Assassin?s Creed Revelation Hands-On

[Steve Butts]

Assassin?s Creed Revelation Hands-On

Four hours of stabbing, climbing, and lute-playing.

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[Broken Blade]

Gahdammit, I want to play this game so hard. Grrrrr. Five weeks to go. Fortunately, I've got a few games between now and then to keep me occupied, like All 4 One and Arkham City, but it's still not going to be a fun week.

How well does the new secondary attack button work for combat? I know you briefly touched on it, but I'm kind of curious about how well it flows in battle.

 

[Landis963]

You missed the thing in the pause menu where you can go to a certain "Animus Island." A guy from Kotaku went there and got the controller physically taken out of his hands by a Ubisoft employee.

 

[Warforger]

Sounds more standard AC stuff, more laughable "secret" society wars, ok plot, very un-assasiny gameplay of fighting mobs of soldiers etc etc

Regardless it sounds fun.

 

[Calvar Draveir]

Sounds more standard AC stuff, more laughable "secret" society wars, ok plot, very un-assasiny gameplay of fighting mobs of soldiers etc etc

Regardless it sounds fun.

You're more laughable than Assassin's Creed's story, I garuntee it.

Assassin is just a name for an ideology. How they accomplish it is up to them. And by that, I mean mostly up to the player.

 

[Broken Blade]

You missed the thing in the pause menu where you can go to a certain "Animus Island." A guy from Kotaku went there and got the controller physically taken out of his hands by a Ubisoft employee.

That's probably the Animus black room where Desmond is recovering. Sort of like how in ACB you could choose to exit the Animus and explore Monterrigioni? Plus, from the clips we've seen of Desmond's new mental home, it does sort of look like an island populated by the Monolith from 2001.

 

[Warforger]

Sounds more standard AC stuff, more laughable "secret" society wars, ok plot, very un-assasiny gameplay of fighting mobs of soldiers etc etc

Regardless it sounds fun.

You're more laughable than Assassin's Creed's story, I garuntee it.

I didn't say the story was laughable, just how not secretively the "secret" societies operate in the universe is laughable. But of course it's fun so it doesn't matter.

Assassin is just a name for an ideology. How they accomplish it is up to them. And by that, I mean mostly up to the player.

Erm, according to their history they aren't an ideology, just a group of people from Syria who used Assassination techniques like the assassin parts in the game to keep their kingdom alive. Taking on whole armies is completely missing the point of that entirely and I really doubt that would fit in to a "secret" society where hundreds of men have been seen and killed, the amount of manpower and surveillance needed to keep like say any ol' guy who saw him kill whole armies from writing about it and the amount of trust you put into the people, rather laughable how everyone and their grandma doesn't know about them.

A good example are the Free Masons, some guy in the 1830's in America was about to tell all their secrets and then disappeared, what did some people do? They formed a political party called the Anti-Masons.

 

[Metalrocks]

looking forward to it. but i have a feeling that the PC version will be postponed again to february next year as the other titles did.

 

[Landis963]

You missed the thing in the pause menu where you can go to a certain "Animus Island." A guy from Kotaku went there and got the controller physically taken out of his hands by a Ubisoft employee.

That's probably the Animus black room where Desmond is recovering. Sort of like how in ACB you could choose to exit the Animus and explore Monterrigioni? Plus, from the clips we've seen of Desmond's new mental home, it does sort of look like an island populated by the Monolith from 2001.

Well yeah, but the fact that it was hidden so quickly makes me feel that there are some story details for Desmond tucked away in there. Besides, if it's a Monterrigioni-in-ACB type place, then why didn't they a) tweak it so that there will be no way to glean any spoilers beyond the original Desmond trailer (i.e. show the twisty field populated with dolmen-portals and 2001 monoliths, maybe the free-run portion leading to the demoed mission), but make all the spoilery details impossible to get to by way of time limit or super drowning skills, or b) just not have it in the pause menu? It doesn't seem like something too hard to disguise, heck, just make it invisible and call it a day, or mark it "end demo now" or something.

 

[Broken Blade]

You missed the thing in the pause menu where you can go to a certain "Animus Island." A guy from Kotaku went there and got the controller physically taken out of his hands by a Ubisoft employee.

That's probably the Animus black room where Desmond is recovering. Sort of like how in ACB you could choose to exit the Animus and explore Monterrigioni? Plus, from the clips we've seen of Desmond's new mental home, it does sort of look like an island populated by the Monolith from 2001.

Well yeah, but the fact that it was hidden so quickly makes me feel that there are some story details for Desmond tucked away in there. Besides, if it's a Monterrigioni-in-ACB type place, then why didn't they a) tweak it so that there will be no way to glean any spoilers beyond the original Desmond trailer (i.e. show the twisty field populated with dolmen-portals and 2001 monoliths, maybe the free-run portion leading to the demoed mission), but make all the spoilery details impossible to get to by way of time limit or super drowning skills, or b) just not have it in the pause menu? It doesn't seem like something too hard to disguise, heck, just make it invisible and call it a day, or mark it "end demo now" or something.

Maybe the build was either a near-finished one or they didn't have time to hide those sort of features before the demo went up?

 

[Calvar Draveir]

Sounds more standard AC stuff, more laughable "secret" society wars, ok plot, very un-assasiny gameplay of fighting mobs of soldiers etc etc

Regardless it sounds fun.

You're more laughable than Assassin's Creed's story, I garuntee it.

I didn't say the story was laughable, just how not secretively the "secret" societies operate in the universe is laughable. But of course it's fun so it doesn't matter.

Assassin is just a name for an ideology. How they accomplish it is up to them. And by that, I mean mostly up to the player.

Erm, according to their history they aren't an ideology, just a group of people from Syria who used Assassination techniques like the assassin parts in the game to keep their kingdom alive. Taking on whole armies is completely missing the point of that entirely and I really doubt that would fit in to a "secret" society where hundreds of men have been seen and killed, the amount of manpower and surveillance needed to keep like say any ol' guy who saw him kill whole armies from writing about it and the amount of trust you put into the people, rather laughable how everyone and their grandma doesn't know about them.

A good example are the Free Masons, some guy in the 1830's in America was about to tell all their secrets and then disappeared, what did some people do? They formed a political party called the Anti-Masons.

It's not that no-one noticed a killing a whole bunch of people, it's that no-one knew who that dude was affiliated with, and if they did, both the Templars and Assassins have dedicated their entire lives to destroying evidence of such stuff. and the reason that it is so complete is that by Modern Times, Abstergo controls literally all the more important and powerful organizations in the entire world.

Ezio didn't ever fight huge armies by himself. He usually fought about 10-15 guards. And a fight that big causes cvillians to run away, they don't give a crap about staying to find out who they're fighting. Assassins work within the people to gain contacts and keep them quiet about their work.

And when you were referring to the assassins being from Syria, that's the real life story. In the game, Assassins and Templars have existed long before that. They are not assassins in the literal form, they don't kill for money. They kill whoever they think is going to opress free will, and they work to uplift the people.

The reason I said that they can do this in any form is because they don't say "WE ARE ASSASSINS" whenever they show up. To any onlookers, they are hooded men and women striking swiftly and dissapearing. Such modes of dress were common then, and are common now. How are people going to instantly know that they're part of an ideal? They could be crazy people, for all they know.

Templars try not to give the impression that they are a big organization, just a few crazies. It's really not that implausible at all that this could have happened.

You seem to think it's ridiculous because you trust that historians somewhere would find correspondences mentioning them and bring them to light.

What if all the historians are closely monitored by a worldwide organization with near unlimited resources?

You ARE overthinking it, but you're overthinking in the wrong direction. For every reason that it's unlikely, there is another that it is.

EDIT:

It doesn't really matter, but I'm just saying, History is not definate. It passes through so much, so many people could have altered it.

And the Assassins and Templars don't ever actually declare themselves, and use a lot of proxies like mercenaries and the Church.

 

[The Dutchess]

"Templar enemies come from either end of the street and Ezio's job is to place crossbowmen and riflemen on the rooftops and barricades down in the streets to keep the enemies from reaching the door of the headquarters."

"It's essentially a fancy version of tower defense, but it works so well with the context of the game, that I found myself wanting to play it again and again."

"Ezio essentially has to scour each group of partygoers, find the ones who are up to no good, and then use his lute-playing skills to distract the other guests long enough for his friends to step in and take out the killers."

Ok, I love Assassin's Creed. I can't wait for Revelations and this all sounds awesome but did no one else start to think he was trolling a little when he mentioned the lute playing? I guess Ezio's a little older, a little wiser ... and a little better at playing the lute.

 

[Varewulf]

I still think it's a shame they abandoned their concept of introducing new main characters in new time periods. Will still get this though. The gameplay has always been the main draw for me. I can faff about for hours.

 

[Scrustle]

Cool preview. I'll be getting the game but I don't think I'll get it on release. I'll wait a short while like I did with Brotherhood, managed to snap up a good deal. The lute playing bit sounds like fun! We get to see Ezio's skills outside of killing.

 

[putowtin]

five weeks!
it too long!
need this game now!

 

[SnipErlite]

I get to play a lute?

I'M SOLD

Well I really want this game anyways, but still - I get to play a lute. Does this mean we can follow those bards around and piss them off this time?

 

[Broken Blade]

I still think it's a shame they abandoned their concept of introducing new main characters in new time periods. Will still get this though. The gameplay has always been the main draw for me. I can faff about for hours.

I think they've said that they introduce new characters with numbered parts of the franchise. So, AC1 focuses on Altaïr, AC2 focuses on Ezio, ACB and ACR are not numbered so they're still focusing on Ezio, a lot of the mobile games focus on either Altaïr or Ezio, and then finally AC3 will have a new protagonist. The "plot" of ACR involves Desmond learning everything that Altaïr and Ezio can teach him, so that he can finally disentangle his mind from their memories, so they really do seem to be closing off Altaïr and Ezio more or less for good so we can move into the finale of the trilogy. Add in that that short movie Assassin's Creed: Embers which is set in the final weeks/months of Ezio's life, and this game really does have a sense of "You will never see Ezio in these games again." And at this point all we know about the third game is that they'd like to focus on a historical era video games rarely touch on.

Well I really want this game anyways, but still - I get to play a lute. Does this mean we can follow those bards around and piss them off this time?

"Here I am, the anointed one! The shadows are MY dwelling?"

I guess that would make Ezio a Musical Assassin? (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalAssassin)
And so long as it doesn't turn into Ezio waling on a lute as a Guitar Hero-esque minigame, this should be fun.