Assassin's Creed Needs to be Interesting, not Trendy

Yahtzee Croshaw

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Assassin's Creed Needs to be Interesting, not Trendy

Let's strip Assassin's Creed back down to nice straightforward stealth-climbing-stabbing.

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Necron_warrior

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Mar 30, 2011
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I feel the integration of history into the Mai characters plot of AC3 might be in part to the setting being far too 'new', in that so much of current American society is built on staying directly true to what happened then, like if they didn't include the main character their American fans might get annoyed at thinking its not 'a majorly important event'.

I dunno. Definitely would have been more interesting to have the world change around the character in the macro (albeit the character can change their world in the micro)
 

CyanCat47_v1legacy

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The 1700s in norway were not uneventful. there were major wars with sweeden. although a good way to troll the player would be to send them on a mission to kill Karl XII whoose death remains a mystery to this day as nobody knows how he died mid battle and wether a norwegian shot him or his own men. then when the player is sneaking up he is shot from an unknown angle and the perpetrator is never identified
 

The Bucket

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CyanCat47 said:
The 1700s in norway were not uneventful. there were major wars with sweeden. although a good way to troll the player would be to send them on a mission to kill Karl XII whoose death remains a mystery to this day as nobody knows how he died mid battle and wether a norwegian shot him or his own men. then when the player is sneaking up he is shot from an unknown angle and the perpetrator is never identified
I dont think his point was so much that nothing happened in that period, than that there aren't really any well known individuals or events known across the world that the game would be tempted to distract itself by shoving in for no other reason than historical fanservice
 

Aiddon_v1legacy

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Another thing people forget about Cleopatra is that she wasn't ethnically Egyptian, she was descended from Hellenistic invaders meaning she was more Greek than anything.

As for AC, I'm fine with exploring various historical settings and meeting interesting characters from history, but restraint is key, especially since you could use it to check out some eras and conflicts not everybody knows about. I do wonder if Ubisoft will eventually crack and release a Japan entry, but the second they did that the Japanese history geeks would tear them to shreds if they couldn't tell Date Masamune from Uesugi Kenshin.
 

Thyunda

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The Bucket said:
CyanCat47 said:
The 1700s in norway were not uneventful. there were major wars with sweeden. although a good way to troll the player would be to send them on a mission to kill Karl XII whoose death remains a mystery to this day as nobody knows how he died mid battle and wether a norwegian shot him or his own men. then when the player is sneaking up he is shot from an unknown angle and the perpetrator is never identified
I dont think his point was so much that nothing happened in that period, than that there aren't really any well known individuals or events known across the world that the game would be tempted to distract itself by shoving in for no other reason than historical fanservice
Yeah - exactly. I would rather play 18th century Norway than the American Revolution because then I can actually learn something.

Maybe they should set one in Bruges, in the 15th century. They'd even be able to justify their need for random property management.
 

maninahat

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The bigger problem isn't the icon cleaning, bloated feature creep. That's just a symptom of the bigger problem, which is that developers feel the need to make every Assassin's Creed a massive open world game. By creating something that big, you have to keep making up reasons for players to traverse it. The first AC game didn't offer very many reasons, and people complained about it being boring and repetitive. So subsequent games stuff in as much content as possible in the hopes of providing variety. But that too is boring, repetitive variety, with copy-pasted tasks. Every game these days feels like it has to be open world, and yet no game has really satisfactorily explained why.

Remember how Arkham Asylum and Dishonored are semi-open world games in comparatively small maps? And how each section of the map is visually distinct and has its own forms of interactions? That's the kind of game Assassin's Creed needs to try being for once. You get to have all the fun of exploring a city with lots of neat vertical design, but you don't have to wander for miles over the same terrain.

You could set an entire AC game around one major intersection in a city, like around the 5 Points in Manhattan, mid 19th Century. It's an interesting setting because the junction was in the process of transforming from a middle-class hub to a bunch of slums sinking into the ground. Rich looking residential zones transition into collapsing hovels. Pleasure gardens transitioning into quaysides. You have churches and prisons. That's a lot of variety and detail in a tiny location. That physical variety can inspire lots of interesting side missions that are specific to each locale, rather than just a "save the slaves" "collect the transcripts" crap.
 

Robyrt

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Ancient Egypt circa 1250 BC actually has a lot of potential. With enough creative use of different date schemes, you can fit the Trojan War, Moses, and King Tut into the same game.
 

Neurotic Void Melody

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What the hell is "witcher-like" supposed to mean? Which witcher? Witcher 3-like? Witcher 2-like? Witcher novel-like? Do we get magic fireballs to launch from our palms? Possibilty of NPC sex scenes alongside a card game? Ubi and their dubious PR skills at their finest yet again.
 

Thanatos2k

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Assassin's Creed went down the gutter when the game stopped being about assassinations and went to being your character being Forrest Gump to history.

It's why I like AC1 the best. The game was about you researching, then executing an assassnation. Then you explored. Then you did it again. None of the innumerable sidequest garbage they've stuff in since. Collecting the random flags in AC1 didn't even do anything.
 

K12

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I'm going to put my money down now and say that, if the next AssCreed is set in ancient Egypt, the two sides of the conflict will still be called "Assassins" and "Templars" even though the setting predates both of those terms.

Robyrt said:
Ancient Egypt circa 1250 BC actually has a lot of potential. With enough creative use of different date schemes, you can fit the Trojan War, Moses, and King Tut into the same game.
I think the main point of this article is that asbsolutely every historical setting has "potential" and the issues with Assassin's Creed as a series won't be solved by the time period in which it is set... I like the idea of Ancient Egypt too btw but after Revelations I decided to not buy another AssCreed unless it's especially good and different (so only AC4 since then)
 

The Bucket

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Thanatos2k said:
Collecting the random flags in AC1 didn't even do anything.
Does it do anything now? I've never met anyone dedicated enough to collect all of the stupid things
 

Ruisu

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Jul 11, 2013
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The Bucket said:
Thanatos2k said:
Collecting the random flags in AC1 didn't even do anything.
Does it do anything now? I've never met anyone dedicated enough to collect all of the stupid things
Probably just some achievement/trophie, I think they meant the flags to be some kind of incentive to exploration mostly.
 

Yeshe

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Mar 1, 2011
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Re: AC and feature creep. How aboot just putting fully elaborated ones in? As in, things that actually _do_ something?

I really loved Black Flag for the seafaring, it was/felt necessary. In Rogue it seafaring was dialed way down again, why?
In BF the base building was existent, kind of, but not engaging. It didn't do much for progression, once I was able to afford things at the base I didn't really need it anymore. Or it was simply cosmetics for draining funds, hated that.

Choose one or two gameplay modes besides sneaky/stabby/jumpy and make them integral to the story and progression.
If there's worry about discouraging players with certain tastes or distastes, give each gameplay it's own difficulty setting.
I for instance would have sneaky/stabby on normal, seafaring on hard and armada management on autoplay.
 

Adam Jensen_v1legacy

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Black Flag largely managed to avoid the problems of its predecessor. In part because people aren't as familiar with pirate history as they are with the American revolution. But that's not the most important reason. I remember reading that AC3 had a lot of production problems. Several teams that worked on the game were basically uncoordinated, so the entire game ended up the way it did. It's a mess. The story is a collection of disjointed ideas like there was only one draft of the script, and gameplay was remarkably unrefined and filled with half-assed ideas that were poorly implemented instead of being scrapped. You can actually see what they were going for but couldn't deliver. But Black Flag was incredible. I enjoyed the story, and I would have enjoyed it more if Ubisoft wasn't married to the idea of present day narrative, and gameplay, though simplistic like all AC games, still managed to be fun more often than not.
 

ExileNZ

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Robyrt said:
Ancient Egypt circa 1250 BC actually has a lot of potential. With enough creative use of different date schemes, you can fit the Trojan War, Moses, and King Tut into the same game.
Watch as Ubisoft tries to shoehorn the Assassin-du-jour into pivotal roles in all three...

Aside from that though, it's a bit rich of Yahtzee to criticise them starting with the time period - it was one of the first things he jumped on when AC3 was set in Revolutionary America instead of Revolutionary France.
I can see his point though - focusing *too much* on the time period would be a bad thing.