Assassin's Creed

You seem to have a problem with the "Templars rewrote history" bits of this franchise. It's not just erasing the Assassins from the record, it's reshaping everything to be more to their liking.

Seriously, you need to let go of the historical accuracy thing. Because clearly that's not what this series does.

EDIT: Like this?

Unless knowing this stuff is part of your job, being this obsessive about details is probably not healthy, and you have to admit to yourself that you are far pickier about things than 99% of the people playing.

edited 15th Dec '15 5:37:38 PM by BadWolf21

I'm pretty surprised that nobody's responded to my notes about the game. Oh, well.

Is it possible to buy maps to the collectibles in the World War I scenario? I couldn't find any and it's annoying me because I may miss out on 100% Completion.

At this point, that excuse comes across as incredibly lazy. Didn't Assassin's Creed used to get praise for doing the research? And having codex entries on every little person who happened to pass by and just how important to history they were? What the heck happened???

Once again, why make it about Jack the Ripper if you're going to change so much that it really is In Name Only? Especially if the details changed are for seemingly no real reason and don't otherwise craft a stronger narrative?

I'm not at all sure how 'being a history buff' is somehow obsessive? I'm a history guy and I like a good murder mystery and the answers are in the details. A good writer knows how to take those details and spin an interesting narrative. I'm not sure where 'obsessive' becomes 'knowing even the most basic details of the murder case'.

edited 15th Dec '15 5:45:29 PM by InkDagger

At the point where you flip your shit every time they go off-book.

Even if I think Ink's taking it a bit too far, I don't think it's your place to decide whether something is healthy. I doubt just getting angry about some history errors is going to cause health problems.

Look, I don't always mind them going off book. If they stayed entirely historically accurate, it'd be boring and we wouldn't have some of the series most iconic scenes. So I'll level and agree with you there.

At the same time, I get frustrated because a lot of these diversions don't create a stronger narrative, or even actively hinder and work against the story being told. And many of them are seemingly lacking in any motivation or a hint of good writing and story telling.

For example, one of the strongest scenes in the series was Ezio's decision at the end of AC 2 to not kill Rodrigo Borgia. And we know that this leads to him being pope, AC: Brotherhood, and a lot of other events. But this choice says something about Ezio as a character. It would have been so easy to have Ezio just time jump to when Rodrigo was supposed to die and kill him there or, worse, kill Rodrigo and say that all of the rest of his papacy was just 'Templars rewrote history for some reason'. This was a great writing decision that developed Ezio as a character.

In this DLC, Abberline is a major figure and was involved in the Ripper Murders. It would have been great if the DLC built him up to slowly feeling he's inadequate for the job and unable to stop this monster and retiring from his career just before the final Ripper Killing. That would develop his character. Make him more interesting and certainly give him agency in this story.

EDIT:

Serious question, is it ever explained how we're playing as Jack the Ripper? He dies by the end of the DLC, so I'm confused how we can be playing him through the Animus at all.

edited 15th Dec '15 6:16:16 PM by InkDagger

This is odd. How do I access the Jack the Ripper campaign? It's not on my map in the game world, and there are no menu options to start it. I have the Season Pass and just did a 1 GB download. What's going on?

Edit: Ah, figured it out. Release is December 22 for PC. Damn console gamers getting it early. :-)

edited 15th Dec '15 9:16:18 PM by Fighteer

Submit...PC-Nazis, submit to the Console Democracy.

Never.

BTW, in more positive news. I think I figured out a way to get the 'Ninja' Game everyone's always wanted AND the WW 2 game everyone wants. Can't remember if I posted it here before though so forgive me if I already shared.

The issue people bring up with both settings is that they're 'over done'.

SET THE GAME IN WW 2 JAPAN THEN. Think of it. Almost every WW 2 work is set in Europe or Pearl Harbor or something very Western Centric.

A WW 2 game set in Japan behind enemy lines would be FACINATING and would certainly be a unique setting. Plus, you can go with the classic AC Themes of 'Tradition vs. Evolution' that Japan was going through with, presumably, far stronger thematic leanings towards 'Tradition' in this case because the 'Evolution' is Japan on the side of the Nazis.

Plus, when is the last time we got to see WW 2 from inside Japan during a major piece of media???

That's a very good idea and novel suggestion. Hence why we will never see an AC game set in WW 2-Japan.

Of course that would not have been true say three years back, but right now Ubisoft is going to keep AC in the tried and tested area and stick to familiarity.

WWII is post cut-off date (which WWI just barely passes), the invention of cars. Also really can you tone down the negativity it's getting tiresome.

Three years back was when they specifically said no Japan or WWII. If anything, it's more likely to happen now. They could do a [insert era here] Japan for the setting with a Pacific Theatre segment towards the end or something if they so desired.

edited 16th Dec '15 9:11:53 PM by TheAirman

I think that a WW 2 game set in China where you play as a Japanese and Chinese assassin would be even better in more personal opinion.

That's a supposed cut off date. They also said they'd never do Victorian/Industrial London and, yet, here we are.

Since the eras are getting more and more modern, they're REALLY running out of settings they can do. Not unless we suddenly get back to more ancient settings.

Idk. I feel like WW 2 Japan would be all the more tragic. Fighting a losing battle behind enemy lines. Desperate attempts to prove that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wouldn't be needed. Raise the stakes more and make them an Asian-American Assassin with family having been put into an internment camp back in America.

Have the Assassins promise that if Protagonist!Assassin goes into Japan and tries to turn the tides there, they will be able to sway officials enough to get their family out. This could illustrate the deteriorating control the Assassins have over government, show a rather nasty side of American history, and give us the agency and motivation for the story.

Thus we have our big premise struggle; trying to assassinate those in power and end Japan as a threat during WW 2. Make it an Asian Female Assassin and we REALLY have an uphill struggle going on. The world is working against them at every turn. Making them Asian-American would also allow more 'Fish-Out-Of-Water' exposition moments as to the political situation in Japan, allow players unfamilear with the setting to have questions answered, and over all make their struggle even harder since they're far out of their depth.

This could build up a really nice character struggle; They're both American and Japanese but both countries have horribly betrayed them and they feel loyal to neither. America is basically holding their family hostage, but Japan is assisting the Nazis and performing horrible acts of its own.

It could be a very dramatic sweeping war piece and I love the potential images and story it could tell. My only concerns would have having notable figures of history involved in which I can think of very few that would be well known to the Western World. I'm sure we could have Roosevelt and various military leaders on the US and European side of the war make cameos in correspondence with our young assassin (particuarly if the game begins in America and showing the Japanese-Americans being sent to Internment Camps), but I'm not so sure about the actual meat of the game.

edited 17th Dec '15 2:52:49 AM by InkDagger

I would pay good money to see that. And I think that era is not as unfamiliar since a lot of Anime fans and cinephiles are familiar with a lot of Japanese films set in that era, so there's a pool of references that Ubisoft can tap into. And generally Ubisoft while initially their attitude was we're all about The Greatest History Never Told, as per Alex Hutchinson circa AC-III, now it's about The Theme Park Version, as seen in Unity and Syndicate.

Oh...I am not supposed to be negative. Well okay I will rephrase this to be as non-negative as possible.

From Unity onwards and the shift in Next-Gen, Ubisoft's target audience is not the folks who came into the games from AC 1 onwards. When they made AC-1, it was bold, new and exciting, and the Assassin as a Brotherhood was a new idea and to give themselves freedom they made AC-2 and updated the brotherhood to the Renaissance and did their research to make it as believable and faithful as possible to win over people who think a quasi-Islamic cult in Catholic Italy is too much Culture Chop Suey. They continued this until AC-3 and Black Flag, because the audience was the people who played previous games and they expected a level of consistency. Since the last console had an unusually long shelf-life they also felt compelled to innovate and push for making everything bigger and come up with newer features.

When they went into Next-Gen, Ubisoft were in a bit of a conundrum since the change to new consoles will largely include people who haven't played AC before, and since Backwards Compatibility didn't exist as an option and it cost money to ask people to go look into their backlog they had to simplify a lot of the pre-existing themes so as to make things work for next-gen. So rather than the detailed and rich backgrounds and themes, you have simpler plots, systemic gameplay and easy conflicts. It's meant primarily to appeal to ignorance, i.e. people who didn't play the earlier games and are unlikely to do so. This is a legitimate choice for a company to make. On the technical side, the next-gen hardware is really tough and the engines they built can't fully accomodate the gameplay and world map of earlier games so it's still a period of transition.

So based on current trends and hardware limitations, I don't think Ubisoft are that keen to try anything off the beaten track anytime soon.

There is one 20th Century setting I think would work in AC.

Berlin during the 20s.

@Ink Dagger

So would your version of the game cover the Nanjing Massacre at all or would it leave that part of history alone?

edited 17th Dec '15 8:36:01 AM by warrior93

Probably not...

Or, at least, not in a 'This will be a level/mission that we witness' kind of thing. Assuming we go with a premise of the protagonist being motivated by their family being sent to concentration camps during WW 2, the story would take place AFTER Pearl Harbor occurs. Specifically, it would be around Mid-1942. Assuming that Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August, 1945) are ROUGHLY the climax of the game, that gives us around a 3-4 year window for the game to take place.

That doesn't mean it can't be a contributing factor and plot point to be mentioned, but the premise as I've suggested doesn't support featuring that event first hand. But, by all means, I believe its something important since it'd step back towards the original 3 AC Games with a 'Warts and All' approach to history'.

EDIT:

Plus, Rape is hard to portray. And I don't think Video Games have matured enough to handle that properly just yet. Rape is similar to 'War Is Hell'; Its hard to portray because most of the damage is psychological and showing the event can be... gratuitous. I have a belief that, unless the narrative REALLY freaking calls for that kind of stuff to be shown, the after affects on the survivor are all that matter in terms of portrayal.

edited 17th Dec '15 4:50:26 PM by InkDagger

Jacob's Cooking

Okay that's actually pretty funny

So I'm guessing that the Jack the Ripper campaign will be waiting for me when I get home tonight. Cool, I'm looking forward to catching up with the console folks.

PC Master Race... *sniff*

Get Frye'd

I'm surprised Jacob's cooking wasn't used for an assassination via food poisoning.

Would have been a good opportunity too.

I feel like, of ALL of the many many things that need updating in the series, assassination and stealth needs to be updated.

I genuinely want to be stealthy and have a goal of 'I can't be discovered because that will ruin my chance to kill x'. And not 'ruin things' as in I desynch because someone saw me or something because that just gets annoying, but ruin things in the sense of this being a very delicate line of work and everyone being alerted will make it significantly more difficult if not near impossible to complete the mission.

As we get closer to the age of ranged weapons, the typical assassin's creed style isn't going to work anymore.

Unity, ironically, took a step in the right direction with making Assassinations open ended with various opportunities to infiltrate and get advantages over my enemy, but Syndicate didn't take it a step further like it needed.

I kind of want AC to take a few steps closer towards Dishonored if I'm honest. Not in the 'Magical Powers' aspect, but the 'take your time and stealth around and pre-plan everything' aspect. That's probably my main draw to sealthy games and that's kind of been fading a lot over the years.

Basically we should expect something around March 25th next year.

No thank you. That has never been Assassin's Creed's style. If that's the experience you're looking for, then you're really playing the wrong series, and should be spending more time with something like Thief.