again. Is it deep or repetitive, eh?

Every crack and crevasse is deep and filled

I'm only just starting the second (of nine) assassinations, so I can't really speak to the repetitive aspect, but so far I'm really enjoying the game - it's dead different in feel than anything else out there right now, that's for sure. At least to start - it has been really slow - for one thing - and that's something I'm enjoying (that others might not). A lot of the "play" is wandering around looking at things, trying to climb buildings, collecting hidden flags. It's not exactly a stealth game (I think), but you do sort of have to take things slow, blend into the crowd, wait for your moment. In some ways, because the graphics are fairly realistic and detailed - and that the cities feel alive with crowds - some of the gameplay elements seem a little weirder than if the game had a more cartoony look. For instance, to escape from a chase, all you have to do is break the line of sight of the guys hunting you - so far that has been pretty easy to accomplish - and once you've broken their line of site and your wanted meter goes back to normal, you can walk right back past the same people who were hunting you five seconds ago but now they won't recognize you.

So, it's an arty, slow game - the kind of game for people who like exploring, wandering around and collecting stuff - more than straight up action and explosions. At times it reminds me a bit of Shadow of the Colosssus - you're on your horse, wandering around looking for something - and when you get there you collect info on your target by observation - and then you kill it - over and over again.

I meant to mention I came across a pretty weird glitch in this game yesterday - I don't know if it was the game, or my 360 screwing up with loading in streaming stuff - but I was climbing up a ladder in the first little hamlet, when the ladder disappeared from underneath me. I fell to the ground and then a lot of the textures on the side of the house started to disappear - so I walked up for a closer look and got sutck in the wall of the house. Looking through the house (my head was half-way inside) I could see through the whole world - down to water a hundred feet below. Suddendly I couldn't get myself unstuck from the house - thought I was going to have to restart the game - but then managed to drop down through the ground - fell into whiteness for ten or so seconds, then the memory bank re-initalized and I was back at my last save. Most weirdly, then an achievement popped up for getting into one hundred fights in a row without losing one (20 points)! Note: I'd only been in maybe twenty fights at that point - if that (and I'd lost several times, at least).

I bought this today, only to be greeted by a lovely ring of death when I got back home to the Xbox. Lovely. Will Microsoft be able to ship me a new one in time for Guitar Hero on Friday?

No - I hear they've gotten a bit quicker lately - possibly down to two weeks, but I wouldn't count on it. Mine took exactly three.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_8cmPZ7hfE

I played the hell out of this game yesterday and got about a third of the way through, when the difficulty ramps up incredibly all of a sudden and it really turns into a stealth game, rather than basically a sandbox brawler. I'm kind of disappointed that it seems like the exploring part of the game is over, and the fighting mechanic, which is after all basically single-button button-mashing, is not very satisfying when you get to the point where you're fighting thirteen guys at a time.

Also, fuck the cutscenes in this game. They're terribly written, you can't skip them, and the interactivity in them is the worst, most boring shit. "Oh boy, this is the part of this ACTION GAME where I have to walk slowly into my bedroom and lie down and go to sleep!"

However, there is a LOT of fun in this game. I cannot get enough of sneaking up behind archers and throwing them off rooftops. Or, to my shame, shoving beggars into merchant stands.

I was straight up stabbing the fucking beggars until I found out there was an achievement for shoving them.

Is there? What is it? God this game seems so wrongheaded in so many ways. Like I'm playing this game and it charms me and compels me so much because I'm transported to a world so unlike my own... And then I have to spend half my time being hassled, like aggressively, by beggars and lunatics. And you can't even pay them off! It starts off like one of these games where you're moving though a living indifferent city and you have to make moral choices about the things you do... But as far as I'm concerned the game is unplayable unless you spend a lot of time slaughtering beggars and desperate lunatics! Considering how much time they spent with the environment it's inexcusable how little dialogue there is for the ambient characters. "Please, sir! You don't understand! I have nothing!" and she follows you and follows you and you CAN'T EVEN GIVE HER MONEY TO SHUT HER UP. The idea of creating a moral imperative in a game with NPCs is a cool idea but having them be completely fucking unbearable, even if that may be realistic, kind of misses the point.
Are you supposed to find some moral

... rant rant

Shove 25 beggars for "Enemy of the Poor" achievement. Already got it, guess I'll go back to stabbing them.

I've only just done the second assassination and I'm already getting a bit bored. Great looking game though.

My housemate was working through the early stages and it seemed a little boring to me, but I'll give it more of a chance this weekend I think.

It gets WAY HARDER after the third assassination, if that would make it more interesting, Jeff.

I don't know if harder will help - if it's just more of the same stuff - it's already kind of frustrating when trying to sneak up on somebody to have a crazy guy shoving you for no reason. Much more of that and it may induce control smashing.

I was trying to think about what I feel I'm missing here & I've been thinking maybe it's tension. For the second assassination I went to Acre and did all the investigations, climbed all the view points and saved all the citizens - and never once did I feel really threatened or in danger. And all those missions were kind of like marking off items on a shopping list - more of a slightly dull chore than anything else. Even with the assassination (the doctor dude) - I had a hard time getting it to initialize correctly (kept getting shoved), which was frustrating, but not exactly challenging.

Anyhow, I'm not giving up yet - I'm definitely looking forward to making it to Jerusalem and at least walking around there for a while checking out the scene. Now that I have throwing knives too - I'm vaguely curious to see how those work out.

The ending at this point does seem so far away that I'm having a hard time seeing myself playing the game enough to make it there - which bums me out a bit.

Oh - the other thing I was thinking about here was that although they created this amazing looking open world - I haven't been able to find much to do that's fun in it. Unlike say, San Andreas, which may not have looked the best - seemed to give the player a lot more options and a lot more to discover. Sick of the missions, go on a race, rescue people with the fire truck, go gambling, exercise (ha-ha), just drive around listening to music and level-up your skills or whatever, hop on a bike, a sakteboard, go to the shooting range, etc...

Try throwing beggars into scaffoldings or crowded stands!

You're right that once the climbing gets old there's not much to do. And what you were saying is frustrating or irritating gets WAY WORSE in missions where you have to kill a bunch of people without being noticed. All you can really do is knife those guys. And really, for a game that continually scolds you about killing innocents from the very first scene, having a major part of the game be a setup where basically either you kill hundreds of innocents or the game is unplayably annoying... That's really fucking obnoxious.

OK, you've got a HUD? In ancient Damascus?

uh there's a reason for that, kinda

ihttp://images.contactmusic.com/images/reviews2/hud.jpg

oops

http://images.contactmusic.com/images/reviews2/hud.jpg

Just got this this weekend - first game for my new PS3. Amazing.

I'm done with the first three assassinations - and it got a lot harder. Guards are a lot more on guard, things are harder to get to without raising static, etc.

Throwing knives might just be the coolest thing ever, though. I really dug standing on the corner of a house and killing an enemy from above with a throwing knife, and then watching the ensuing crowd gather.

I think you have to enjoy the discipline imposed by the creed - no killing innocents, don't compromise the brotherhood, etc. - to enjoy the game. Its all about doing it just right.

I heard that this is going to be the first in a trilogy - any truth to that?

I also finally bought this game and am incredibly ambivalent about it for ALL of the reasons mentioned above. Really beautiful, immersive, feels nice... but repetitive, obvious w/ its clues as to what to do, and some really irritating things (the beggars don't bug me, but when the lunatics PUNCH you, and that SOMEHOW alerts the guards to the fact that you're an assassin? BULLSHIT). However, I am starting ass'nation four and it is a lot more interesting, in the very least that it is HARD to get up the towers. which is my fave part. getting all of the view points.

I bought a copy of Vladimir Bartol's _Alamut_, which the french canadian design lead has pointed as the inspiration for this game. It's a really good book and I recommend it, written in 1938 as a commentary on Mussolini. The main character is a guy who starts the assassin guild and seems a hodge-podge of Osama bin Laden, Mussolini, and a Bond villain.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8c/Alamut1.jpg/180px-Alamut1.jpg

Also has a nice primer on Islam for westerners, with bits about N.Iran.

Well written, and originally in Slovenia but got translated 3 years ago.

I still haven't gone back to this game after finishing the second assassination :(

you have to slog through one more to get to the magic on the other side of the third kill. it actually becomes, uhh, a video game, then.

currently $38 at Target... is it worth it? The very mixed reviews make it hard to decide.

not played it, but I do know that :

Mixed reviews = try before you buy

Yeah... in my opinion this game is definitely a "borrow from a friend who's bored of it or buy it from him" type game.

or, you know, her

After finishing the first two assassinations I just haven't felt like going back to it. The game is (mostly) great looking, but as a game - I'm just not finding it very compelling. Or not with so many other games I'd rather be playing right now. It's hardly garbage though

Great for making me see out "Alamut", the 1938 novel written by a guy from Slovenia mocking Mussolini

I was planning on waiting for the PC version of this, but even my newly-built shithot system is going to struggle with this. Take a look at the system requirements, they're absurd:

Supported OS: Windows XP / Vista (only)
Processor: Dual core processor 2.6 GHz Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or better recommended)
RAM: 2 GB (3 GB recommended)
Video Card: 256 MB DirectX 10.0–compliant video card or DirectX 9.0–compliant card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher (512 MB video card recommended) (see supported list)*
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 or 10.0 compliant sound card (5.1 sound card recommended)
DirectX Version: DirectX 10.0 libraries (included on disc)
DVD-ROM: DVD-ROM dual-layer drive
Hard Drive Space: 12 GB

At least it's not Vista only, but when I just barely meet the "recommended" requirements for a new game with a system I literally built last week (and indeed don't meet, in terms of RAM), there's something wrong. My bet is that it's an abolute mess and they didn't take time to scale it properly across a broad range of hardware.

Ah well, at least by the time I finally buy a current-gen console it'll be in the bargain bins.

After finishing the first two assassinations I just haven't felt like going back to it. The game is (mostly) great looking, but as a game - I'm just not finding it very compelling. Or not with so many other games I'd rather be playing right now. It's hardly garbage though.

Ha - I was actually @ the same point, but I started playing it again last week and blew through the rest of the game. The assassinations get a little trickier & more interesting (tho I tended to take the bull-in-a-china-shop approach) AND they give you the option to skip all the obnoxious horse riding - you can just jump from one city to another once you reach the transition points, which was one of the reasons I too a prolonged break. And, yes, knife throwing is awesome.

The wonkiness of the "real life" controls was really annoying (as was the guy doing Altair's voice), and a lot of the stuff you guys mention re: shortcomings is spot on - I started shivving the beggars & drunks because they were annoying me (and a controller might have gotten spiked angrily at one point because the attack controls SUCK; I plead the 5th). But my biggest beef: just when the game gets interesting (and all the Templar / Assassin nonsense finally comes to light, in more ways than one), they end the stupid game! Looking forward to a sequel that I hope takes place in the modern-day / future environment, though.

while I agree that a modern-day version of this game would be hell of awesome, it occurred to me that the reason they introduced the recovered-memory gimmick in the first place was to give the game some boundaries - i.e. how else could they have divided the cities up into sections when you're able to climb or run on/over anything?

I still say this game is awesome, though; it is very much the Armageddon of vidya games in that parts of it deserve complete and total respect (the film's mise-en-scene, the game's city design) and other parts - specifically the story - need to be used as props in classes teaching people how to point and laugh at stuff.

also I finally beat this last weekend! (make sure to watch through the credits for an achievement, too.) now I can finally play Galaxy without feeling guilty!

how else could they have divided the cities up into sections when you're able to climb or run on/over anything?

it's kind of funny that all the futuristic pseudo-scientific DNA hoo-ha in this game is somehow more believable than the fact that you're, you know, playing a video game with certain reasonable limits!

it's easier to ask gamers in 2008 to take a bad gibson leap instead of tolerating another world where two foot picket fences block all progress?

ha. but do gamers really have nervous breakdowns when they reach the end of a map?

So, I just started playing this (thanks Gamefly!) and I totally should have bought this game sooner why because it look intersting

This is the first action game to come out in a long, long time that's actually engaged me; I think the last one was... probably PoP:SoT.

that's a baffingly competent cast for what is sure to be a terrible movie

this scene will be a challenge even for fassbender

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--yz7qRVtQ--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/n18tgsjmf9vwk2gjdj2m.gif

not even a fassbender bends that fast

Solid reviews is enough to tempt me back to this generally disappointing franchise.

Has there ever been more time and effort put into something that absolutely no-one gives a shit about than the futuristic bits of these games

after six years of posting on this thread I finally played AC2 & now am playing Brotherhood. & they are worth the wait. just bought the rest of the AC games available for 360, when I finish those maybe it'll be time to get an xbone/ps4. the setting of AC3 still seems lame to me but as long as there's exploration and little dinky tasks and killing I'll be good.

Black Flag is the one! so so fun.

Yeah, Black Flag is the standout of the series, though I remember being really pleasantly surprised by Brotherhood. Before Witcher: Blood and Wine was released I was playing AC: Syndicate, which looks wonderful but is a bit of a drag. It's huge but feels really small.

Had quite a bit of fun with AC: Syndicate until I leveled up way beyond what I needed to complete the game.

I am 2/3 through AC3 lol & yes it more or less sucks but I want to get the trading system going so I am faithfully doing all the dumb homestead missions. but all I really want are some good assassination missions! instead I ride around on a dumb horse telling my soldiers when to shoot which is basically "as soon as I arrive". I'm in the prison sequence which is quite fiddly & restrained: I want to fuck up the guards calling me a half breed but I don't see how I can fulfill the mission when doing so, so I hold off and pickpocket some moron. but it's not as bad as the war segments. I'm not gonna bother getting all the highpoints since the urban ones are terrible ( I don't give a fuck about the northeast usa) & the frontier ones are mostly just the same tree! hunting is ok fun because I guess I like killing animals by stabbing them in the head. also I haven't figured out how to upgrade anything yet: I guess I can't get more health than I started with? so when I try to fight more than 3 people at a time I die a lot. I want to level up but I don't see how. whatever, it's not that hard. the naval parts have been very fun so far & I'm looking forward to playing black flag next.

Best thing about AC3 is that Black Flag was built off of it.

ok finished AC3 tonight, what a bummer. such inept writing, such a dreadful lead character, such misconceived gameplay. all these complicated systems for crafting and it's good for making a couple of cool weapons and for making money that you won't need once you have the cool weapons, since you get enough money to upgrade your ship without crafting/trading. & it ended abruptly. the BEST part of the game was Haytham, a jerk with flair, unlike Connor, a boring jerk. the naval missions were pretty good so yeah Black Flag should be a joy. I'm gonna play Mass Effect 2 & Dragon Age 2 first though (trying to finish out my 360 games before choosing bw xbone & ps4 for Origin etc

I've never played any of these games but the new one looks promising.

they're always available for like 15 bucks not too long after release which is sometimes enough for the privilege of futzing around a big open world for a few hours before getting bored

Good to know!

Viking rap battles though!

I'm gonna play Mass Effect 2 & Dragon Age 2 first though

(I miss JLV.)
A crapload of Ass Creed games are on sale at Best Buy right now for BF/November; what are generally considered the good ones these days? I've only played the first. I assume the Ezio games are still held in high regard, but everything after that is a mush to me.

I liked Odyssey. Sun-drenched with a charismatic protagonist. Origins a slightly less good version of that

The London one is boring imo

I played them all up to Syndicate. Yeah, the Ezio games were great. 3 was ok, could have gotten most of the fun out of just Freedom Cry though. Black Flag was ok enough, Unity was disappointing (& I love the setting), didn't bother with Syndicate because I don't really care about London. I got Origins pretty cheap, I guess I want to try it, not sure about the Greek one, really these all sound exhausting these days.

Odyssey is great fun if you just like wandering around endless gorgeous landscapes solving tons of sidequests, a la Skyrim. The main character is cool like Biscuits said, and some of the historic Greek characters they've included are surprisingly fun. The main plot is a bit meh/predictable, but there are several intriguing subplots. I know some people dislike the Fate of Atlantis DLC because it sidesteps the relative realism of the main game and takes you to straight inside Greek mythology; there's a sci-fi explanation for all that, though it's rather flimsy... But I like that one too, it's visually quite inspired and fun to play.

origins, odyssey, valhalla are the new rpg-style Definitely Not Witcher 3 ones if that appeals

Sun-drenched with a charismatic protagonist.

Alexios or Kassandra?