Assassin's Creed

I'm currently at 70% in Black Flag and, yeah, really enjoyed it so far. I've only played a tiny bit of the first AC, so the whole thing is quite fresh to me. There's been a few too many 'follow this person and don't get caught' missions, but the creeping around, knifing guards in the back stealth stuff never gets old. Mostly I'm just enjoying sailing to desert islands over choppy seas as the crew sings shanties, and pickling fights with big fuck off Spanish galleons loaded with booty.

Am in this. Anyone wanna do multiplayer?

Encountered this odd cross-promotion at a Target tonight:

https://scontent-a-sea.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/1505053_10151796430946596_23649933_n.jpg

AC Liberation HD hits on Jan 14/15, apparently

What is James Kidd's accent in AC4?

It's a Manchester accent, if I recall.

I picked up ac3 on a steam sale for 7.50, then the hell with it and bought the goty version for another 7.50.

Ac4 is a blast, but the chase sequences are shit and a particular jungle mission is bugged all to hell. I'm really enjoying the bits where you cut back to Montreal, and the extensive lore of the game is a nice touch.

I've just finished Black Flag, and I am so fucking annoyed. No warning that a particular mission is the last mission in the main quest, then BAM game over, even though I haven't finished the Templar Hunt, or got the Mayan suit, explored that last island... now it would feel artificial to go back and do it, and if I don't (which I won't), all the time I spent chasing those objectives seems a total waste.

Fucking game.

Pro tip - look up the main quest mission names and don't do that last one til you're good and ready.

So in an effort to ward off depression I decided to take "advantage" of my sudden downtime and catch up with all the AC games (I beat 1 when it came out, played 2 a little bit but that was all). Made my way through II, which was great, and the rest of the Ezio Trilogy which was fine despite Revelations being ridiculously uneven.

I'm on sequence 9 or so of ACIII right now and hoo boy this game.

It's glitchy as all get out (side missions especially require a fair amount of leaving and restarting because x, y, or z isn't there that you need to beat them). I'm glad they've made the fighting a little bit more difficult (highland axe guys have put me down far more in this game than anyone else has in all the other ones combined) but it's unbelievably frustrating how few places to hide there are in the cities. Just trying to do their little "liberation" missions or a homestead one of getting papers for the smith alerts the entire british army and you can run around for ~~ages~~ before you find somewhere to hide and nobody is following you. The worst part is with the side missions where you basically have no choice but to alert the guards to your presence is that if you leave the little zone you have to restart the thing all over again. So you have to beat down wave after wave of the soldiers and then hopefully remain under 2 notoriety because you can't walk 10 feet to bribe a crier without yet more people being alerted and yet more running/fighting, all so Big Dave's dumbass apprentice can get his comeuppance and you can craft a nicer barrel or whatever.

Also Connor sucks and the dialogue is so corny and stilted I really appreciated what a smooth bro Ezio could be, even if he did blather on about the damn order or whatever. I'm also not sure why I spent so much time getting that miner and that hunter together so they can have some dumb wedding because I want to build a naval convoy and make some mad cheddar off a bear pelt.

otoh it's a very pretty game and the sea battles are a lot of fun in their limited way. Also I think everyone underestimated how awesome it is go all Hawkeye on some motherfuckers by picking up a rifle, killing someone, dropping it, and picking up *that* dude's rifle to shoot the next one. The entire purpose of this game really is to make me rewatch Last of the Mohicans and Master and Commander, and I guess there are worse things.

III is horrible, but IV redeemed the series in every way.

I got IV for 30 bucks last week so it's sitting there waiting for when I finish III.

nice.

Played IV for an hour or so yesterday, not sure I will want to play much more of it though. The graphics are real nice to look at but the controls kind of suck and I have no idea what is going on. I was in a ship crash and woke up on a beach somewhere, where there was also a lone assassin. He threatened me with his gun, then threw it on the ground and ran away. So I tried looking for the gun for about 10 minutes before I realized it was just part of a cut scene.

So the game says to chase the assassin, and I do. I end up climbing up a rickety tower to see if I can scope him out from above, but no. So I climb back down and walk around, eventually he appears in the distance. As I chase him he alternates between "I'm going to kill you!" and "We can work together!", often within seconds of each other.

Yeah but it gets really awesome

Really digging this game so far

I'm still so angry at III that I can't really bring myself to get IV.
instead I went back to II !
just played a little bit yesterday but walking around (and on the roofs) of renaissance florence is pretty good (especially after the lame boston and NY in III) !
It reminded me of the pleasure I had in I discovering jerusalem, damascus...

http://kotaku.com/leaked-images-reveal-one-of-this-falls-two-assassins-1547111652

These screenshots, sent to me by a source who requested anonymity, show Unity's new assassin roaming around what appears to be Paris. You can see Notre Dame, the Seine River, and other Parisian landmarks, and the shots are very clearly from an early version of the game.

Finally, a French Revolution setting for an AC game. Kinda curious how many Napoleon or Ac3/AC4 character cameos they'll have

ah yes ! I hope I can find my appartment in it !
pretty excited by this. and indeed, if it goes to the Empire era too, that will be awesome.
too bad there will be no eiffel tour to climb though !

as for II, I've played it some more yesterday and so far it's very very cool and so much better than III.
the story is interesting, the hero is nice, the gameplay is not bad.
and it's fun again to run around on the roofs through a great city (haven't succeeded in climbing to the top of the duomo and the campanile yet... but did the leap of faith from the palazzo vecchio, yay !). in III, I was almost never on the roofs and the viewpoints were so not exciting.
I'll see if it gets as repetitive and boring as I or if there are awful mission designs like III...

Played IV again. Pretending To Be A Pirate: The Movie: The Video Game. The cinematography in this is great! Sometimes the wobbly camera looks silly but this is really well done. The voice acting is stellar! I only realized this time around I can actually steer the ship while I'm shooting canons. Incredible.

This would be amazing with a VR helmet. Jumping around jungle lagoons, leaping from coconut treetop to coconut treetop, and you never have to worry about bugs, heat, or dangerous animals.

You automatically knew there was treasure behind the waterfall.

When the meta stuff starts up in IV, I just want to go back to playing that awesome pirate game. I hope this isn't a huge part of this game.

but everything outside the story was a blast

lol modern games

― napgenius (goole), Tuesday, December 10, 2013 11:04 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Uh that first meta part was just like someone walked into the room while I was playing an awesome pirate game and stole the computer screen from me then waved it around going "Nyaah nyaaah nyaah!" is there a mod that will let me assassinate these VR clowns? I don't care that I am playing a videogame inside a videogame. Unless this is going to turn into Saints Row IV you can leave that stuff at home.

Please tell me this is a very very small part of this game.

yeah the Animus/Abstergo stuff in the series is really annoying and compeltely pointless - not sure why the developers feel obliged to stick with it.

Paris is burning !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLcjwqXATIM

I was expecting this to follow !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L93-7vRfxNs

Pretty psyched for that but maybe it's because I just read Fatal Purity.

Finally got the mission where I have my own ship and the crew are singing sea shanties and there are all these little islands everywhere to explore. YES THIS IS AWESOME.

Yeah the open world segment here (it feels like this game is made of a few different open world areas) is pretty frickin' amazing and seamless. You can go from sailing the seas and fighting other pirate ships to discovering buried treasure on a secret island without any load screen or load time. I love the controls for the ship, you can sort of put it on cruise control, you can turn it around like a tank, and you can pull it up to an island and just whip it to a stop like you would a car in GTA. But it doesn't look silly, it looks awesome!

The collectible stuff in IV is done extremely well, any time you have to find something out of the way you end up using your crazy acrobatic moves and end up walking across treetops or something cool that you wouldn't otherwise have done.

It's harder (or maybe just more time consuming) to make money as well, which is frustrating when I'm trying to level up the ship but is better than opening up stores and watching money roll in you'll never spend. Making you dive for the elite plans was a good move too.

So this awesome open world, it's going to be available for the rest of the playing time, I suspect? I've been running around doing random missions and I'm wondering if should just chill on those for a minute and progress in the main story so everything is unlocked. Can't wait to do a diving mission...

Just want to comment again the open world looks AMAZING holy crap AAA video games over the past couple of years are giving Hollywood a run for their money. Seems like every 10 minutes or so I catch a view that is postcard pretty, and yes this is my favorite non-Monkey Island pirate game of all time. When you are sailing at travel speed and your boat hits the water and it all splashed up and onto the deck and then washes off..... holy crap it looks amazing. Just, damn.

prob gonna pick this up after i finish dark souls 2

I found my rip of the old Pirates of the Caribbean Disney record I made and it sounds really cool played alongside this game, you can even leave the game music on.

Not gonna lie I try to get the music sheets so I can hear more shanties

Neu goes SUPER well w both the cutscenes and big dramatic open-sea drones.

Both 1 and 2 have water sound sections.

Riding the big waves is the killer app.

I really liked the Abstergo segments in IV. I thought it worked as an interesting framing device for what you were doing, as well as opening up the premise for any other era they wanna hit....as the Unity previews show. I liked the change-up of going from third-person blonde piratey dude actioning around vs first-person vaguely nameless gamedev QA tester.

the sheer buckets of lore in the game were a nice addition.

Dawned on me last night, after digging up treasure from a island that looked a little too familiar, that this game is procedurally generated. The towns are really starting to feel the same too. It's still a great game, but the more that shows through, kind of ruins it a bit for me.

I went back to this at the weekend for the first time in a month or two. My ship's so maxed out on weaponry that I can take out man-o-wars from distance just by raining mortar down on them and come away without a scratch. Kinda spoils the fun. I've still a couple of dives left to complete - I tended to avoid them as they were always so unbearably tense - but that's about it :(
Roll on the French Revolution, but I'll miss the pirating.

I harpooned a few hammerheads last night, which was amazing (as everything in this game is) visually and easy to control. I still can't get over the look of the ocean in this. Just brilliant programming. You really feel the weight of the ship, and the gravity of everything, and the pull of the waves, particularly during rough seas. It looks _exactly_ like real footage. Best water EVER in a videogame.

I'm serious about "Neu! 2". The second track has this crazy minimalist reverbed out snare drum part that goes really well with all the cannons during ship-to-ship battles. And track 03 sounds like a windy spooky Caribbean church.

I haven't touched the story mode on this for a while, just been exploring underwater pirate hideaways filled with sharks and stuff. I just climbed up a really sweet bell tower that was 6 or 7 stories tall.

Just finished 3. Really bad story/acting and glitchy gameplay. In mitigation, easier time with recruits and I liked trading. Sea missions also brilliant.

Really slow to go for 4. I played game thinking that Ezio was such a good character compared to Connor (

Superfluous 'N' or is this common US spelling?) in that there was a bit of movement and growth. Honestly felt that this game was just railroading me between cut scenes. Some of historical notes were interesting as I know/knew very little about that period.

The accents though - they could not find actors capable of accents with their budget?

In terms of 4 though it sounds from this thread they've kept good bits of 3 and chucked the rest.

I don't know, haven't played 3. It feels like an open world pirate action game laid on top of a stealth franchise. It is a LOT of content. You can spend dozens of hours just doing sidequests and fighting ship battles. It's pretty good, it's almost too good, in fact. If they had made a game with half this content, and spent all that extra time perfecting gameplay and little physics issues, it would be a masterpiece.