So, as the title may suggest, I've just finished Assassin's Creed 3, and I thought it was impossibly overrated. This isn't a rant thread or anything - I really just want to see how other people responded to the issues that I have with the game. I am entirely open to the fact that maybe the game just didn't click with me, so I want to get some other opinions on some of these facets of the game.
I will do my best to leave it spoiler free, but there may be light gameplay spoilers ahead. Be warned. Let's begin.
Pacing
For most of the time I was playing, I was intensely aware of the fact that I was playing a tutorial. It's a big game with a lot of different elements knocking about, but the tutorial 'section' goes on for about five hours. It was so slow to open up that when it did, I didn't realise, and just kept going through the story missions. The free-roam aspect was left so late and wasn't ever revealed to actually have a point, so I didn't really realise what I could be doing in the Frontier until very late in the game.
This is a gripe I've noticed a lot of people having so I'll keep this section short.
A linear campaign that forgets what made the series great
One thing I really enjoyed about Assassin's Creed 2 was that it managed to keep a great variety of mission objectives and secondary missions while keeping the core of the game -- assassination missions that offer up creative choice in how you approach them -- intact.
Assassin's Creed 3 has an even wider range of things to do, and a lot of it is entertaining, such as the
However, a LOT of the mechanics featured in the main story were absurdly repetitive and dull, and there was an unbelievable lack of what made the series so great; open areas that required thought to approach and daring escapes once you've eliminated your target. Instead, we're treated to dull and glitchy chase scene after chase scene, spending hours running to and fro just because the story tells us to. These missions were so impossibly linear that it genuinely felt to me that Assassin's Creed 3 was an on-rails game where occasionally the rails fell off. If you do ANYTHING that the game doesn't want you to, show any semblance of forward-thinking, then the game tells you you failed and restarts the mission. Making a game that's about free-roaming and creativity this linear makes the moments where you DO have free reign just feel at odds with the rest of the main campaign.
Unfortunately, from what I can remember there were only about three missions in the game that embodied what Assassin's Creed was, for me - intense and creative stealth-action gameplay. Don't expect to just be able to assassinate your targets, either; I was told to 'chase' one of the main story targets and when I just whipped out my pistol and shot him instead, I failed the mission. So, I did what the game asked me to and chased him, only to murder him in a cutscene. Irritating.
Free running is pointless.
Parkour was one of the main things that made Assassin's Creed so interesting and so unique. You had complete freedom in where you wanted to go in these beautifully-crafted cities, and tumbling and swan-diving around them was an absolute blast. I was really looking forward to it in AC3 but honestly, I never found myself using it.
You're given an ability to whistle for a horse very early in the game, in a city or in the frontier. The areas are so big that using free-running to get around is ultimately just redundant - the enjoyment I may have had from hurtling across the rooftops of colonial America was completely negated by the fact that the cities take a very, very long time to traverse and there is an immense amount of inane travelling to do, so either you're going to use the new Fast Travel system (yay, fast travel..) or you're going to spend the whole game with your fat ass on a horse.
The only time I had memorable moments with free-running were genuinely when the game told me to do it for a plot mission. None of the very, very few missions that allowed me freedom in my approach encouraged any kind of free-running to the point where ultimately I just forgot about it. The best part of the game was just thrown to the wayside. Sad. Which brings me to...
'Optimal strategy' issues.
In gaming you are naturally drawn to the easiest and most effective route through any level. As shown above, the optimal method of travel is horse-riding and fast-travel, which is so, so much more effective than running that it almost completely negates the presence of optional free-running and exploring in the game, which was one of my absolute favourite parts of the series.
Similarly, in previous games you had a health bar that had to be restored by herbs. The health bar was lengthy and combat was still rather easy, so you felt no massive threat when you were discovered, but you were still punished by having your health bar cut down until you were forced to use a herb to heal. This encouraged more careful gameplay, to an extent - it was still way too easy to bull through everything - but you did feel punished when you ran out of herbs and your health was dwindling.
In AC3, you now have a recharging health bar. Why, I have no idea, but there you have it. This essentially means that as long as you don't actually die - which is next to bloody impossible with combat this easy - then you won't be punished at all. Furthermore, due to the time era, near enough every enemy is armed with a gun. These two things combine to have a pretty interesting effect on gameplay.
First, since you have rebounding health, you are under no obligation to try to avoid combat; just kill everyone and let your health magically restore. Secondly, since every enemy has a ranged attack, running away or climbing a rooftop to escape (something that was very enjoyable in previous games) is suddenly an awful idea. I tried to flee from combat several times in the game, not even out of self-preservation, but out of the fact that I enjoyed the chase. Every time I was killed by a barrage of gunfire, which, if I just ran at them and stabbed them in the face with very little effort, wouldn't have been a problem. You can't climb buildings quickly enough to escape the magical semi-automatic rifles these men seem to have when you're not looking at them, and it just gets frustrating, so you just turn and kill them all. Not enjoyable.
Secondly, the combination of free-running being neglected and escape being a frustrating and pointless option meant that I was just bulling my way through most of the missions. In the rare moments where stealth was encouraged but not mandatory, I would try to sneak through on my first try and inevitably get seen. I'd kill every single person in the area and then consider restarting from the checkpoint but then wonder what the point would be. I'd finished the objective, and I wasn't punished in any way for just fighting the enemies, and nor would I have been rewarded by using a creative and sneaky route. Ultimately, I just ended bulling my way through most situations simply because the alternative took far too long in an already ridiculously lengthy game.
Pointless side missions and other mechanics.
Now, don't get me wrong. I REALLY enjoyed the hunting and naval mission mechanics in this game. I think they were well-thought out and very well-crafted. Also, as a huge fan of games like Dark Cloud, the Homestead development missions were great.
However, after the initial enjoyment of these little side mechanics, I rarely went back to them. Why? Because they have no point to them at all.
Early in the game you're taught to hunt. 'Cool', I thought. 'Red Dead Redemption made hunting an interesting and rewarding part of the game, and I hope AC3 can follow that example.'
I was later told what hunting is mostly used for - crafting on the homestead. Again, 'pretty cool, I like deeper metagame elements like crafting in games like this.'
A little later in the game and I had completely stopped hunting and crafting. Why? Because all you get from it is money. This'd be fine, if money were at all useful in this game, but I spent most of the game with £0 and still nothing posed a challenge in the slightest.
You can spend money on consumables like arrows and bullets, but why bother when you can just murder guards and steal their guns and loot their bodies for easy ammunition?
You can buy new weapons to increase your combat effectiveness, but why bother? You can literally get through every fight in the game with your fists without so much as losing half your health, as long as you make sure to just run at everyone you find and beat the crap out of them. Remember, running is for fools!
You can upgrade your ship, but the costs are so high and the effects so utterly negligible - and again, you don't need it, even the ship combat is pretty easy - that there is absolutely no point in putting in the effort and time needed to garner enough cash to do it.
It's a shame that so much of the game is rendered completely pointless and given no draw whatsoever simply because Ubisoft can't be bothered to give their game a semblance of challenge.
This all said, the naval missions were fantastic. However - there is a main mission string that's about 5 missions long. It was very enjoyable, but a bit short, and also, utterly pointless. You go through a short story sequence that has no impact on the rest of the game, gives no rewards, and ultimately feels painfully inconsequential. The other missions are just to reduce the risk of your trading ships, which get you... yeah, money. So pointless.
It's not all bad.
A lot of it is actually damn good. The visuals are stunning and Ubi have done a super-human job in recreating the atmosphere of Revolutionary America, and the soundtrack is appropriately memorable. Voice acting and characterisation is strong, and while the story is generally overdrawn and loses track of itself, it's still better than the fast majority of schlock we get passed off as a narrative in this industry. The game does show glimmers of greatness and it's not hard to see why it's worthy of good reviews, but I just cannot understand why huge publications are giving it 95's and so on.
For me, it's like someone tried to make an Assassin's Creed game and just left out all of the parts that made the series noteworthy. I'm not saying it should be exactly like previous games and gameplay evolution in sequels is something I am all for. However, AC3 has moved on from the exciting and creative crowd-stealth infiltration gameplay, but not actually replaced it with anything.
Ultimately, AC3 feels like it an Assassin's Creed game sitting around someone else's campaign. It feels far too much like they're trying to do a 'cinematic gameplay' thing like Uncharted but they haven't changed the mechanics of the game to compliment it.
Anyway, I'm more than open to be told that I'm wrong, and why. My intention is not to stop anyone else from playing the game - just to raise questions and get answers from other people. I do hope I'm wrong.
I will do my best to leave it spoiler free, but there may be light gameplay spoilers ahead. Be warned. Let's begin.
Pacing
For most of the time I was playing, I was intensely aware of the fact that I was playing a tutorial. It's a big game with a lot of different elements knocking about, but the tutorial 'section' goes on for about five hours. It was so slow to open up that when it did, I didn't realise, and just kept going through the story missions. The free-roam aspect was left so late and wasn't ever revealed to actually have a point, so I didn't really realise what I could be doing in the Frontier until very late in the game.
This is a gripe I've noticed a lot of people having so I'll keep this section short.
A linear campaign that forgets what made the series great
One thing I really enjoyed about Assassin's Creed 2 was that it managed to keep a great variety of mission objectives and secondary missions while keeping the core of the game -- assassination missions that offer up creative choice in how you approach them -- intact.
Assassin's Creed 3 has an even wider range of things to do, and a lot of it is entertaining, such as the
army command missions where you control cannon fire and squadrons of line infantry.
However, a LOT of the mechanics featured in the main story were absurdly repetitive and dull, and there was an unbelievable lack of what made the series so great; open areas that required thought to approach and daring escapes once you've eliminated your target. Instead, we're treated to dull and glitchy chase scene after chase scene, spending hours running to and fro just because the story tells us to. These missions were so impossibly linear that it genuinely felt to me that Assassin's Creed 3 was an on-rails game where occasionally the rails fell off. If you do ANYTHING that the game doesn't want you to, show any semblance of forward-thinking, then the game tells you you failed and restarts the mission. Making a game that's about free-roaming and creativity this linear makes the moments where you DO have free reign just feel at odds with the rest of the main campaign.
Unfortunately, from what I can remember there were only about three missions in the game that embodied what Assassin's Creed was, for me - intense and creative stealth-action gameplay. Don't expect to just be able to assassinate your targets, either; I was told to 'chase' one of the main story targets and when I just whipped out my pistol and shot him instead, I failed the mission. So, I did what the game asked me to and chased him, only to murder him in a cutscene. Irritating.
Free running is pointless.
Parkour was one of the main things that made Assassin's Creed so interesting and so unique. You had complete freedom in where you wanted to go in these beautifully-crafted cities, and tumbling and swan-diving around them was an absolute blast. I was really looking forward to it in AC3 but honestly, I never found myself using it.
You're given an ability to whistle for a horse very early in the game, in a city or in the frontier. The areas are so big that using free-running to get around is ultimately just redundant - the enjoyment I may have had from hurtling across the rooftops of colonial America was completely negated by the fact that the cities take a very, very long time to traverse and there is an immense amount of inane travelling to do, so either you're going to use the new Fast Travel system (yay, fast travel..) or you're going to spend the whole game with your fat ass on a horse.
The only time I had memorable moments with free-running were genuinely when the game told me to do it for a plot mission. None of the very, very few missions that allowed me freedom in my approach encouraged any kind of free-running to the point where ultimately I just forgot about it. The best part of the game was just thrown to the wayside. Sad. Which brings me to...
'Optimal strategy' issues.
In gaming you are naturally drawn to the easiest and most effective route through any level. As shown above, the optimal method of travel is horse-riding and fast-travel, which is so, so much more effective than running that it almost completely negates the presence of optional free-running and exploring in the game, which was one of my absolute favourite parts of the series.
Similarly, in previous games you had a health bar that had to be restored by herbs. The health bar was lengthy and combat was still rather easy, so you felt no massive threat when you were discovered, but you were still punished by having your health bar cut down until you were forced to use a herb to heal. This encouraged more careful gameplay, to an extent - it was still way too easy to bull through everything - but you did feel punished when you ran out of herbs and your health was dwindling.
In AC3, you now have a recharging health bar. Why, I have no idea, but there you have it. This essentially means that as long as you don't actually die - which is next to bloody impossible with combat this easy - then you won't be punished at all. Furthermore, due to the time era, near enough every enemy is armed with a gun. These two things combine to have a pretty interesting effect on gameplay.
First, since you have rebounding health, you are under no obligation to try to avoid combat; just kill everyone and let your health magically restore. Secondly, since every enemy has a ranged attack, running away or climbing a rooftop to escape (something that was very enjoyable in previous games) is suddenly an awful idea. I tried to flee from combat several times in the game, not even out of self-preservation, but out of the fact that I enjoyed the chase. Every time I was killed by a barrage of gunfire, which, if I just ran at them and stabbed them in the face with very little effort, wouldn't have been a problem. You can't climb buildings quickly enough to escape the magical semi-automatic rifles these men seem to have when you're not looking at them, and it just gets frustrating, so you just turn and kill them all. Not enjoyable.
Secondly, the combination of free-running being neglected and escape being a frustrating and pointless option meant that I was just bulling my way through most of the missions. In the rare moments where stealth was encouraged but not mandatory, I would try to sneak through on my first try and inevitably get seen. I'd kill every single person in the area and then consider restarting from the checkpoint but then wonder what the point would be. I'd finished the objective, and I wasn't punished in any way for just fighting the enemies, and nor would I have been rewarded by using a creative and sneaky route. Ultimately, I just ended bulling my way through most situations simply because the alternative took far too long in an already ridiculously lengthy game.
Pointless side missions and other mechanics.
Now, don't get me wrong. I REALLY enjoyed the hunting and naval mission mechanics in this game. I think they were well-thought out and very well-crafted. Also, as a huge fan of games like Dark Cloud, the Homestead development missions were great.
However, after the initial enjoyment of these little side mechanics, I rarely went back to them. Why? Because they have no point to them at all.
Early in the game you're taught to hunt. 'Cool', I thought. 'Red Dead Redemption made hunting an interesting and rewarding part of the game, and I hope AC3 can follow that example.'
I was later told what hunting is mostly used for - crafting on the homestead. Again, 'pretty cool, I like deeper metagame elements like crafting in games like this.'
A little later in the game and I had completely stopped hunting and crafting. Why? Because all you get from it is money. This'd be fine, if money were at all useful in this game, but I spent most of the game with £0 and still nothing posed a challenge in the slightest.
You can spend money on consumables like arrows and bullets, but why bother when you can just murder guards and steal their guns and loot their bodies for easy ammunition?
You can buy new weapons to increase your combat effectiveness, but why bother? You can literally get through every fight in the game with your fists without so much as losing half your health, as long as you make sure to just run at everyone you find and beat the crap out of them. Remember, running is for fools!
You can upgrade your ship, but the costs are so high and the effects so utterly negligible - and again, you don't need it, even the ship combat is pretty easy - that there is absolutely no point in putting in the effort and time needed to garner enough cash to do it.
It's a shame that so much of the game is rendered completely pointless and given no draw whatsoever simply because Ubisoft can't be bothered to give their game a semblance of challenge.
This all said, the naval missions were fantastic. However - there is a main mission string that's about 5 missions long. It was very enjoyable, but a bit short, and also, utterly pointless. You go through a short story sequence that has no impact on the rest of the game, gives no rewards, and ultimately feels painfully inconsequential. The other missions are just to reduce the risk of your trading ships, which get you... yeah, money. So pointless.
It's not all bad.
A lot of it is actually damn good. The visuals are stunning and Ubi have done a super-human job in recreating the atmosphere of Revolutionary America, and the soundtrack is appropriately memorable. Voice acting and characterisation is strong, and while the story is generally overdrawn and loses track of itself, it's still better than the fast majority of schlock we get passed off as a narrative in this industry. The game does show glimmers of greatness and it's not hard to see why it's worthy of good reviews, but I just cannot understand why huge publications are giving it 95's and so on.
For me, it's like someone tried to make an Assassin's Creed game and just left out all of the parts that made the series noteworthy. I'm not saying it should be exactly like previous games and gameplay evolution in sequels is something I am all for. However, AC3 has moved on from the exciting and creative crowd-stealth infiltration gameplay, but not actually replaced it with anything.
Ultimately, AC3 feels like it an Assassin's Creed game sitting around someone else's campaign. It feels far too much like they're trying to do a 'cinematic gameplay' thing like Uncharted but they haven't changed the mechanics of the game to compliment it.
Anyway, I'm more than open to be told that I'm wrong, and why. My intention is not to stop anyone else from playing the game - just to raise questions and get answers from other people. I do hope I'm wrong.