Assassin's Creed

See, I don't consider Torres as the Big Bad of Black Flag. As I've mentioned numerous times, the game isn't interested in the Assassin/Templar conflict in the slightest, and basically forgets he exists for long stretches of time. He's the final boss, but Black Bart is the real main antagonist of the piece.

Yes, Bart is the main antagonist, even if Torres is the guy you have to kill (with a straightforward air assassination, if you do it right) at the end.

Either way, I'm talking purely about the final battle with the main antagonist, and Bart's showdown simply isn't anything special IMO.

edited 10th Oct '15 9:04:20 PM by TheAirman

My favorite villains among the Templars are Al Mualim and Haytham.

But you know in terms of actual menace and intimidation I always found the non-Templar villains scarier. Like King Washington in Tyranny, Savonarola in Bonfire of Vanities and above all Bartholomew Roberts.

On the ubisoft forums we had this discussion and basically the idea is it might be better to have more non-Templar bad guys. That is to say do a game or story where the Assassins aren't really fighting the Templars but after somethign else. In AC-2, Savonarola is a far more interesting villain than Rodrigo Borgia for instance, Savonarola really believes he's right whereas Rodrigo is totally evil.

What makes Bart scary is his general sense of menace. Like he's always calm and cool, never acts angrily or loses confidence. He basically embodies his idea "A short life but a merry one" and totally doesn't give a damn. So that gives him a genuine sense that he's dangerous the way that Torres and other Templars don't.

And of course that speech is totally boss...and that was a real-life speech straight from history: "For I have dipped my hands in muddied waters and withdrawing them find, 'tis better to be a commander than a common man."

edited 10th Oct '15 9:25:34 PM by JulianLapostat

Lulz, Vane having a boss? That dude had no boss. The closest thing to a TA and he promptly went nuts and chucked hand-grenades.

Torres was a pretty chill dude—I never got the sense of menace that I got with Bartholomew. Which fit the historical context perfectly. This dude pops up because he spoke Welsh and had some flair—somehow this makes him among the most money-raking pirates of his age and the swansong to the Golden Age of Piracy? Historical hoopla equaling fictional suspicion FTW! Plus Edward actually honored his dying wish.

Haytham was my villain bae. I have some writing critiques with the fight, but the funeral with a grieving Charles Lee helped.

edited 11th Oct '15 9:24:55 AM by Phoenixflame

Right, not Vane, Hornigold, my bad. His boss, the governor guy. I honestly didn't care for any of Black Flag's villains that much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08yEh3r35II

Historical cast of Syndicate. Not liking Marx's voice at all and I guess he's not the Sage from the look in his eyes, which means that the Jacob-Evie Twin Sage theory is probably the correct one.

Agreed. I don't think Rodrigo was a bad villain, but I prefer Savonarola, maybe because his faith is genuine. I actually felt sorry for him - the idea that you think you're the hero of the story when really you're the monster...well, it's rather sobering. Certainly I found him desperately praying as he was being burnt at the stake rather more impactful than...well, Rodrigo didn't exactly go out in a blaze of glory, did he?

Heh, blaze. Get it, because he was burnt at the stake? ...I'll shut up, now.

Agreed. Templars have all the same motive and everything else is fake as fuck. Sav. was more grounded in his fanaticism, or at the very least was more genuine. Villians outside of the Templars have a much less limited range of motivations and potential plots.

In all the games you had non-Templar bad guys like Savonarola, the Hermeticists in the Da Vinci Disappearance DLC, King Washington in the Tyranny DLC, Black Bart in AC-4, and in Freedom Cry where you have Governor de Fayet but essentially you are not fighting Templars there, you are fighting slavery itself.

UNITY was a huge lost opportunity in that regard. I mean it's a game of breathtaking stupidity.

We get it. You hate Unity. No need to turn every single conversation into that.

I haven't ranted about UNITY for a while on this forum actually.

I don't know what they mean by saying Edward is the most skilled fighter since he can take on multiple enemies by himself, all the other Assassins could do that too, and free aim was there in AC 3 as well.

I am amazed they didn't talk about the most innovative ground gameplay feature in Black Flag...the stealth room structure. That is an area has several layers of patrol. Guards on ground, Snipers on Higher levels, Alarm Bells that call for reinforcement and which can be silenced. This was imported without credit or acknowledgement into Unity and Syndicate and that was something which Black Flag introduced. The Jungle infiltration missions, Assassination missions and the Plantation Missions basically became UNITY's mission structure. And most likely they borrowed that from Arkham or Far Cry but whatever.

This video was a disappointment in that sense, since the earlier videos pointed out little known innovations this one was basically caught up in the whole "Pirates bro..." haze and this for a seven minute video? Wow. Likewise, seriously Rogue gets an entire video for itself. I hope it's paired with Unity because that game is fanfiction cannibalized from the assets of earlier, and better, games without any contribution. It's even more worthless than UNITY which at least is a legitimate failure.

So actually kind of accurate in capturing Black Flag's tone. :P

That's true, but I felt like Black Flag's free aim was definitely better than III's.

It's pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

—> Cultures and religions and languages keep folks divided. But there's something in the Assassin's Creed that crosses all boundaries. A fondness for life and liberty.

—>— Mary Read

BLACK FLAG is actually in some respects more philosophical and better explains the appeal of the Creed than even AC-2 does.

People who say that it's a pirate game and not a true AC game, have neither played pirate games nor do they understand AC well. The point of AC is that it can do anything and go to any historical era and be any kind of game. That's the greatness of its concept. If you want a true and pure AC, play Assassin's Creed 1 and nothing else, that's the only game where they exist.

Likewise, BLACK FLAG isn't a pirate game so much as a deconstruction of pirate stories. It places pirates in an actual historical context of colonialism and the slave trade which no pirate game, forget that, no pirate movie or book captured.

Black flag is a pirate game. I really don't see the need to argue against that.

To rmctagg09,

I don't get why Elise's outfit is available instead of actual Assassins like Maria Thorpe, Claudia Auditore, Mary Reade, Aveline (whose ensemble looks better than Evie Frye's) and Shao Jun?

What I meant is that Black Flag has stuff that no pirate game before it had. Darby Mc Devitt, the writer of the game, talked about how most pirate stories and games assume that it's all piracy, so you have skulls everywhere and so on. When in most cases, pirates lived and sailed alongside merchants, operated in port-cities with navies and raided plantations which were run by slave labor. They basically take pirates as something separate from a bigger context. In Black Flag, you have pirates within that context. It's not a game like Red Dead Redemption where it's basically the cowboy fantasy from every Western ever made without any attention to historical context or background.

Because of AC's focus on Historical Fiction, it was possible to do something that catered to the pirate fantasy but also put in a realistic historical background, and they did that to a greater extent than any other pirate story. It even spoofs the Jack Sparrow The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything where the pirate the audience thinks is cool or more likable is the only one we don't see doing actual piracy. In Black Flag, Edward is as blood-soaked as everyone else.

So you can say that AC is about piracy more than it's about being an Assassin, but you can't say that it's like any other pirate game or story or that it doesn't do something unique with that concept. In any case, the minute AC walks out of the Crusades, all the games use the Assassin experience as metaphors for other concepts. The Ezio games are about Renaissance Arts Patrons rather than about being an Assassin, AC-3 is about being a Mohawk and Revolutionary rather than being an Assassin. It's only because there aren't fantasy tropes around the latter two to the same extent as pirates that people think Black Flag is an abberation, when it's part of the general approach to use Conspiracy Theory as an Excuse Plot for basic Historical Fiction.

edited 14th Oct '15 9:18:29 PM by JulianLapostat

Aveline and Shao Jun outfits for Evie confirmed as a Uplay reward.

edited 15th Oct '15 2:09:14 PM by rmctagg09

Yay, all that's left is Mary Read, Maria Thorpe and Claudia Auditore. But this is a good step forward.

The outfits instead of the characters make sense. Recreating the characters would require rigging and animating an entire new model. Plus, it'd be really awkward to have Edward (30s or 40s) or Ezio (who LOOKS around late 30s during half of his games) making out with the 18 year old Elise and talking with Arno's voice. That'd just be kind of awkward.

Given that I don't think Claudia ever wears anything besides a floor-length dress, that actually would be too difficult to animate on the player model. And Maria's wardrobe is super boring. I'd be down for Mary Read's outfit, though.

They've been doing character outfits for basically ever. I don't know why they'd suddenly switch to full character models now.

That said, you also have the ages wrong. Edward starts Black Flag at age 22 and ends it at 29. Elise starts Unity (after the prologue, obviously) at age 21 and ends it at 26.

EDIT: For interest's sake, here's how old the various main characters were during their games:

• Altair: 26
• Ezio (ACII): 17-29 (not counting the DLC sequences or the epilogue in Rome)
• Ezio (Brotherhood): 40-48
• Ezio (Revelations): 52-53
• Connor: (when you finally get to Connor in his Assassin outfit) 15-27
• Aveline: 18-30
• Edward: 22-29
• Adewale (Freedom Cry): 43-45
• Shay: 21-29
• Arno: 21-26
• Elise: 21-26
• Shao Jun: 21
• Jacob and Evie: ~20

edited 15th Oct '15 11:27:30 PM by BadWolf21