Assassin's Creed

Honeslty, now I'm just imagining the staff + apple merely being the key to an Isu toilet and I'm unbelievably amused with this.

Yeah, Origins' villains have... problems. We don't get much development or time with them and its very frequently, we get the quest to kill them as soon as we meet them. I feel like the Hyena was probably the most interesting if simply because she's a dark take on what Bayek could have become.

I like the concept of 'Open world and infiltrate anywhere you want as long as you can survive' but it seems to be causing structure problems with the storytelling. The previous games built themselves up in sequences around defeating one of the several villains with AC 1 being the most obvious about this where all of the build up missions are one of 5 different types to get new info about the guy you're going to kill. AC 2 then has a less rigid but still structured set of events with more interesting set pieces, such as the Da Vinci Flying Machine mission. Syndicate had several missions build up with Pearl Attaway as an ally until she is revealed to be your target. Origins wants to be fluid about its world, but its harming the storytelling since I don't get those cool narrative moments.

Sneaking into Alexandria with Cleopatra and the subsequent Battle of the Nile was probably where the plot finally felt like it hit its stride... but that's also supposed to be the start of Act 3, the game ends soon after, and even that segment picks up too much speed and ends up skipping over important details.

I suppose what I'm saying is that Origins has a massive pacing problem. And all of this is really strange to think about in consideration that the game was given extra development. Makes me wonder what they would have originally turned in.

edited 16th Apr '18 3:35:30 PM by InkDagger

I feel the extra time went mainly into the open world and side quests, while the main plotline was basically finished in the first stretch of development. That would at least explain the disparity in quality.

It does prove, however, that taking its time does improve the game.

At least they didn't sink their dev time into a crafting system where I can craft 150 distinct items with no other purpose than to sell them, and I end up selling couches just so I can sell more couches.

The Order of the Ancients isn't actually doing that much wrong.

One guy is trying to build a city in the desert.

Most of them are just trying to loot as much from Egypt as possible.

They're greedy Templars making money off the Egyptian minority.

No Haytham Kenways in the group.

Well, they do happen to murder and enslave a lot of people in the process. And looting/corrupting an entire kingdom isn't exactly jaywalking.

The problem is that the villains don't exactly interact with each other much, either. They don't feel like a group most of the time. Some of them barely have the same general goal.

I mean, one of them is just some poor woman who will cross any line to get her daughter back. No apparent greater motive there.

It's more like AC 1 than later editions.

In AC 1, the Templars all had their own agendas and just generally donated to Robert Du Sable's war chest/plan to end the Crusades with MAGIC.

Mind you, I felt the revelation the Old Man was a Templar was BS and he was just an evil Assassin.

Exactly. So it just ends up being confusing how the hell they ever met and etc. With the Hyena, they could have maybe pulled a reveal that she ISN'T in the Order of Ancients and it just ended up being a false lead, but you might as well stop her by the time you find that out. Or they could have mentioned she was in the Order of Ancients, but disappeared and hasn't contacted them since the quest to resurect her daughter started.

I don't quite get how, say, The Scarab or The Lizard fits into Flavius and Septimus' plot. Or why they would ally with the Roman's plot. Maybe this is how The Heron and the others that are dead by the beginning of the plot fit in, but the game doesn't explain that. I can think of a few work arounds (Maybe the Order of Ancients is similar to how the Assassins became and Flavius and Septimus' devision was separate from the group with the Hyena, Lizard, and Scarab? This kind of reveal could suddenly raise the stakes, tie into Aya's growing obession with a more global organization, and clear up the discrpancy) but the game itself gives no answers.

Heck, even my solution doesn't clear everything up as that would require Flavius NOT being the one who actually killed Khemu requiring a 'Head Templar' character to be developed to fill that role. It at least would fix the 'Why is Flavius walking around dressed in Egyptian attire and mask???' bit. The more I think about it, it would probably strength the growing divide between Aya and Bayek; Bayek kills the 'Head Templar' guy and wants to be done with the whole business, but then The Reveal of the Order being larger and having a Roman Cell is what drives Aya to want to take on the world.

Right, but the AC 1 Templars actually interacted. For example, I think one that was kidnapping people off the street was sending them to the insane doctor guy in a different city. I at least felt like everyone got something out of the deal. But I can't see the Scarab and the Lizard being on the same side considering their goals and personality.

Ok, question about Hidden Ones. Ok, I just finished the Shadow of the Scarab quest and... I'm very confused when this takes place. I thought Hidden Ones was about 4 years after the base game, but the Scarab's son was, at my guess, six or seven at the time. 4 years later and I'd place him at 18-21? How? What?

edited 16th Apr '18 5:58:57 PM by InkDagger

Well, the Son of Ra is interesting because he is a false lead.

He's just a lunatic (or is he?)

Mind you, the Proto-Templars don't have any nationalist sentiments. They're for Ptolemy over Cleopatra but that's because he's easier to control. When Ptolemy is killed, then they move to controlling Julius Caesar. That's why the Templars are so hard to fight because they don't care if Egypt, Greece, or the natives are in charge as long as they're the one pulling the strings. That's part of what Bayek finds out as he investigates. He starts fighting the Greeks but ends up discovering the Order is everywhere.

In the Oo A case, they're after magic for power.

edited 16th Apr '18 6:03:56 PM by CharlesPhipps

Hmm, according to the wiki, it is closer to 10 years (48 BC/38 BC). His son could easily be a small 10 year old.

But Flavius and Septimus don't seem particuarly for Ptolemy over Celopatra and they can't possibly 'shift gears to Ceasar' after Ptolemy dies since they're already in Caesar's inner circle at that point. Then again, Ptolemy gets killed off within a scene or two of being introduced and he's introduced the same time our Big Bads are so... the writing just isn't with that one.

Well, they WERE fighting for Ptolemy.

Caesar forgave them and absorbed them into his army. They were a unit of ethnically and culturally Roman soldiers who were serving as mercenaries in Egypt and had been for generations. Because history is weird that way.

It leads to the hilariously awkward fact Caesar must die because he's a merciful ruler. Which in Bayek's time would have been a legitimate reason to murder him. Values Dissonance.

edited 16th Apr '18 6:41:53 PM by CharlesPhipps

Right, when your culture places great importance on personal revenge, a ruler pardoning your enemy is just about the worst thing that could happen.

Though I am not sure if Egypt ever had the same kind of feuding culture Northern Europe used to have.

The Ptolemaic era was a certainly feuding - you had Pharaohs outright erasing the history of their rivals or adopting it for themselves.

I think this highlights something of an issue with the series as a whole - the concepts of "liberty" and "Freedom" that we embrace; plus the idea of emancipation for the wider populace would be strange concepts for a feudal, agrarian society. Their nearest concern is whether there's rain coming, or what the harvest will be. Yes, it speaks to us as an audience, but feels a bit overwrought when trying to get a farmer to buy into it.

He wants freedom to not be stabbed. He wants feedom to maybe not be eaten by a crocodile. But a few NP Cs make the point - they don't really care who's on the throne, as long as they can go about their daily lives.

I imagine many a citizen of mildly oppressive regimes feel the same way.

It's covered a bit in the Origins comic, which is being written by someone who seems mildly Caesar-sympathetic.

Mark Antony does an excellent speech about how the murderers of Caesar hadn't been asked to kill Caesar by the people and removed their defender. That they had decided to do this on their own and had plunged Rome into chaos.

That was what took the shine off a few of my colleagues idealism in Afghanistan. The average farmer was like "What government?" or just "Well that's nice. Now, who's going to pay for burning my field?"

It's like the overenthusiastic revolutionaries from Monty Python or some satirical takes on things.

Its like Machiavelli said in The Prince, the average commoner won't care what the government does if they leave him, his property, family, and livelihood alone. The idea of citizen input legitimizing governments (especially at the top level, local governments have always been more likely to be informally democratic in some places) comes centuries after Origins ends.

Which is probably another problem with Caesar as a Big Bad entirely. Julius Caesar was kind of a 'Big Good' as far as historians are concerned and portraying his assassination as the end of tyranny or a really good event when, in most other stories, its usually a BIG NO-NO and generally agreed that murdering him was a massive mistake that lead to the fall of Rome... uhhhhh...

It needed better build up to what makes him an antagonist. Especially since the mission he's introduced has him and Bayek shaking hands and hugging it out that they killed a War Elephant, but then he's suddenly BIG BAD by the next mission. I wasn't as invested in wanting to see him dead as the characters were. We needed build up, dialogue, confrontations, or just simply ACTION to inform the audience of why we need to hate him now.

Again, I'm not against the idea of 'Caesar was a horrible tyrant' or some other interpretation, but we needed it to make sense rather than having a label inform the audience. And not to have made up events build him into a tyrant role because that just fucks with history on a level I'm not really here for.

We take democracy and freedom for granted in the modern age, forgetting that the only reason we care is because of publicly available, easily accessible education, fast communication. These things allow even a very very poor and poorly educated person to know that they can change the social and legal situation around them by participating in government at the citizen's level, which democratizes government power.

I think is the issue of trying to make the chararter likable and ignoring the values dissonace they should have.

Which eventually give this weird issue of having a murder cult that stab people fighting for right almost 20 twenty century a head of is time.

Making Caesar a Big Good of history is a controversial statement even today as a lot of people are still on Brutus' side in academia. Augustus may have been the go to model for a benevolent dictator but the Emperor system more or less ruined Rome along with (and here is a topical bit of history if there ever was one) the overconcentration of wealth in the hands of a minority as well as outsourcing of labor.

The thing is, you don't NEED to make Caesar the Big Bad of all history to make him the Big Bad of Aya and Bayek's story. He is, after all, allied with Rome and down with Cleopatra's plan to ally herself completely with that country. Egyptian nationalists can all be down with the idea he's a foreign invader.

However, this element of the story shows up at the very last second and, honestly, I feel like rationale Assassins would just leave Caesar alone and kill the guys he spared. i feel like we skipped a third act in storytelling.

edited 17th Apr '18 12:03:48 PM by CharlesPhipps

But... wasn't that the whole point of bringing Cleopatra to Caesar? So she could ally with him? If Bayek and Aya were ok with that, but suddenly he's a tyrant after? I'm confused.

Caesar forgave their enemies and allied with them because they could bring more soldiers and Roman influence to Caesar's rule than the Hidden Ones could. Bayek had Flavius and Septimius on their knees, and Caesar set them free.

The Emperor system did not "ruin Rome" nor did it necessarily lead to a far greater degree of concentration of wealth than was previous. The concentration of wealth was what lead to the fall of the Republic, not vice versa and Brutus and his crew represented the elite status quo oligarchs. (this is not to say concentration of wealth did not increase but the increase from the early republic period to the post-second punic war republic period was far more significant than the increase from said post-second punic war republic period to the principate period).

Brutus himself and probably some of the conspirators were probably idealistic, but they were also representative of the calcification in the system that had lead to repeated civil wars and Ceasar wasn't the first person assassinated by nobles afraid of changes to the system.

Outsourcing of labour? (to slaves rather than sweatshops?) Was taking place previously as a result of the mass enslavement in the aftermath of Rome's conquests. The resulting mass land deprivation of the poor was opposed by Tiberius Gracchus. Killed with a chair leg by a senatorial mob.

Rome's dismissive treatment of the poor and its non-citizen Italian allies? Opposed by his brother, Gaius Gracchus. Committed suicide, after the death of a senatorial attendant in a brawl incurred the wrath of the senate.

Again, the cause of giving citizenship to the Italian allies? Supported by Marcus Livius Drusus. Murdered in his own atrium by assassins unknown.

And what's the result of this violence being injected into the political system? The Social War between the Italian Allies and the Romans. The Marian purges. The Marian/Sullan war. The Sullan purges. The street fights between Clodius Pulcher and Milo. The Caesar/Pompey civil war.

The Emperor system was a temporary end to all of this, (not that you didn't also have civil wars occasionally) and the golden age of Rome is generally regarded to be the Five Good Emperors, and I would personally extend that to include the entire Flavian dynasty as well.

edited 17th Apr '18 3:14:02 PM by Sigilbreaker26

Yeah, I've heard all of that before and have many other systems. While some of that has merit, a lot of it is controversial.

And bluntly, the cult of Caesar and the Good Emperors is accompanied by the incredibly incompetent ones.

Often directly related or following the best of Rome's Emperors.

This is hardly the forum to discuss it, though, and my own opinion can be summarized as, "Real life is complicated."