Zero Punctuation: Assassin's Creed Syndicate

[Canadamus Prime]

You should know by now that corporations have no souls.

 

[Zontar]

You should know by now that corporations have no souls.

B-b-b-but corporations are people, no? I thought they where people just like the rest of us/s

That ending to the video was bloody brilliant though.

 

[Zontar]

I personally don't like Jenner because she killed someone after she crashed into them while driving and she never apologized for it.

One would think just getting away with it without reputation due to being famous would be enough reason to hate someone for that.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

People hated Ashley because of how irritating she was rather then because her A.I. was stupid.

But she had ballistics!

 

[Darth_Payn]

Kaitlyn Jennar can eat her own dick, no, literally. She still has her manly lumps. Oh great, here come the SJWs. *POOF* Smokebomb, Hookshot. Sideburn slap, D'oh!

I never saw the charm in the AC series. I played the third one and most fights were *hold X to deftly dodge enemies and win*. Sneaking is fun and all, but I like more visceral combat than this game could provide. But I might give the series another chance, eventually, who knows?

I personally don't like Jenner because she killed someone after she crashed into them while driving and she never apologized for it.

So that explains that one South Park episode, which was mostly Mr. Garrison acting like Donald Trump.

The female Enemy thing isn't even a new idea since that was in AC rogue but since nobody played that... Shame about the story getting lazier though you think that with the era that had to play with it could have a good story.

If Yahtzee didn't play Rogue, he should give it a try, at the risk of him exploding at Ubisoft for not doing more of that. He might like it for how much like Black Flag it plays like, or dislike it if he's reminded too much of III.

 

[thanatos388]

I remember when the first one came out, I said something like, "I'll buy them as a set when the series is complete." I thought it was going to be a trilogy. Clearly I will never own these games.

Well the Ezio trilogy is its own package, and those are the best games in the whole series. Well, AC2 and Broho are the best ones and Revelations is just ok like every other game after Broho so thats a good sample of the Assassin's Creed experience and you get the whole of Ezio's story, the only character worth a damn in the franchise.

 

[Callate]

Worth remembering that PoP: The Sands of Time came out in 2003, methinks. It did a lot of things really well. And it ran on my old AMD notebook and looked gorgeous.

The big thing, though, was the time mechanic, which was quite a step forward for the time. A game filled with lethal and near-lethal traps that doesn't make you re-do six perfect leaps because you mis-timed the seventh and landed on a buzzsaw? Bless my soul, that was a good idea.

...And, yeah, the combat gets old before it's over (pardon me while I avoid being flanked by vaulting over someone's back for the fifth time in the past thirty seconds), but it still has a certain cinematic flair.

As far as Assassin's Creed goes... Yeah, I should really get around to playing those, shouldn't I? Especially as everyone else seems to have done me the courtesy of expressing where I can stop.

I do rather feel that the "Unity should have had a female protagonist" thing seems quite half-baked in hindsight. If nothing else, the state in which Unity shipped ought to have put to rest the idea that the developers had some massive pool of spare resources with which to forge a new character model in the eleventh hour if they had really cared to. The PR guy made lame excuses, as PR guys are often wont to do; that shouldn't have gotten the whole enterprise burned in effigy.

(That should have been reserved for releasing a game in that sorry-ass state.)

 

[The Heik]

Anyone know the gun he uses @2:50?

 

[Callate]

The dev team spent an entire fucking YEAR designing ONE fucking building in the game(I really wish I was joking), if they could do that, they absolutely could've had a female protagonist, Ubisoft just loves making really shitty excuses.

Yes, if designing a female protagonist had been in their original design document, they could have. No one was suggesting there was some inherent impossibility to making a female skeleton, applying texture and lighting to it, and putting it under player control.

But the furor over the idea that of all the games on the market, Unity specifically should have included a female character model didn't rise until well into the game's development. By that point, there's little indication that they had the ability to create and integrate such a character, even if it would have fit into the context of the way they were doing multiplayer (with each character continuing to play as their own version of the (male) protagonist as they dropped into multipayer games or back out into their own solo sessions.)

Indeed, as I said, the state in which the final game was released suggests that it was overly rushed, not that they had time to indulge in adding late-stage features, no matter how much anyone might have wanted them.

One could argue that they should have incorporated a female character from the beginning. One can also certainly argue that given the lackluster reception of the multiplayer element, it would have been time better spent on other things- including, possibly, different character models and/or a simpler multiplayer like the one in Brotherhood that would have been more conducive to alternate player characters. But those views come from the benefit of hindsight. Virtually no one was waving banners for such things at the time the game was first advertised to the public and a more significant alteration might have been achievable, and an awful lot of the response was a particularly bandwagon-happy and reality-averse kind of self-righteous self-congratulation.

A bad response to an unexpected question prompted a lot of people to make Unity the scapegoat for the industry. As Yahtzee noted, Ubisoft's response, viz. Syndicate, has been pretty predictable- a fairly stock female character in a by-the-numbers storyline in a game that- coincidentally- has jettisoned multiplayer all together. Even if I were inclined to judge the outcry solely on the basis of that outcome, it seems like the sledgehammer result of a sledgehammer approach to an issue that no one was half as interested in solving as they were in yelling about.

 

[MysticSlayer]

People hated Ashley because of how irritating she was rather then because her A.I. was stupid.

Maybe it is just where I happen to go, but I've seen plenty of people criticize RE4 simply because it is one big escort mission. Yeah, Ashley's character gets criticized (I personally didn't mind it that much), but it isn't like that's the only thing people dislike about her.

 

[Lightspeaker]

I remember when the first one came out, I said something like, "I'll buy them as a set when the series is complete." I thought it was going to be a trilogy. Clearly I will never own these games.

Well the Ezio trilogy is its own package, and those are the best games in the whole series. Well, AC2 and Broho are the best ones and Revelations is just ok like every other game after Broho so thats a good sample of the Assassin's Creed experience and you get the whole of Ezio's story, the only character worth a damn in the franchise.

I take umbrage with that. The best character in the series is, by far, Haytham Kenway. Who you play for a short prologue in AC3.

Pity about the rest of that game...


As far as this new one goes...actually I find it rather depressing. If you'd told me back around the time of Brotherhood or even as late as Revelations that there'd be an AC game set in Victorian London I would have pretty much wept with joy. But over the past few years they've sucked long and hard on the blood of Assassin's Creed and now I'm just totally fatigued. I really don't care about this game. At all. And I'm actually seriously upset about the fact that I don't care about this game, because its something I've wanted to see for years.

I just can't bring myself around to it. Revelations was okay but nothing to write home about. AC3 was an absolute abomination. I disliked AC3 so much that I didn't even buy Black Flag until around a year or more after launch after reading constant positive things about it. And I'm still to buy Unity. I might get it at some point, just to play through it, but I really don't know. I'm pretty much just drained of this series now.

 

[Abomination]

Were there really that many women in Victorian London gangs?

Does the British Army also have that near 50:50 gender divide?

 

[C117]

Maybe the gang system would be more useful if the enemies you met were more threatening. In my experience, every single enemy in AC is too polite to attack you when you're preoccupied with another enemy, and will blithely wait for their turn. If they removed that and made enemies actually gang up on you, maybe fights would feel more dangerous, and maybe running to your mates for help would be more tempting.

That's a lot of "maybes'"...

 

[Mangod]

So, because I was curious to see how the series has evolved, I went back and watched all the ZP AssCreed episodes, in order. And... it's really a rather sad development, actually.

Assassin's Creed [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/16-Assassins-Creed].
Assassin's Creed 2 [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1148-Assassins-Creed-2].
Brotherhood [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2519-Assassins-Creed-Brotherhood].
Revelations [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/5114-Assassins-Creed-Revelations].
Assassin's Creed 3 [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/6516-Assassins-Creed-3].
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/8424-Assassins-Creed-IV-Black-Flag].
Unity [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/9920-Assassins-Creed-Unity-Review].
Syndicate [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/106803-Assassins-Creed-Syndicate-Review].

 

[Dragonlayer]

Hmmmm.

I *do* like Assassin's Creed.

But I don't like Victorian England as a setting (possibly because a tragic early encounter with the accents of Fable 2 filled me with eternal hatred for the sound of my own country's language).

But I *do* like killing women.

But I don't like blandly written Templars, especially after Rogue showed good characterisation of the designated "villains".

Decisions, decisions....