Assassin's Creed

[MetalCaveman]

Well that's dumb.  

 

Why I came here:  from the looks of this demo, the coop missions seem to be side missions, tied in to the main singleplayer game but not actually part of it.

 

Aaaand, while I was typing that the coop partners appeared in what had seemed to be singleplayer only.  Damnit.

 

I don't like when a game goes "you're having too much fun! Here, have this boring stuff you don't care about!"

 

 

 

Also:

 

http://www.siliconera.com/2014/06/09/assassins-creed-unity-collectors-edition-announced/

 

Collector's Edition announced.

 

 

• Figure of Arno poised atop a gargoyle
• Music box that plays a remixed version of the Unity theme
• Official soundtrack
• Art book
• Collector’s game box
• Two in-game missions

[TheMightyEthan]

But if it's optional you can just continue not caring about it...

[MetalCaveman]

 

There's a ton of instances where it's not optional:

 

When you're introduced to your role in Abstergo game studios.

 

When you're told to hack the thing and then deliver it to the assassins.

 

When the dude calls you to his office and then you're told to hack his PC/tablet/schedule thingy.

 

A bunch of other times where you hack the thing and then you give the thing to the assassins.

 

 

 

Those were not optional, sure, you could returns to the animus immediately afterwards, but they shouldn't be there in the first place IMO.

[Alex Heat]

I hope this doesnt fuck the AC series in the ass like it did to Resident Evil and Dead Space by slapping on co-op. I dont want to feel like i SHOULD have 3 other people with me when Im playing solo.

 

I personally thought co-op made Dead Space 3 more enjoyable on the whole.  I'm hoping Unity doesn't force it and lets you actually do things separately from your partner(s) when you do play in co-op.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

I'm surprised anyone made a big deal out of this. It was just AC. But more next-geny. They're being extremely safe with the formula.

[TheMightyEthan]

The only thing I see people making a big deal of is the potential for the coop to negatively impact the singleplayer experience...

[staySICK]

like watch dogs

[TheMightyEthan]

Is there coop in Watch Dogs campaign missions?  Because they're making it look like Unity's coop is during the actual campaign, not just integrated into the world.

[deanb]

Online stuff is separate from the campaign (though if you're being hacked that'll impede your ability to load up the campaign mission). You're either hacked randomly in the open world, or you're enabling the MP modes from your phone to drop into.

[TheMightyEthan]

That's what I thought.

[staySICK]

yeah, I meant "online bits ruining the single player experience"

[TheMightyEthan]

But you can turn it off in Watch Dogs, and the actual singplayer isn't designed for coop...

 

My concern isn't that people will drop in and ruin my game, I'm confident they'll let me turn it off (or worst case I can unplug the ethernet cable), my concern is that the "singleplayer" campaign will have been designed around you playing with 3 other people, and it just won't play right alone.

[Eleven]

I can't get over the new animations! About time they improved it (well, some of it!). That and the new parkour abilities. There was another video at IGN where the protagonist jumped to lower (way lower) ledges. They made it as easier going down as it was easy going up. I guess that's how I should describe it.

And the new animations!

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, the ability to climb downward was amazing.

[Strangelove]

From Kotaku:

 

• The game's new co-op missions are optional, all story-based, but can be played solo, too. You find them in the game world. The developers promise that those of us who love playing through the game's solo campaign and side missions will not feel underserved. 
• There is no competitive multiplayer mode in Unity, the first time a big new AC will lack that since 2010's Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood.
• There's a crouch button. Yay!
• There will be a modern section to the game as well, in some way starring "you." I'm not quite sure what that means, but they said it'd be different than Assassin's Creed IV, which had the player in the role of an unnamed employee of fictional (and Templar-aligned) Abstergo Entertainment.
• Amancio may have previously been the creative director of Assassin's Creed Revelations, but he promised me we would not be getting the return of that game's tower defense missions. Praise the lord.

Edited June 10, 2014 by Strangelove

[TheMightyEthan]

The developers promise that those of us who love playing through the game's solo campaign and side missions will not feel underserved.

They can say that all they want, but I won't believe it until I start hearing it from non-Ubi people who have actually played the game.

 

Amancio may have previously been the creative director of Assassin's Creed Revelations...

Fuck.

[TCP]

Good that he has a chance to redeem himself from Revelations. Revelations was obviously too rushed, and the tower defence sucked. I'm still confused about Comet, you'd think, even if it was a PS3/360 version of Unity, they'd want people preordering it by this point? 

[TheFlyingGerbil]

I'm guessing/hoping it will be on the actual show floor. That doesn't open until tomorrow does it? Certainly does seem weird though

[SomTervo]

I'm surprised anyone made a big deal out of this. It was just AC. But more next-geny. They're being extremely safe with the formula.

 

I disagree.

 

At first I would have agreed with you, but I decided to look deeper at a couple of things which looked surprising in the demo. For one, it looked like the minimap was gone (gamechanger- in open world games at least). And for another, it looked like combat actually required some tact and skill (gamechanger- for AC at least.) Then there was the fact it seemed like there was a stealth/ sneak button (gamechanger- for AC at least.)

 

I distrust the series and the developers, but I really wanted to be sure of what these changes were, because AC is one series which I can't stop playing no matter how much I hate how it's designed. I needed to know if they had fixed things which always bugged me.  

 

So I read all the previews I can:

 

- Minimap is gone. You can only see things which are located nearby/ objectives if you climb on top of buildings, to get high enough for vantage. 

- This ties to the lack of "Leap Of Faith". They got rid of that frustrating "auto-dive" bullshit because it was stupid and unnecessary. Now you hold O/B to automatically and smoothly grab stuff to climbing down. As we saw at the beginning of that big guillotine-square demo.

- And with Leap of Faith gone, they also killed the synchronisation bullshit, so now whenever you're high up you're at a vantage point and can see everything in the area. This is a huge break of formula from AC/FarCry/Watch_Dogs, which have all had variations on the "synchronise to unlock content" shitty mechanic since Day One.

- Combat has been reworked so that enemies attack simultaneously and there are no more one-hit-kill combos or counters. I.e. the thing which literally broke any sense of tension AC could have ever had. They changed this and made combat harder to make stealth a more appealing approach.

- There is now a sneaking/ crouch button. So at long last we can lower our profile at will and stick to surfaces as hiding places at will, with a button.

 

Imho, it looks like this is NOT "just Assassin's Creed by next-geny". It could be. But it appears they are taking some actual risks with the formula, to make the gameplay experience deeper than AC has ever managed. God I resent the series. Yet I think this is the first one I'm going to actually anticipate. 

[Eleven]

How come you say you hate it, yet you can't stop playing? The positives surely outweigh the negatives for you in this case. I don't know. It's just a weird stance that I don't understand.

[Strangelove]

I kind of feel the same way. If you take the series apart, it's...mediocre. Maybe even worse. Seriously, think about all the parts that make it what it is....there are games that do it a million times better. The sword fighting is awful and even worse than button mashy. The parkour stuff is completely automatic. I cant even claim it has platforming. The shooting is also autoaimed and Id almost say that its not true shooting. The stealth is halfassed and bland. The mission structure hasn't changed since AC2. And the less said about the stuff outside the Animus the better.
But somehow when you mix all that stuff in with great sense of scope and size, fantastic real world locations, decent to likable characters, involved stories(which arent great either really), fantastic graphics, and boat shit...it works.

 

So yeah, "resentment" I think is the appropriate word. I enjoy it though I really shouldnt.

[TheMightyEthan]

My feelings are who cares if it doesn't do any one thing especially better than any other game, it still works well as a whole.  That's what matters to me.

 

But yeah, if they want to improve the mechanics as well, then more power to them.

[Eleven]

Hmm... For me the combat fits the game. I would prefer this difficulty than having to constantly redo combat sequences, as it breaks up the pace of the game. And it's not button mashy, or worse than button mashy, at all. This is actually one of my favorite things in the game. I run around and stab 2 guards. Run around for a bit and get all those guards in 1 place and perform 5,6,7 kill combos. Then i run around and do it again. Honestly, it's super fun. I don't even "lose the guards" on chase sequences. I just kill them all because it's so satisfying.

 

The parkour is automatic i agree but i wouldn't have it any other way. If i'd have to do mirror's edge perfectly timed jumps and wallruns then i'd have to give up the series.

 

The shooting is supposed to be auto aimed, how else are you going to put guns in a combo.

 

The stealth i would agree. I still found the system in AC4 fun, though.

 

Anyway, it just feels weird to me that someone would say i hate this game, and yet they constantly play it. I guess I see what he could mean now. But to be honest, they could make all future games like AC4 and not add 1 single feature and I would buy them all, day one. Everything in this game just works for me.

[FredEffinChopin]

I feel like such a sourpuss lately when it comes to games... I don't really have a lot of good to say, which makes me feel bad for coming to be a stick-in-the-mud in this thread. This series in particular though, I think I'm officially finished with. After sticking with Watch_Dogs for as long a I could stand, I figured I should finally get around to playing Assassin's Creed 3 while I still had Ubisoft's E3 advertisement installed on my computer. Plus I could get to Black Flag already, which I recently snagged, as it looks really cool. I didn't last more than a few hours. The whole thing felt like a chore, and way too familiar. It was one of those moments in gaming that made me wonder how it is that I've been playing video games for as long and frequently as I have, considering the limitations of what can be done with a screen and a control interface. Not even the time/setting was enough to keep me interested. It's possible that I just became sour towards the entire thing quickly and didn't give the plot enough of a chance, but that was coming off as incredibly standard fare as well. 

 

I think I've just played too much AC. I skipped Revelations because I needed a break (I'm pretty sure they announced it while I was playing the fairly-new Brotherhood), and figured AC3 would be the perfect breath of fresh air to get me back in. I think I've just done it enough times though. It's nearly impossible for me to give a shit what piece of Eden (or whatever it's called) is going to be discovered at the end of any particular narrative, as it's all already left me with the impression of taking the greatest number of chapters possible to get from A to B. At the end of the day I feel like they just bombarded me with something I enjoyed until I couldn't stand to look at it any more. Not that they are a model for productivity, but compared to SE, there were about as many (main, "canon", even though the term doesn't apply to FF as well) AC titles in a single console generation as there were FF titles since 2000. 

 

Or maybe SE does have a pacing that I prefer, even if it's for all the wrong reasons (delays and general lack of any direction, typically). When people complain about people who don't want to have to install Uplay (or Origin, though I understand that one is less problematic), they often question why nobody cares that Valve has a similar service. Aside from the fact that people did and do care, I can personally say that I'd much rather do business with the company that makes two great games in a franchise over a long period of time than the one that does everything they can to promote a sort of palette-swap (to the point where when they finally develop a new game it still kinda resembles AC in ways) development culture status quo. I'm really not crazy about these guys who make games in a series every 14 months on average, and sell you new DLC every 8-12 weeks on the way to the next title that will make your previous game and DLC (especially if it was online-oriented) obsolete. Unfortunately, they seem to be the ones most interested in giving platforms like Steam competition. 

 

Anyway, aside from all the shit I just talked, I still might decide that I'm ready to give Black Flag a whirl at some point. A couple of friends told me that they liked it much better than AC3, and I did already buy it, it can't hurt to fire it up at least once. It'd be wasteful not to. I'm pretty sure I'm really far away to thinking about their latest AC endeavor though. Ubi and I can talk again when I hear some news on Beyond Good and Evil 2 already (or just something else that I enjoy). I'm sure we'll be playing Assassin's Creed Deep Space Nine by that point.

[Eleven]

So... Crouch button.

 

I'm playing Tomb Raider right now, and Lara doesn't have a crouch button either, but she does it automatically. I wonder if that's better, and just use a "high profile" button (or the run button) like before if you don't want to be stealthy. IMO, it would be better than holding down a button while turning the camera around or whatever. And I hate toggles.

 

Like in that demo, as long as Arno (should have been Arnault!) isn't seen by enemies yet, he could just crouch down by default or stick to walls. Isn't that what any normal people who don't want to be seen would do automatically? Again, in Tomb Raider, whenever you hear enemies approach, Lara crouches automatically (sometimes accompanied by gasps of surprise or fear). It's a cool visual cue that says "hey people are around, need to be careful".