Assassins Creed Series

[Segata Sanshiro Jr.]

Taste the Assassin's creed?

Wheres the spoon?

AHAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

seriously tho wtf is up with that? knowing its not a glitch kinda makes it worse. that would mean someone actually looked at that and said "Yep this is totally what we wanted"

[Perfect_Chaos]

seriously tho wtf is up with that? knowing its not a glitch kinda makes it worse. that would mean someone actually looked at that and said "Yep this is totally what we wanted"

If you google "assassin's creed brotherhood white gradient" you can read about all the angry consumers. i noticed almost immediately. i hated it. it was so distracting and out of place. the game was so damn good tho i put up with it. and like i said that pic is when its in "extreme mode" rare that its that bad when you play. the game was released 2 years ago and was never patched. i picked up the ezio trilogy today and ACbrotherhood still does it on that too so im guessing it will never be fixed

[Axm]

Just got the Ezio Trilogy. Quite awesome. I platinum'd AC2 when it came out but never did dlc or played Brotherhood or Revelations. Heck I loved AC2 ill play through the main story again just for fun. Ezio is a pimp.

[Samanosuke Akechi]

Would buy the trilogy in a heartbeat if they released the japanese CE.

[OL]

Indeed, sir.
Indeed.

And I think I just noticed one more thing I'm not a big fan of in AC3.
I've been going back and replaying missions and just running around the city wreaking havok in Revelations, and it's incredibly fun to be stealthy, stalking after groups of enemies and taking them out one at a time as they patrol around. The hidden blade kills are silent, so it's actually possible to do this kind of thing.
As I was playing AC3, it felt like they'd changed this. Enemies get alerted much easier now. I'd kill a guard in some way other than ambushing him from a corner, and some other guard practically off in the distance would notice and come running, all while some stupid alarm goes off and everyone else comes running as well. Even if a guard is ten feet away with his back turned, it still seems like he hears it when you kill someone behind him.
They likely made it so this happens in response to many players (I know I've seen it mentioned on here) saying that the AI needs to be improved, but I think they've gone about it the wrong way. Instead of simply making it more challenging, they've just made it less fun by doing this. It's harder to feel like the stealth badass that you could be in previous games.
And since the combat is also easier in AC3, it suddenly seems as if the stealthy approach no longer makes much sense; you may as well just hack and slash your way through.
Just something I noticed. I still love AC3 of course, but the preceding games (barring AC1) easily rank higher for me in terms of sheer fun.

[Riku Rose]

Well I just beat the game an hour ago and although I thought it was a lot of fun there are many many problems. It really felt like the game could do with longer in development but because of the whole 2012 thing they really had to rush it. I've never ran into so many bugs in a game that I imagine this is what people complain about when they play Bethesda games. People would disappear or a cut scenes wouldn't happen when it was meant to meaning I had to reload from the last checkpoint.

The ending was really bad for Desmond as well. I'm sure there will be a sequel and I bet they go find Desmond's long lost brother or cousin so you can replay as Connor or a new assassin.

I thought the scene where Connor kills Lee in the tavern was brilliant but the 2 hours before it felt really weird. You barely controlled Connor at all save for the odd chase or fight. It felt like a really rushed film which no game should seeing that it can go on as long as the developers want it to.

I thought the after credits missions may make up for it but it seemed to be hinting that Connors journey is done. All I felt at the end is how I would have rather played as Haytham through the whole game. In the few hours you play as him he has more personality then Connor does despite getting 4x as much screen time. Even the scenes during missions that he does with Connor he steals every scene.

I enjoyed it overall but it had a lot of potential that it never filled. As it stands my favorite games in the series is the Ezio trilogy. I doubt they would make it but I'd love an entire Assassin's Creed set in present day but if they ever did it I hope we get someone with more personality than Desmond.

[Segata Sanshiro Jr.]

I think with stealth games people mistake omniscience with intellect. I feel like designers in general don't think about things. Thats why when you throw a bottle in Dishonored the even if he had his back turned he'll look over to where it came from not where it crashed. Its the reason if you get seen in Uncharted, every enemy knows exactly where you are, despite never sounding an alarm or yelling "over here".

[Axm]

Ways I Would Make Assassin's Creed 3 Better by Orange Lightning

1.) Reinstate the "high-profile" button in conjunction with the button for foot movement. A single button for running/freerunning is just too imprecise, and leads to too many awkward mistakes during chases or normal traversal. I shouldn't run aross a ship and unintentionally keep hopping on cannons and ledges for no reason. It looks ridiculous.
There was no reason to change it. Not like it was complicated before anyway. This is a case of to much streamlining, and now the X button on the PS3 controller (or A on the 360 one) serves little purpose outside of battle. Unless you want to jump to your death, that is.
At the very least, give us an option of which kind of controls to use, rather than forcing the streamlined version on us.

2.) Allow cutscenes a little more time to develop, with more room for dramatic effect. As Riku mentioned, something like the scene in the tavern at the end was brilliantly done, and recieved the time it needed, but others (such as the actual Desmond-centered ending) feel hastily-thrown-together, with very little dramatic impact at all.

3.) More interaction with historical events/figures. The American Revolution backdrop is well-implemented in some cases (such as the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Boston Tea Party, or Paul Revere's ride), but by the end of the game, that backdrop seems to drop out of existence, instead focusing on the more mundane story of Connor and his own motivations.
No Cornwallis? No Vice Admiralty Courts? No press gangs? No battle of Yorktown (would have been the perfect end, utilizing British, American, French, and Indian troops all in the same place)?
Despite a few really cool uses, the time and place settings feel oddly under-utilized. Being based around a war, you would think this would be the most epic, large-scale AC yet; instead, despite a particularly large "world," the story itself feels like one of the smallest in the end.

4.) Make Connor more interesting. It's been said already, but Connor comes off as incredibly bland. His personality has almost nothing endearing in it, his insistance on "freedom" comes off as blind, teenage rhetoric, and his voice actor is simply unfit to play a character meant to hold a commanding presence. Byt the end of everything, I was left with no desire whatsoever to see this character given another game of his own.
Like Riku said,

Haytham is simply the more interesting, entertaining character. Considering that he's Connor's father, you would think they would have carried over some of that swagger as an inherent familial trait, to further emphasize their relation and make the resulting events a little more tragic and affecting.
But no, they may as well have been completely unrelated. A sad missed opportunity.

5.) Keep the stealth generally the same as in the other games. You could argue that they should make it better, but that's exactly what they tried to do. In some instances it payed off (such as in the use of the corner-kills, whistles, and the ability to hide in thick foliage), but in others (the aforementioned over-alertness of guards, the immediate alarms, and the automatic enemy knowledge of your position) it just hurts the experience and makes it less fun. And I think the negatives affect the game even more than the positives do.
Keep the new features, but revert the "AI" back to what it was. It might not be a step forward in AI, but at least it wouldn't be a step backward. And that consistency with the old games would be a lot more fun (which is the ultimate goal).

6.) Yet another "revert back" suggestion, but the counter kills were much more satisfying to perform in previous games. Again, go back to the "high-profile" button setup. The new control scheme is just too easy, and relies a bit less on timing and skill than it did before. Granted, it's good that the new one makes you take different tactics with different enemies, but the exact same thing could have been done with the "high profile" button as well, without dumbing it down. The big red triangle flying up over enemies' heads doesn't help either. Just makes it feel too easy.

7.) Allow horses to take a couple shots before falling down. It's just retarded that while trying to make a daring escape, I can dramatically jump on a horse, valiantly ride five steps, then have the horse fall down under me when it gets shot a single time. To hell with realism; I want fun, and it's nigh-impossible to make a fun escape on horseback with these frail-ass, one-shot horses.

EDIT: 8.) Bring back the hookblade. Some of the greatest moments I've had in Assassin's Creed came from making a blind leap of faith and being saved by a quick-thinking use of the hookblade from Revelations.
If not the actual hookblade (which, granted, was pretty specific to the Turkish order of Assassins) then have Connor use his tomahawk in the same way, reaching out with it and grabbing ledges/speeding up climbing. Would look awesome and actually be useful.

[Segata Sanshiro Jr.]

everything this man says is true

I think I should clarify something also, despite saying they're pushing for the truth and a good representation of a slightly fictionalized era they really went WAAAAY off the rails when it comes to certain figures.
Why not have Cornwallis (who actually lobbied for more rights for colonists before the war broke out) as an Assassin's contact? This was a man that actually believed in the rights of men regardless of position and religion. thats like evrything the Assassin's stand for.

I know its only shown in Discovery which is a spinoff, but in Revelations when Ezio expresses sadness for Christopher Columbus I feel like vomiting. Read up on the guy, he was ALL Templar. A devout Christian, he held the belief that "red people" (referred to directly as Rojos in his journals) were sub-human and because they (we as I am one of these red people) were unable to govern ourselves and thus were only fit to be ruled by white men as slaves. Dosen't really fit in with "Nothing is true, Everything is accepted" (especially once you find out what it means)

they did such a good job with Machiavelli, because half of the prince was sarcasm. Looking at his history (and incarceration) his views in game seem to match up with the historical figured. Do that some more.

[Axm]

Of course the argument could always be made that since they're dealing with a sort of "history as you never learned it," Columbus may have been a really good guy in the AC universe ( ).

But no, you're absolutely right.
I think one of the problems this time around was the fact that the historical figures in this one were likely even more well-known to the creative team since they were kids, so the more little-known aspects found a harder time getting in (or, at the very least, it was harder for them to put "less acceptable" spins on these figures, since they kind of grew up with them).
With Renaissance history in AC2 and Brotherhood for example, they likely wouldn't have just known all of this stuff off-hand. They likely had to do a shit-ton of research to truly understand how to utilize the DeMici family, Machiavelli, Bartolomeo d'Alviano, Cesare Borgia, etc. These would have been figures that, as North Americans, we don't automatically learn about in highschool, so they truly had to be looked up and sought out for potential story use. Same with Revelations and figures like Piri Reyes, Prince Suleiman, Manuel Palaiologos, etc.
With the American Revolution, it's easier for North Americans to think of the people involved and throw out a story using them without much research, then just doing extra research later to fill the gaps.
I see that as one of the reasons the story in this one just doesn't connect with or interest me as much as earlier games. The others were a little more "foreign" to me. They inspired me to do research, to seek out the basis for these characters, to understand the countries and time period they inhabit. To me, that's kind of a part of the whole Assassin's Creed appeal. Introduce me to something I don't know, then let me figure out the facts to the fiction.
While it's cool to see the colonial setting in a game like this, there's little here that I didn't already know, and little is done to put any kind of more controversial spin on it (Cornwallis as one of the Assassins' order would have thrown people for a loop, to be sure). It really comes down to my own personal experience with it, but I thought their use of the American Revolution would have interested me more than it did. I wish it would have.

So where should they go now?
I'm hoping for another totally unexpected setting and time period. My first thought would be some Asian country, but that feels a little too... obvious. They'd likely do China or Japan. And while a Japanese one, especially, would have me right on board, I'd rather see something a little more unknown to me.
I had a cool idea the other day while thinking about The Count of Monte Cristo, that Edmond Dantes could be an Assassin, trained by Abbe Faria, a former Assassin himself, while imprisoned in Chateau D'if. Dantes escapes, finds his treasure, gets his revenge, then a whole slew of Templar-related stuff could happen, all against the backdrop of 1800s France. The Count of Monte Cristo is fiction, of course, but it would be interesting to think that the events were inspired by reality in the AC universe, then weave it in with the AC mythology and French history from the time.
Of course, this would probably just end up seeming like a mix of the Ezio trilogy and AC3, being another western/European-based one after all, and aside from the basis in fictional literature, wouldn't be quite as unexpected as certain other countries/time periods might be.

Christ, it's easy to end up with walls of text when I'm talking about AC. Sorry 'bout that.

[Samanosuke Akechi]

The creative director pretty much shut down the idea of a feudal japan setting.

Don't see how such setting would be "boring".

[OL]

I think his point is more along the lines of what I was saying: it's just too expected, too "obvious".
It would be cool, but there are so many games covering that setting already. Assassin's Creed has kind of made a name for itself by doing the more unusual ideas; open-world action games set during the Crusades, the Renaissance, the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and the American Revolution are all pretty effing different from anything else out there.
Not really a fan of their India idea myself, but that's just my own personal taste. At least they're thinking of things that would be different.

[Segata Sanshiro Jr.]

I wouldn't mind if they started over and the new present day assassin started as Altair's grandson or great grandson in Alexandria, with a second scenario in Egypt.

From there take the series to China. not Sanguo but 1900s China during the time of Europeon imperialism.

It should also be noted that Assassin's creed hits pretty similar timelines to Black Adder. I'd be wrong if they don't just go the distance and make a game set in World War 1.

[Riku Rose]

I was trying to think where the next game was set and imagined one set in WW2 with Hitler being an evil Templar. Problem is when you get into the early 1900's guns are more common meaning either the assassin is going to need a gun to fight back. There was rumors about AC3 being set in Russia since some of the comics for the series are set there. Maybe that's a place they will go to.

[OL]

I can't remember if the Subject 16 puzzles mention him in AC2 or Brotherhood, but offhand, I wouldn't actually peg Hitler as a Templar. His outlook was one of hate and eradication. As bad as some of the Templars are made out to be, their goal is always one of rule and conquest, not destruction.
I would peg Hitler more as just someone who, unexpectedly to both the Templars and the Assassins, comes into possession of a Piece of Eden without being affiliated with either group.
Either way, they shot down the idea of a WWII AC game, so I guess that's out for now.

In all seriousness, I think a very natural next step would be a prequel game about Haytham, taking place in jolly ol' London. It'd be a case very much like Brotherhood or Revelations, where they could tweak the system for whatever they want to do, but the basic engine and the functions it can perform are already in place, so they could just build another game with what they already have (whereas a far-removed time period like WWII would require a lot of extra additions; a complete overhaul in many regards).
I think the only problem with the idea is that they wouldn't be able to logically do the ship battles anymore with an idea like that, since it's made clear in the the beginning of AC3 that Haytham has no previous experience on a ship.