Where force fails, cunning prevails
Had to take a break, but picking back up on reading the Unity novel now. So, Elise is meant to become the next Grandmaster of The Templar Order. She does possess Templar ideals so far, which when revisited and quote from the novel...
“What are Templars?” I asked instead.
My father indicated himself and Mother, then extended his hand to include me in the circle. “We all are. We are Templars. We are members of a centuries-old secret order committed to making the world a better place.” I liked the sound of that. I liked the sound of making the world a better place.
“How do you do it, Papa?”
He smiled. “Ah, now, that is a very good question, Élise. Like any other large, ancient organization there are differing opinions on how best to achieve our ends. There are those who think we should violently oppose those who oppose us. Others who believe in peacefully spreading our beliefs.”
“And what are they, monsieur?”
He shrugged. “Our motto is, ‘May the father of understanding guide us.’ You see, what we Templars know is that despite exhortations otherwise, the people don’t want real freedom and true responsibility because these things are too great a burden to bear, and only the very strongest minds can do so. We believe people are good but easily led toward wickedness, laziness and corruption, that they require good leaders to follow, leaders who will not exploit their negative characteristics but instead seek to celebrate the positive ones. We believe peace can be maintained this way.”
That and skipping up a bit more...
I said, “Monsieur, I think our present monarch is corrupted beyond redemption, that his rule has poisoned the well of France and that in order for the people’s faith to be restored in the monarchy, King Louis needs to be set aside.”
My answer caught him off guard and he looked startled, casting a quizzical look at Mother, who shrugged as though to say, Nothing to do with me, even though they were her words I was parroting.
“I see,” he said. “Well, your mother is no doubt pleased to hear your espouse such views, Élise, for in this matter she and I are not in full agreement. Like you she believes in change. Myself, I know that that monarch is appointed by God and I believe that a corrupt monarch can be persuaded to see the error of his ways.”
He nodded. “Across the world, yes. There are those who serve the Order. Those who are sympathetic to our aims. However, as you and your mother discovered today, we have enemies, too. Just as we are an ancient order hoping to shape the world in our image, so there is an opposing order, one with as many adherents sensitive to their own aims. Where we hope to unburden the good-thinking people of the responsibility of choice and be their guardians, this opposing order invites chaos and gambles on anarchy by insisting man should think for himself. They advocate casting aside traditional ways of thinking that have done so much to guide humanity for thousands of years in favor of a different kind of freedom. They are known as Assassins. We believe it was Assassins who attacked you today.”
edited 17th Jan '15 5:20:05 AM by Prime_of_Perfection
Improving as an author, one video at a time.
Ok. Correction. Napoleon was put under house arrest at the proper time. So, point to Ubisoft; credit where it is due. I'll admit, my knowledge on Napoleon is not that wonderful.
However, I still don't get the point in the scene. It portrays it as a 'YAY. The bad guys get their dues!' except Napoleon's house arrest doesn't last longer than a year really.
Also, what is the relationship with Arno and Napoleon??? In the main game, they seem to be friends as Arno does side quests for him and they are friendly to some extent here. In the DLC, Napoleon is a Bigger Bad to Captain Rose, but Arno never comments on Napoleon being there or shows any surprised. No dialogue at all.
What makes this even more confusing is that we know Arno later protects Napoleon from the Infernal Machine in 1800 (6 years later) which means, in those six years, Arno rejoined the Assassins (possibly sooner, I'd have to check the co-op dates) and seemingly gained some reason to protect Napoleon. And this is never to be expanded upon???
Where force fails, cunning prevails
The more and more I read about Elise's father and actually get to know him, the more I'm finding I really don't like him. What he did for Arno was nice, but he seems kind of like an asshole at varying points. Aside from previous quote, well, I'll quote this with regards to raising Elise as a Templar.
Father’s face became serious. “Julie, you know I trust you in all things and if you have been tutoring the child, then I support you in that, too, and if what she’s already had helped Élise keep a cool head during yesterday’s attack, then it’s been more than justified. But Élise will be Grand Master one day. She will follow in my footsteps. In matters of combat and tactics she may be your protégé, Julie, but in matters of belief, she must be mine. Is that understood?”
There seems to be brewing conflict of sorts here really. With Elise's father wanting to control her upbringing to fit into model Templar and be his heir as The Grandmaster of the Templar Order while her mother rather she takes after herself and wants to change the Templar Order entirely as she thinks their plans are doomed to failure when it comes to creating peace. She's fine with structure, just thinks their intended authoritarian structure won't work.
edited 17th Jan '15 8:28:47 PM by Prime_of_Perfection
Improving as an author, one video at a time.
The Wanderer
Well yeah, when you play or watch the game you can see that Francois de la Serre was kind of a classist asshole.
Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1_2NwmIobU
This might be helpful for anyone who isn't sure about the French Revolution considering the game sort of very vaguely and inaccurately explains certain details.
Will kill you
What Arno did in AC Unity to screw over the Templars definitely puts him leagues over his predecessors. ^^
"I don't give a rat's ass about going to hell. I guess it's because I feel like I'm already there." -Mugen
Where force fails, cunning prevails
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Oh that I know, it's just that the more I have to actually interact with it, the more I realize even his Pet the Dog with Arno is minor.
Hell, remember the whole thing about him not forcing Templar ideology onto Arno? Well, it turns out he DID wish to do that. He has some beliefs with Nature and that Arno was one by nature. He also was hoping Elise might influence him enough to nurture away from Assassins, mostly if possible, but at most figured it's his nature to be that and nothing more.
Elise's Mother was against this and didn't like when brought up to try and force him into believing the Templar ideology. As for Elise, she just wanted Arno to stay out of everything. She didn't want him to be an assassin or a Templar alongside her. One reason she enjoyed Arno's company was because, as much as she genuinely enjoyed all her training and such, Arno was her escape from that stuff and allowed her to just be a normal kid again.
Also a small bit of selfish streak - which she acknowledges in writing it in reflection - that she overall saw Arno as hers and didn't want any side to take him away from her. So yeah, she didn't want to be enemies and she didn't want him to be forced into her world as a Templar.
“The Assassins don’t know he’s here?” I asked.
“We don’t believe so.”
“Then there’s no reason he need be found out.”
“That’s quite right, Élise.”
“Then he needn’t be . . . anything.”
A look of confusion crossed Father’s face. “I’m sorry, my dear, I don’t quite follow.”
What I wanted to say was, Leave him out of this. Let Arno be for me, nothing to do with the way we see the world, the way we want to shape the world. Let the bit of my life I share with Arno be free of all that.
“Quite,” agreed Mother.
He pursed his lips, not especially liking this wall of resistance thrown up by his womenfolk. “He is my ward. A child of this house. He will be brought up according to the doctrines of the house. To put it bluntly, Élise, we need to get to him before the Assassins do.”
“We have no reason to fear that the Assassins will ever discover his existence.”
“We cannot be sure. If the Assassins reach him, they will bring him into the Order. He would not be able to resist.”
“If he would not be able to resist, then how can it be right to steer him otherwise?” I pleaded, though my reasons for doing so were more personal than based on beliefs. “How can it be right for us to go against what fate has in store for him?”
Father fixed me with a hard look. “Do you want Arno to be your enemy?”
“No,” I said, impassioned.
“Then the best way to be sure of that is to bring him round to our way of thinking.”
“Yes, François, but not now,” interrupted Mother. “Not just yet. Not when the children are so young.”
He looked from one protesting face to the other and appeared to soften. “You two,” he said with a smile. “Very well. Do as you wish for the time being. We shall review the situation later.”
I shot a grateful look at my mother.
What will I do without her?
Also, at the time of her passing, Elise's mother basically told her to not just follow the teachings of the Templar Order. Instead she told her to set out to find a third way that ran against what the Templars had been as well as what The Assassins currently were. So yeah, to seek balance between the two and so forth. That and also made a point of the key to this is compassion. That her principles must be founded on compassion above all else.
edited 20th Jan '15 10:24:17 PM by Prime_of_Perfection
Improving as an author, one video at a time.
Where force fails, cunning prevails
I'm getting more and more ticked off Elise wasn't the main protagonist of the core game. Her life is so much more fascinating, especially now that I'm at teenage Elise & she's subtly rebelling. With her mother dead, her father is more and more trying to force her to rein in Arno while he's making sure he has the skills needed to be a suitable Templar. In fact, Elise has gone into a rebellious teenager phase as of now. She said she would help out, though she's acting out more at school, causing problems there, and she's questioning whether the Templar path is necessarily the best one as is.
To quote a bit of Elise's rebellious aspect...
Not only had I neglected to persuade Arno of the joys of converting to the Templar cause (a situation at least partly informed by me disloyally wondering if in fact there were any joys in converting to the Templar cause), my behavior at the Maison Royale had failed to improve.
It had really failed to improve.
It had got a lot worse.
Why, only yesterday Madame Levene called me into her office, the third time in as many weeks. How many times had I made the trip across the years? Hundreds? For insolence, fighting, sneaking out at night (oh, how I loved to sneak out at night, just me and the dew), for drinking, for being disruptive, for scruffiness or for my particular favorite, “persistent bad behavior.”
There was nobody who knew the route to Madame Levene’s office as well as I did. There can’t have been a beggar alive who had held out their palm more than I had. And I had learned to anticipate the swish of the cane. Even welcome it. Not to blink when the cane left its brand upon my skin.
It was just as I expected this time, more repercussions from a fight with Valerie, who as well as being our group leader was also the star drama pupil when it came to productions by Racine and Corneille. Take my advice, dear reader, and never pick an actress as an adversary. They are so terribly dramatic about everything. Or, as Mr. Weatherall would say, “Such bloody drama queens!”
True, this particular disagreement had ended with Valerie in receipt of a black eye and a bloody nose. It had happened while I was supposedly on probation for an act of minor revolt at dinner the month before, which is nothing worth going into here. The point was that the headmistress claimed to be at the end of her tether. She had had “quite enough of you, Élise de la Serre. Quite enough young lady.”
And there was, of course, the usual talk of expulsion. Except, this time, I was pretty sure it was more than just talk. I was pretty sure that when Madame Levene told me she planned to send a strongly worded letter home requesting my father’s attention at once in order that my future at the Maison Royale should be discussed, this was no longer a series of idle threats and that her mind was indeed at the end of its tether.
But still I didn’t care.
No, I mean, I don’t care. Do your worst, Levene; do your worst, Father. There’s no circle of hell to which you can consign me worse than the one in which I already find myself.
edited 24th Jan '15 9:50:03 PM by Prime_of_Perfection
Improving as an author, one video at a time.
Officially intimidated
Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but in my Wii U Assassin's Creed III isn't loading anymore. Last time I played this game was in June 2013 and now my cousin wants to start playing it as well. After I start running it from the Wii U menu, the screen fades to black and nothing else happens.
I've read somewhere that it was an anti-piracy thing from Uplay, but my brother got the game legally from Amazon and it was running perfectly. Now I don't know what to do. AC IV does run perfectly.
135 - 158 - 273 - 191 - 188 - 230 - 300
I doubt many will know what to do. I'd recommend U Play Customer Support?
Officially intimidated
You know what sucks? I don't even use Uplay. I just play the games. And the Customer Support requires registration.
My only remaining way will be to email the company directly. Hopefully I'll get an answer.
EDIT: Never mind, I managed to login by using my associated Wii U account. I've submitted the problem. I hope I can get an answer soon. =(
edited 26th Jan '15 6:55:55 PM by MyFinalEdits
135 - 158 - 273 - 191 - 188 - 230 - 300
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r47yZIYBUzc
I think some observers here might be interested in this video. It's a discussion of Unity's historical inaccuracies with a leading historian on the French Revolution, Mr. David Andress. He says that the game is pretty right-wing and royalist.
Other things, he says about the gameplay:
1) He says that the game's streets are wider, and more open to move around than in reality, which he's giving a pass since its a game. He stated that real-life Paris back then was more clustered, more dark alleys and the like.
2) He says that the shops have 19th Century-style storefront windows. He notes that streets being narrower back then, shops had exterior low-hanging medieval signs (Think Poster of World's End movie) jutting towards people walking up a street.
3) He says that the social vision is fairly inaccurate. Arno can move around places and kill people with NP Cs being apathetic citizens. He says Parisians back there were pretty vigilant and self-governing. He also states that it shows crowd events full of angry extremists breaking stuff, but that was only sporadic and it died down during the Terror.
4) He also notes that the real-life Paris was full of horse-carriages. These carriages functioned like cabs, taking people to and fro, and cab drivers, totally not like today, were famous for being rude, getting into fights and driving like psychopaths. There were often traffic jams of horse-carriages back then...(I heard that and thought why is this not in the game).
About the history part, he says the same thing about it as the edits on the Unity page do. The guy who did History Respawned also did a series of other videos including one on Black Flag and Liberation/Freedom Cry with other historians specializing in the field. They say that those games are broadly accurate for the most part.
He did notice one thing about those games and Valiant Hearts, another Ubisoft release set in France WW 1, that the games have a slight bias to white-washing French history. He said that BLACK FLAG had you raid Spanish and English ships but removed (Except for Du Casse) the presence of French ships and French pirates in the same area and same time and the game kind of focuses on the Caribbean that has only the Spanish and English colonies rather than Lower Antilles (which were mostly French). They did tackle France's colonialism and slave-holding past with Liberation/Freedom Cry but then those are side-games. And of course there's the curious fact that INITIATES mentions that Robespierre abolished slavery and Napoleon brought it back, but in UNITY Robespierre is Pure Evil and Napoleon is a Loveable Rogue and they don't present the Terror and Revolution with any real attention to the ambiguity of the time.
edited 27th Jan '15 5:02:24 AM by JulianLapostat
Officially intimidated
In the end, I decide to erase my files, and then the game worked again. I suppose it was an update of either the game or the console that caused the error. Oh, well, at least now I have a good excuse to replay the game (it helps that both my brother and my cousin were having the same idea).![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
X-14: Killer Cheese
Regarding number 4, there were some in-game documents in ACIV talking about how the inclusion of vehicles complicated things too much in the game dev process. Granted, these were fictional Abstergo Gaming emails, but I took a lot of that as commentary on Ubisoft's own policies. Interestingly, the same documents implied there would be no 20th century Abstergo products (i.e. no 20th century AC games) for this reason.
The Wanderer
Victory will definitely have carriages though.
Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.
By vehicles I think they meant cars and motorcycles. AC did do carriage gameplay in AC 2(the part where Ezio rides shotgun as Leonardo drives to Venice, and later in the finale of Revelations. You also had Convoys in AC 3 playing a big part in the Frontier and it did have moving carriages in the cities with collectibles and a moving hide spot).
X-14: Killer Cheese
Well, I figure developing a system for carriages would be similar in difficulty to making one for cars. I don't think any of the AC games had large numbers of vehicles in the streets? One or two is doable as a set-piece.
Where force fails, cunning prevails
Yay for continuity! I actually got tons of reading in today and am going to keep on going. Assuming anybody is paying attention to these, Elise has gone to London (sneaked there, to be precise, to try and help out in the hunt for those responsible for an attempted murder on her & her mother when she was young) and been busy with some espionage work. She met with Haytham's sister and had a whole infiltration job there. Her task was to recover letters sent to her before Haytham died.
She was outmaneuvered, but she got the letters from Jennifer anyway. Jennifer says she overall senses doubt in Elise and noted that Haytham had some too. She gives her the letters on two conditions. The first is that The Templars leave her alone. The second is that she wants Elise to read Haytham's writings, his personal philosophies, and so forth. She wants Elise to learn from his doubts so as to become a better Grandmaster herself as well as brings up again the whole concept of unity between the two sides. She thinks the entire thing has become a pointless thing has become a pointless struggle and hopes Elise can end it.
Elise, as a whole, feels even more committed to finding a third way now.
Oh and finally, Elise is now at odds with some her of Templar allies due to a Kick the Dog action they committed involving murder.
“I’ve read the letters and taken note of what Haytham Kenway had to say. And what he had to say involved the worlds of Assassin and Templar ceasing hostilities. Haytham Kenway—a legend among Templars—had a vision for the future of our two Orders and it was that they should work together.”
“I see,” said Mr. Carroll, nodding. “And that meant something to you, did it?”
“Yes,” I said, suddenly sure of it. “Yes. Coming from him it meant something.”
He nodded. “Indeed. Indeed. Haytham Kenway was . . . brave to put these ideas on paper. Had he been discovered, he would have been tried for treachery by the Order.”
“But he may well be right. We can learn from his writings.”
Oh and I almost forgot to mention, they pissed off Elise by burning Haytham's letters (or at least trying to, she didn't give them the real ones). ...And in what I just read, they decided to kill Elise now too. They hold that it's for the greater good, that a truce is not the way to go and that they must crush any who might try to aim for it as it'll weaken their order. Elise fought to defend herself against their daughter (who she had hated up for the longest of times anyway) and killed her.
WHY WASN'T ALL OF THIS FUCKING EXPLORED IN THE GAME?!?! >_<
For final fun excerpt, this being after all that above fun...
So I did. I wrote to Jennifer Scott. I told her how sorry I was. I “introduced” myself, telling her about my home life, about Arno, my beloved, and how I was supposed to steer him away from the Creed and toward the ways of Templars.
And of course I discussed Haytham’s letters and how his words had moved me. I told her that I would do everything I could to help broker peace between our two kinds because she was right, and Haytham was right: there had been too much killing, and it had to stop.
edited 31st Jan '15 5:27:21 AM by Prime_of_Perfection
Improving as an author, one video at a time.
The Wanderer
Brightness
So the vibe I'm getting is that Unity really should have been about Elise.
PSN ID: FateSeraph Congratulations! She/They
Yeah... She seems to have the more interesting character arc and... well, actually doing things off screen. I feel like its only Arno because he survives the game, thus fitting the framing device.
Why do we even need Arno at all???
Que asco!
There's Arno answer to that question.
croak
I don't talk soft, that's the other guy.
It took me a bit to realize the pun.
It makes more sense if you remove the 's from there's and add the s onto answers.
edited 2nd Feb '15 3:14:32 PM by InkDagger
The Wanderer
Since Memories already depicted the Sengoku Period, they're probably doing the Meiji Restoration if it is indeed a game based in Japan.
Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.
@ rmctagg09
BEAUTIFUL... ^^
Btw this dude's speculation video on Eve playing an important role to modern day plot is unbelievably captivating:
If this actually might happen might interest in modern day plot will be even more drawn to what happens after exiting the Animus.
"I don't give a rat's ass about going to hell. I guess it's because I feel like I'm already there." -Mugen