Assassin's Creed

You're forgetting about her Assassin's outfit.

edited 16th Oct '15 12:07:26 AM by rmctagg09

Sorry. I mispoke for Edward. I was thinking Haythem for some reason. He gets pretty grey in the hair by the end of AC 3. Idk why, but I thought Edward was older. He screams older than early 20s for some reason anyway.

Well there was a reason I put Younger Than They Look on his section of Black Flag's character page.

Well young people in that age grew faster. They got married, worked in the farm and the likes at an early age in that time. This was before the Victorians invented the concept of childhood after all. So I think Edward married at 18 (which still happened in the early 20th Century in some places mind you) and then became a privateer between 19-21.

Eh, even if she did have a reasonably workable outfit, Claudia was never an important enough character that I think her costume is something worth having. Frankly, I don't know that any of the three you mentioned come close enough to protagonist status that they qualify for costume cameos. Because that's clearly what they're fore. Maybe Maria in Revelations, since I haven't played all the way through it to know, but definitely not Mary Read or Claudia.

If they were still doing Desmond's outfit as an unlockable, then Lucy would've been a cool one to have, though.

Edward met Caroline when he was 17, and they were married "within a year," so he was 17 or 18. The life of a sailor hardens you, and Edward's been living it for 2-3 years by the time we meet him.

Also, he's clearly modelled on his voice actor, Matt Ryan, who was 31-32 when they would've been working on it.

Well Claudia Auditore was important enough that some people remembered her at least. And she did get a unique outfit and fought alongside Ezio at the climax of Brotherhood which would make her more than bystander. As per Revelations, she ran the Brotherhood while he was in Istanbul. Well the logic of Legacy outfits is you play famous assasins of the past who in the case of male protagonists happened to be protagonists of earlier titles. For a female character it's not remotely an equal situation. For Evie Frye she would only have Aveline and Shao Jun and both were sub-console releases, not main release. Most people would not know who Aveline or Shao Jun is, especially the ones who buy main console releases but they will know Maria Thorpe, Claudia Auditore and especially Mary Read.

So in terms of fairness it would be nice to have her play prominent female characters in earlier games. Besides they are giving her Elise's outfit when she's a Templar, so lady Assassin NPCs are fair game and why not Maria Thorpe, Claudia Auditore and Mary Read? And besides Maria Thorpe and Mary Read are also English, so it would be fitting for Evie Frye and like Claudia she's the sister of a headstrong, very brash brother.

Edward's backstory was pretty much settled before the actor cast, the only thing he brought in was Edward's Welshness which the writer felt made perfect sense since Blackbeard and Black Bart were also Welsh pirates.

edited 16th Oct '15 9:34:13 AM by JulianLapostat

I meant visually. Edward looks older than his 20s because he's visually modelled on his actor.

I'm not trying to imply that Matt Ryan has been a sailor since he was a teenager.

So, a new (read: ANNOYING) ad on You Tube is a gamestop employee reciting what I presume is some speech from the game (or one of the trailers, I didn't check) about the 'working class sleep walk through life unaware of the machine that drives them'.

Anyone else find this dreadfully ironic??? Almost to an absurd degree???

I find it more irritating that there are 12-second ads that you can skip, yet each time I try to watch a new episode of the Storyteller, I have to rewatch the whole 30 seconds of the thing.

How cool would it be to see this connection made in Syndicate?

Cool enough that I would consider actually giving enough of a shit about Syndicate to be disappointed when/if it falls flat.

I doubt very much that Ubisoft will go all that deep into Marx. And in any case I don't see what's cool about that phrase, especially since UNITY p—sed all over the history of the Revolution.

A cooler connection is this phrase:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

What is that but not the Animus?

edited 18th Oct '15 7:57:03 PM by JulianLapostat

I'm familiar.

Frankly, the one I brought up has more potential as an actual story beat, while yours is just thematic.

Every European culture, including some that are not traditionally thought of as European, has, at one time or another, claimed to be the true descendant of Rome; the place where Roman the glory of Rome can now be found, and a lot of European iconography is lifted wholesale from Rome. The seals of Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, and the President of the United States are strikingly similar, and all are based on symbology tied to Zeus/Jupiter.

And we've met that guy. Those Who Came Before are basically walking Roman iconography. The observation that these symbols repeat across history could very easily be a plot point, and one could make the argument that subtly, it already is.

edited 18th Oct '15 8:48:05 PM by BadWolf21

And that is the Eagle, the Assassin's own standard. I actually wondered if Ubisoft would explore that connection or symbology. For the Assassins, Eagle means freedom and flight, but for the Romans, Napoleon, Hitler and the United States, it means order, power and strength. The duality of that symbol has never been touched on well.

Assassin's Creed III did explore it in a visual rather than thematic fashion, with the Bald Eagle an originally native American icon, becoming an adornment on the crown of King Washington.

They are technically Etruscan, the lost predecessors of the Roman civilization whose writing remains untranslated. As Minerva says their original names were Uni (Juno), Merva (Minerva) and Tinia (Jupiter), and Aita and Consus, other First Civ are Etruscan names.

I don't know, subtlety is not Ubisoft's strong suit these days. But it's true that originally it was. Patrice Desilets put a lot of thought into that design.

The Assassin Logo for instance is the Spartan Lambda:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta And (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconophilia) Spartans certainly inspired philosophy to some extent.

The Lambda of course is an icon of rebellion, a symbol of the LG Bt movements and the herald of The One Free Man.

TWCB are implied to be all the deities, so what their original names are isn't particularly relevant to the discussion. For two of the three we've actually met (not counting the Sages because there's all kinds of wackiness happening there, and really, we call them "Sages" more than anything else), we use their Roman names pretty exclusively. And they're the freaking Capitoline Triad, the three most important Roman gods. The association with Rome is pretty clear.

Plus, we met them in the games starring an Italian protagonist. :P

How about we not make blanket statements like this, m'kay?

edited 18th Oct '15 9:34:45 PM by BadWolf21

The first 40 minutes of the game got leaked a couple of days back. And I found a couple of interesting stuff on it.

I put some observations under spoiler tag. I will say it's more stray observations than any story spoilers. Ubisoft is saving the real meat for later in the game, so nothing too fancy or stark like the opening of AC-3, Black Flag and other games. But it's under the cut.

Modern: Portraits of Haytham Kenway and Elise on Left side of Corridor of Isabelle Ardant's office. I like the fact that the list of British Assassins and British Templars includes characters from AC Lore, including comics and Bowden novels. Shaun has some fancy tech, looks all electric. Piece of Eden? Huh...no Sage this time, seriously, okay.

Historical - First train we see is called "The Great Eagle" and the number is 1191, the year in which AC 1 takes place. Lovely touch, Ubisoft. Reginald Birch is namedropped, Starrick is as bad as Birch according to Henry Green's monologue. Starrick's Window Decoration is weird, it's got a cross floral pattern with Assassin A etched in wedges...wonder if that means something? Okay the Assassin George who is boss of Jacob and Evie has an outfit that looks very similar to the original Victory Leak. He has that belt and bracer with the A buckle on upper-back.

edited 18th Oct '15 9:36:22 PM by JulianLapostat

Your tags are broken.

edited 18th Oct '15 9:35:14 PM by BadWolf21

In so far as you base it as part of a general Roman connection, it is. The Etruscans are the Trope Codifier for the Precursors after all. Lost civilization who taught the Romans, whose writings lack a Rosetta Stone so ubisoft used that for its lore.

It's clear in ezio games because it's set there. But it's not stressed in other games. Like Marx says the french revolution was inspired by Romans. But in unity none of that comes out. The fact that Notre Dame is built on top of a Jupiter Temple gets no mention in the game nor does it play a role. The game is based on the whole on 19th century urban legends and right wing conspiracies than anything else.

How do you know for certain that there's no Sage? Wouldn't such a character be revealed later in the game?

What I meant was that the reasons for entering the past is not to find a Sage in England, it's to recover a First Civilization device. I thought they would continue with the Sage thing from Black Flag and Unity basically said, "we're on the hunt for sages, y'all". Now they are looking for a new McGuffin. It's a little odd that's all. Maybe they are saving that for DLC.

¿Porque no los dos?

Savez-vous que nous sommes parler à propos d'Ubisoft? Une équipe très rigide et très timide comme le rat dans l'experiment de Pavlov. Aprés les plaintes sur l'Unity, ce veut à raconter une histoire simple comme Brotherhood. Une quête pour deux McGuffin dans Londres est très compliqué.

edited 19th Oct '15 12:43:49 AM by JulianLapostat

Also, the review copies have started to leak.

Also when I was watching the Syndicate trailer videos, I noticed that they had Robert Fitzwalter mentioned in a list of British Assassins, which means that Memories is probably indeed canon to the rest of the series.

Also, apparently Samuel Bellamy (A contemporary of Edward Kenway, though he operated further north.) was an Assassin too.

edited 19th Oct '15 4:32:17 PM by rmctagg09

Man they are inordinately proud of that mediocrity. The video is also inconsistent:

1) It says the Templars gave Shay the Rifle and upgrades. But Shay got the rifle when he was still an Assassin, the only thing he didn't get was the grenade launcher and that's because Benjamin Franklin gave it to him under false pretenses.

2) The end of that video touts the fact that Shay killed civilians, saying he "accidentally" killed them, which goes against what the writer Richard Farrese said about that not being canon. So Shay is a sociopath then?

The video makes Rogue look better than it deserved.