Assassin's Creed

Verisimilitude takes a back seat to functional gameplay. That is: if the game presents a challenge that the player is expected to defeat, that challenge should generally not make one ragequit. That said, the elephants are clearly supposed to be like the legendary ships in Blag Flag: fundamentally unfair challenges that you need a lot of retries to beat.

edited 17th Nov '17 7:30:57 AM by Fighteer

Maaaan I loved those. Fighting that Man O' War in the middle of raging storms. One of the best "boss" fights I've every played - losing sight in the waves, lightning flashes, burning frigates.... was amazing.

Indeed. The legendary ship battles were most certainly legendary — they presented a vast challenge and had interesting gameplay. With the war elephants, I'm slashing (or shooting) at their legs until they finally fall down, while hoping not to be turned into Bayek-shaped paste on the ground. With twitch dodging required and the visuals not being very clear as to when I should expect to get hit.

edited 17th Nov '17 8:45:04 AM by Fighteer

I take it the trireme segments aren't much to write home about then?

"Segments", plural? I've done one so far. Was fun, but nothing I'd obsess over in isolation.

They are fine. They are not super challenging or complex, more of a minigame than anything. Even the AC 3 ship missions were more involved, by mere virtue of not all being in the open sea. But they are still fun and a nice diversion.

That's a shame. The whole ramming system and setup of Triremes would've been a nice change to Black Flag's ship combat.

That's the issue with melee RPG mechanics - how do you do interesting boss fights?

How does a sailing (or rowed) vessel "accelerate to ramming speed"? It's a bit nonsensical.

Well, they somehow managed it in historical times.

Obviously, ramming was a technique that was used in naval warfare, but not in a "suddenly make your ship go twice as fast" sense.

Well time compression for gameplay reasons. Obviously it took more time to accelerate. Black Flag did similar things

Same reason the Reed boats Bayek can use can accelerate to speeds that would make the average modern fishing boat blush.

Or how Bayek can travel from Alexandria to Memphis in less than a day on horseback.

edited 17th Nov '17 9:51:15 AM by Ghilz

He gurns REALLLLLLLLLY hard.

Or he's just blowing that sail.

Black Flag is an odd place to say the Templars were generically evil as the big thing I took from that game was, "You know the big irony? The Templars and the Assassins are the only two groups in the world right now who think slavery is bad and they're murdering each other instead of working together to stop it."

That and Edward Kenway is the worst Assassin ever.

edited 17th Nov '17 3:47:48 PM by CharlesPhipps

To Edward's defense, he's not an Assassin for like 90% of the game :-P

Speaking of slavery, I find it's near absence in Origins distressing. Like the only time it comes up I can think off is the side-mission with the Runaway Gladiator. And yet this is Greco-Roman Egypt, where slavery peaked. And Caesar's rise is tied with the meteoric rise of slave labor in Rome allowing rich land owners to edge out poorer and more middle class land owners till the republic becomes unable to reward its soldiers, and said rich land owners countering every attempt at reform which leads to Caesar's popularity. Of course That'd require the game to portay Caesar as anything than a 2 bit tyrant and give the man any of the complexity his real life counterpart had, so fuck that I guess?

And we're talking about an organization that literally from its inception talks about fighting for man's freedom. And the topic is absent?

edited 17th Nov '17 3:56:18 PM by Ghilz

Eh,

I actually am the one who mentioned slavery not coming up actually being on point because if you had Bayek rescuing slaves or going against them then it'd be Politically Correct History. There's a lot of use of the word "master" in the game starting with the first enemy you fight and it's entirely possible most of these people ARE slaves with social status as well as loyalty to their houses. In Egypt, you wouldn't be able to tell many of the servants from the slaves vs. say the South in later centuries.

Mind you, that'd be an awesome topic for Augustus' Rome in a hypothetical sequel.

edited 17th Nov '17 7:44:21 PM by CharlesPhipps

I dunno, Politically Correct History is when you change the past to fit modern norms, I'd say wallpapering over the obvious Slavery issue especially when it'd run right into what the Brotherhood was created for and would require Bayek then murdering half of Egypt definitely counts as Politically Correct History.

Like that quest with the Son of Ra where you're helping those rich farmers who are getting their houses burned down, they suddenly look a lot less innocent if you remember those farms are all worked by slaves.to

edited 17th Nov '17 8:50:32 PM by Ghilz

If the Medjay (and by extension Bayek) did not consider slavery to be an inherent evil, then why would he go around freeing slaves?

If the Medjay were agents of the Pharaoh, why would he Oppose Ptolemy? Or Cleopatra?

Clearly he's not just defined by his job description. And my point isn't that it can't be rationalized. It's that the game doesn't even try too. You could just have Bayek not consider slaves people. It's what a lot of people in history did to dodge the morality of it. Heck, it'd make him interesting, that he's got some rather period-accurate views.

Heck, Black Flag was willing to have Edward act racist (though aware of it) and outright say he doesn't feel any particular inclination to the plight of slaves. So not like there's no precedent.

edited 17th Nov '17 9:06:20 PM by Ghilz

We're kind of running into the differing nature of slavery of the time period as well. Slavery is around and awful (it's an inherent evil no matter the time period) but the difference between slavery in the Ancient World and the modern world also needs to be acknowledged.

The lack of a racial aspect and the fact the difference between peasants and slaves wasn't quite as distinct is a major point.

In Alexadria, for example, plenty of the slaves could order freemen put to death because they were slaves of the court. We're also in a time period where absolute power existed in numerous groups and people routinely were slaves for short periods then went on to become slaves of their own.

The short version being, "Slavery is a hard subject to discuss because no one actually has any freedom in a place without a concept of rights."

edited 17th Nov '17 9:40:39 PM by CharlesPhipps

Okay, story's done. At least, I think it is. I'm not used to an Assassin's Creed game that doesn't have a 30 minute long credits sequence or a modern day epilogue, although maybe I still need to do something to trigger them.

Thoughts:

The "Battle for the Nile" sequence was disjointed and hard to follow. I dislike it when a game throws mechanics at you without explanation, like that damned chariot chase riding shotgun for Caesar. Maybe you aren't meant to be able to kill all the enemies, but there're absolutely no hints or tips about what you need to do in that sequence. The first time through, the elephant killed me, and I couldn't figure out what I'd done wrong.

I also hate when story sequences take over and I can't use my tools, like when Senu becomes unavailable to mark enemies/scout objectives, or I don't get to choose my weapons. I realize that Aya doesn't have the bond with Senu, so when I control her, it's not something I ought to be able to use, but without her I feel blind. Amazing how quickly I adapted to that mechanic, to miss it so much when it was taken away.

Also, Aya is an interesting character, but to not be able to develop her skills and gear, and then have to fight as her, makes me feel like she's definitely the gimp character choice. I'm not sure if that was the message Ubisoft intended to send but it's definitely the one I received. That said, assassinating Caesar did feel pretty epic, even though it came across as rushed. I was also amused to see that on the final approach to the Roman Senate, I couldn't climb over the buildings because of a row of inward facing spikes on the roof.

I'm not saying I dislike the ending, but it feels like Ubisoft just loves taking away the sandbox when they want specific sequences to happen in a certain way, and it's irritating. "Oh, you liked your freedom to approach objectives as you will? Well, you can't have it here. Nyah nyah." The staged boss fights are part of this, since they completely remove the stealth elements of the game, which is what I play Assassin's Creed for.

Should I go back to the modern day now? Does anything happen with Layla and Miles after he pulls a stealth-hi and interviews her for the Assassins? Do we get to chase down the Apple and the Staff, or are those some of the ones that we already know that Abstergo found and wrecked? So many things left unanswered.

Also, I can't figure out Cleopatra. Yes, I know there's a historical person there and the game has to write around her. But I ended up being mistaken both ways: she's not a founding patron of the Assassin Brotherhood, nor is she an enemy — rather, she uses the Medjay as tools of state and when she gets what she wants — an alliance with Caesar and her brother dead — she forgets all about them and goes off to Rome. She just sort of... ends up being little more than another ruler more concerned with grandiose theatrics than with the welfare of her subjects, to the point where Aya threatens to slit her throat if she doesn't remember that last.

edited 19th Nov '17 5:23:49 PM by Fighteer

Oh, it goes further than that Ammunet aka Aya historically DOES kill Cleopatra.

Oh, I see. Well, that makes sense, then.

After all was said and done, I still can't quite grasp why the Order places so much importance on killing Bayek's son. To me, that plot line feels stretched out to an improbably long thread that gets tangled up somewhere along the way.

Nor do I quite understand the importance of the Vault at Siwa, if what Flavius wants all along is the Apple and the Staff. He gets the Apple at the start of the game and he gets the Staff from Alexander's tomb, so are we supposed to believe that the point of that whole exercise is to set up the story of the Order pursuing the Pieces of Eden across the globe — that glimpse of the First Civilization map that ties into the first AC game? There's so little payoff in-story that I was left kind of breathless. He also doesn't need the Staff to control the Apple, so what happens to it? Bayek makes a big deal out of storing the Apple away safely but there's no mention at all of the Staff's fate. Edit: Oh, I just read that Septimius uses the Staff during the boss fight with Aya.

Oh... are those the Apple and Staff from Assassin's Creed II?! That would make sense...

Edit: Wait, wait. Historically, the real-life Cleopatra killed herself with poison, either ingested or by inducing an asp to bite her, after the defection of her armies and the capture of Alexandria by the Romans under Octavian. How do we reconcile that with Aya doing the deed?

edited 19th Nov '17 6:58:32 PM by Fighteer

In AC 2 It's said Amunet killed Cleopatra with an asp.

edited 19th Nov '17 6:35:51 PM by Ghilz

Got it. It's been way too long since I played that game for me to remember all the alternate history details.

I usually am very much about video games keeping consistent lore but this is getting a bit dense.