What is so great about Assassins creed games?

[sageoftruth]

I feel they do some pretty cool things, that not many other games, if any, do.

The settings. You see so few games that take place during the American Revolution, or in New Orleans and Istanbul.

The Free Running. While not very responsive, the animations and generally mobility around the maps, still impress me to this day. It's just something not seen in many open world games.

I mean that's mostly it. The games cover some pretty cool settings and systems that few others do. Combats been pretty stale since 2 (though it looks like a lot of people already felt it was in 1) The naval battle were a nice change of pace though. The majority of extra stuff around the map is both pointless, and just not that fun, though I do like when you get to go on treasure hunts, or have to figure out your way through some ancient ruins. (and I'm more than glad the stuffs there. I have no interest in collecting feathers, but I appreciate that it's a simple addition that others may like.)

And while I really like the whole Templar/Assassin's war, because both sides are trying to do the rights thing, they just have completely opposite ideals of how to achieve it, but the characters just aren't all that. I love the design of Aveline and Altair. But Altair is the only character with a real arc. They gaze Ezio 3 games and he didn't change as much as Altair did in the first five hours of the first one. And I'm not going to even mention Desmond... (beyond that mention.)

I've had to force my self to finish the last few. But for at least the first two thirds the games always hook me. But after twenty hours they have a hard time keeping my attention.

So while there are definately great things about the games, and the graphics are, kind of insane, really, I don't think I would actually consider any of them great. They do fill a niche I like though, that other games just don't, and it seems they will continue to do so, for a while at least.

That's a good point. I don't like the Assassin's Creed franchise, but Shadow of Morodor borrowed heavily from it, and the Batman Arkham games used a better version of the combat system. In the end, while I don't enjoy the game itself, it likely served as a necessary building block for many games that I like a lot more.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

AssCreed games are great for Ubisoft because they can remake the same game using the same formula, a lot of the same assets, same engine, same 30fps limit, same everything but increment the number on the cover by one and (re)sell it at full price.

 

[sageoftruth]

I just think they're fun. I enjoy running around, climbing on things, and dramatically killing half a dozen baddies one right after the other. Some are better than the others (2, Brotherhood, Black Flag), but in general they've been consistently entertaining. I'm very much looking forward to Rogue and Unity.

OP, it seems to me like you're overly hung up on challenge. Clearly these are not the games for you. Perhaps you would prefer Dark Souls, or a roguelike such as FTL?

I'm getting the impression he's more of a Devil May Cry/Ninja Gaiden player. After his last article on Doom, I think Dark Souls would be too slow-paced for him.

 

[L. Declis]

Sigh.

Why do people constantly expect everyone to defend their choices in video games? Isn't it enough that we enjoy them?

Okay, I put my hand up. Yearly Assassin's Creeds are something I look forward to and like. I am their market. Yay me.

Firstly, they always release on my birthday (usually on the day) so that's nice, but not much to do with the game.

So, it's a stealth game, but not the Sam Fisher "Gonna make you do this twenty times because you blink too loudly" kind of stealth game, but the "oh bullocks, they found me, better pull out my sword and be kickass" kind of stealth. You may notice Mr. Boss as my avatar. As you can see, I like this kind of stealth. Where you can be stealthy, but doesn't expect you to spend hours waiting for a guard to pass or piss or whatever so you can get on with it. Assassin's Creed can be nicely paced and you can get shit done in a single session.

2) The setting. Walking around Venice, Flourence, America, Constantinople and so on is fun. I enjoy it. It's interesting and different and colourful, unlike so many Gears-esque grey-brown marathons. You're not often on rails, so if I want to, I can climb to the tallest thing on the map and look around. Or, as I usually do, I can look down from the roof on my target and feel like Batman's ancestor. Next up we are an ex-Assassin in some artic place, and a group of French Revolutionaries. Well, that sounds fun. Guess I'll buy those.

3) Story. Yes, I like the stories. I like Ezio, Altair is a bit flat but he grew on me, and Kenway is 5 kinds of awesome with a sweet ending. Connor and Desmond... well, when you release so many games, you're gonna make mistakes. But if they've released 1, 2, 2.2, 2.3, 3 and 4, and they've messed up 1 of them, that's an 80% hit rate. That's better than Total War does. And even I can admit that Ass Creed 3 just needed to be a little more focused, and have a better protagonist, and it would have been a lot better. Nothing could save Desmond though.

4) Gameplay. The gameplay isn't about intricate fighter-esque combos; it's more fast-flowing than that. Originally, it was a game of "Wait for the counter" but now you have sneak attacks, a knife, a sword/axe/club/mace, guns, smoke bombs, jumping from above, ambushing from behind, poisoning them, using your allies to help ambush them, sniping them and so on, all the way down to "Sneak past them". Your combat is as fun and different as you're able to think of at the moment.

Finally, people just enjoy the games they enjoy. You don't like Ass Creed? You want hardcore stealth? Go play Splinter Cell, Thief, Styx or whatever else scratches that itch. For me, Ass Creed scratches my "Oh god, that was fun and it didn't take me 50 hours to finish" itch.

 

[IceForce]

Aren't you the same person who's always championing how great Doom/Quake/etc are? This is a bit ironic.

Oh right. It's that guy. I forgot about him. I mean, I'm no fan of Assassin's Creed either, but after that last thread, I'm feeling a bit wary this time.

Anyway, how do you get 100% sync? Is that something they introduced after AC2?

Yeah, it's something that was introduced in AC:BH (the game after 2)

In AC2, all you had to do was complete each objective and each mission, and you'd automatically build up maximum sync as you went through the game.

In AC:BH, they changed this. Now most missions have extra, challenging (and annoying) optional objectives, or objectives that have to be completed a certain way, in order to get 100% sync.
Fail that, even if you complete the mission perfectly fine, you still only get 50% sync.

 

[Arch Demon]

I think "Assassins Creed" , starting with the first game became exteremly popular primarily because of it's uniqueness. At that time, there was hardly any game/character like that. It was like one of a kind. But in the end, I guess it boils down to personal taste. I have read some reviews of the first game on a popular website. Many have loved the game and many hated it. And both sides had valid reasons. Me? Well, when I started playing it, I liked it immensely but sadly the repetition simply killed it for me.I just felt that I was doing the same thing, a million times. In fact I discontinued the game twice, because the repetition was too irritating to continue. The game now just lies on my shelf, collecting dust. I doubt if I'll ever finish it (as I have a LOT other games to play). And before even starting to play AC1, I had bought AC2..Guess that's another game that I'll never play

 

[Flammablezeus]

The first one (whilst dated in a number of ways) had a very promising system where you could gather intelligence on each target and then plan your attack with it. You could interrogate people, pickpocket them and eavesdrop (and maybe one or two other things I'm forgetting) to gather different pieces of information, such as maps of guard layouts and other things.

However, this was pulled in sequels because most people ignored it (some didn't even know you actually gained bits of information after doing these activities) and simply ran towards the marker on the minimap. Because of this, the sequels focused on having more icons to get to on the map, because that was how people played it. In AC3, they dropped the finer controls of free running so that people didn't have to think at all and could simply hold a direction and a single button to get to their map icons.

It's sad that the game had so much promise, but now we have Shadow of Mordor anyway, which is basically closer to what AC was aiming at. Hopefully in the next Middle-Earth game, they incorporate more things from the first AC (variety in interrogation, and actually splitting up pieces of intelligence instead of learning everything about your target from a single random orc.)

What did they drop in movement controls in Assassin's Creed 3? Besides ditching the hookblade, which was kind of pointless anyway, it seemed to be the same AC movement controls as always.

And people ignored the information gathering system in Assassins Creed 1 because it was boring and pointless. It didn't have to be! Unfortunately they only had about three or four information gathering mini-games total, and that gets really old stretched out over a 12 hour game. It didn't help that most of the information could, at best, be classified as "helpful, but not important" and at worst, "ancillary and irrelevant". If the information wasn't vital to me getting the job done, I wasn't going to waste my time doing those things I'd already gotten bored of four hours ago.

So maybe, maybe, they weren't just dumbing it down for the unwashed masses, hmm?

They also got rid of the climbing/jumping/sprinting button and mixed it in with the high profile button. So now when you're running along you'll suddenly jump onto a wall even though you didn't want to, or leap off a building when you just wanted to drop down. It also means they completely dropped a running speed, giving you less freedom in how fast you wanted to run. Also, the hookblade actually made climbing faster if you managed to tap the jump button at the right time when climbing.

Well keep in mind it was the first game. They could have improved upon it rather than giving up and getting rid of the intelligence-gathering altogether. Plus, some people like to actually do things differently. Sure, you could just run up and assassinate each target the same way every time and simply fight your way out, but that was never as fun as actually using the information and tackling each assassination in their own ways.

 

[small]

i played a little of the first game and the controls irritated me no end. i picked up and played the 4th game , enjoyed it for the most part until i reached the point of looking at the main character kenway and thinking "you are a giant, obnoxious twat" and never went back.

the modern day stuff and the constant "this is a memory" stuff shoved in your face is very jarring to say the least.

personally the would of been better dropping the whole assassins creed stuff for 4 and just making a new pirate IP

 

[mmiki]

So my friends, I have played AC2, 3, 4 and found all of them overrated mediocre. first off they are bunch of casual non games with no failing mehcanics requires. i mean they are very very easy and no challenge require. entire game feel like tutorial. story are always mediocre, so is gameplay. combat is very basic and platforming/climbing is just simply one button.

I really liked the ones with Ezio but I gave up on the franchise after that.

Why do I like it? Because you get to be a damn ninja, or a Western variation of it anyway. No, the combat isn't particularly hard, but it looks really cool. There's also free-running around stunningly well-done environments, which isn't really hard to do which makes it double awesome. You may use the relatively low difficulty of the game as something to bash it with, but I say it's one of its strong points. It means that you can grab a keyboard/controller and within an hour be able to go around doing cool stuff - there isn't a difficulty curve between firing up the game and being awesome. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of old-school roguelikes so I can appreciate banging your head into a wall for hours, but not every game has to be like that.

The story isn't the pinnacle of storytelling but it didn't have me rolling my eyes (until later in the franchise).
The part where you find bits in the environment that transports you into a puzzle that explains the history of Abstergo, that was creepy as hell and brilliant. The open world and side missions and collectibles give you plenty of stuff to do, and even if it is often basically the same stuff that was done since, I dunno, GTA 3, it seems that it works quite well, because it uses our desire to collect stuff and complete the game as something to drive exploration, and there's no use building an open world sort of game if you don't want to encourage the player to explore.

On a final note I have to say, calling a game you don't like a non-game simply because you don't like it makes you sound like you just couldn't think of anything better. If you want to go with a definition of a game that includes "must have a fail state", then AC qualifies, because it does have one. Calling it a "casual non-game" is a low effort, grade school level insult.

 

[CannibalCorpses]

So my friends, I have played AC2, 3, 4 and found all of them overrated mediocre. first off they are bunch of casual non games with no failing mehcanics requires. i mean they are very very easy and no challenge require. entire game feel like tutorial. story are always mediocre, so is gameplay. combat is very basic and platforming/climbing is just simply one button.

Assassins creed 4 is only decent one. has best of story and protagonist (edward kenway is atleast badass unlike ezio). and has naval battle that bring some challenge

I saw AC unity and still looks same old boring. they release franchise every year like COD, madden etc.

so my friends, what do u see in AC games that make it great?
discuss

I couldn't agree more with you, they are about as easy as a game can get. They do churn out the same crap every year and the story is particularly poor to boot...but unlike Call of Duty and the sports games, it lacks any real difficulty. People like to cry about the damage done by the success of CoD but Assassins Creed is far worse. The first game was my favourite and nothing since has intrigued me. The story went from baffling to bullshit, the combat went from fairly easy to forgone conclusion...they diluted everything that made the first interesting and then made it into a cash cow for the dumb, low skilled masses that now saturate the market. On the plus side though the animations are pretty good and the graphics aren't too shabby...shame those are the part of the game that matter when i'm playing.

Press x to win the game, yippee...look at my skillz!?!?!?!

 

[sageoftruth]

So my friends, I have played AC2, 3, 4 and found all of them overrated mediocre. first off they are bunch of casual non games with no failing mehcanics requires. i mean they are very very easy and no challenge require. entire game feel like tutorial. story are always mediocre, so is gameplay. combat is very basic and platforming/climbing is just simply one button.

I really liked the ones with Ezio but I gave up on the franchise after that.

y fine, you still only get 50% sync.

What kind of challenges are presented? Not being seen? Completing them in a certain amount of time? Is it like the bonus challenges of Shadow of Morodor, where you have to defeat a certain number of enemies using a particular stealth kill? Just curious.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

AssCreed games are great for Ubisoft because they can remake the same game using the same formula, a lot of the same assets, same engine, same 30fps limit, same everything but increment the number on the cover by one and (re)sell it at full price.

AC2 and AC4 shook the formular considerably, they're anything but repeats of prior entries.