Assassin's Creed

It was? Really?

That's just awful, honestly. Resolve it in the main games, not some supplementary material.

So I take it the Juno storyline has been discarded, then?

Gah. Now I have even less motivation to play. The sci-fi meta-plot was my primary draw.

Feedback was, apparently, people weren't enamoured with it. Plus it was getting really messy with all the other Isu just rocking up in games and side materials. Textbook example of the writers disappearing up their own lore...

Anyway, yeah, read the summary. I did. It's WEIRD.

Tho the sci fi gubbins are strong in Odyssey - front and centre. Just it's a different arc and building on the Origins stuff... though they talk about the Staff of Marcus Aurelius as if it was a key plot point... and not something I barely noticed in that game. So they're a bit more consistent here.

"Perhaps as part of her journey, perhaps simply because she was feeling violent that day, Kassandra unknowingly completed a job. All that remained was for her to collect her pay."

They got feedback that people weren’t enamoured with the Juno plot because they did fuckall with the Juno plot.

I'm not gonna shed any tears for the Juno plot, it really was kinda garbage, but resolving it in a comic isn't great - especially when most of the audience is never going to fucking read the comic and know the plot was resolved. But like I said, no value lost. Juno was a Generic Doomsday Villain and less interesting than the Templars whom she was usurping as villains.

That said, I do love the Isu elements of Odyssey.

Aletheia might be my favorite Isu so far with her no-hold-barred "This is why we sucked as Precursor" commentary in Atlantis

Edited by Ghilz on Oct 9th 2018 at 1:24:25 PM

Yeah, I can hardly fault them for jettisoning that particular albatross. Just putting it off on a comic seems like a crappy way to do it.

But that's what I have this site for, I guess.

They could have at least acknowledged it in the present-day documentation on Layla's computer.

I mean, I'm on record elsewhere (AKA whining) as saying that I personally hate Ancient Aliens. In my opinion there's no better way to drain a series, especially one that deals with mythology, of any kind of majesty or gravitas. Athena's shield Aegis, imbued with the powers of Medusa's head after Perseus beheaded her? That's a legend, because it has a legend. That's a treasure worth going after. Some defensive matrix made by a random alien scientist? Useful, sure. Cool? Maybe. But it's not a legend, and it shouldn't really be treated as anything more than a Names The Same similarity, honestly. Same for all the Isu characters, too.

I just think they should have TRIED to get people enamoured with the plot rather than throwing it away. It retroactivly undermines... basically the first 5 games. Desmond's choice means nothing.

At the very least, resolve it in a game, even if it’s not quicker and less important to the story than initially planned.

Yeah, that just doesn't make sense no matter how you feel about the Isu plot.

I hate to break it to you: it never did.

3 doesn't even set up HOW Desmond saves the world. All Juno does is listed the shit they tried that didn't work, and not the one they got ready. Why Desmond died from pushing a button made no goddamn sense. That Juno set this all up while being imprisoned and none of her counterparts, who were free to act, made no sense.

Desmond's "Sacrifice" was always a big empty payoff to mark the end of the first arc, but it never was meaningful or worthwhile.

Oh, I agree. Desmond died because Ubisoft didn't like that he wasn't a good face of the frachise and would rather go... headless for a few years tbh. I hate that he died.

But making a stupid short sighted decision seem even dumber by undermining his death is worse.

However, they DID tell you how they saved the world, if just not explicitly. Juno, when explaining the tower solution, explains that the solution failed because it would take too long but 'Some thought to automate the process' but never explains why that solution wouldn't work. The implied answer is that it DID work, but just took too long to be useful to the Isu, but Juno used it for her solution in AC 3.

Juno could have been interesting. And compelling. I would have loved to explore her and I though her parts in 3 were a decent start. But everything after didn't move things forward.

Pretty sure Desmond was always slated to die.

Nope. Desmond's VA, Nolan North, has said in interviews that Desmond was meant to carry on beyond AC 3, but Ubisoft wasn't happy with the character's direction. I remember him mentioning it when I saw an AC Panel at my local con, but I'd have to go searching for it.

Desmond was meant to be a thread across the enitre series, but everyone hated him for being 'bland' so they threw him away... in the game that he finally got character development.

It seems like a think with Ubisoft that, if something doesn't work the first time, throw it away instead of fixing it.

Wow. They actually threw out a major arc in a supplementary comic because of fucking course they did. Goddamn it.

And I agree that killing off Desmond was a mistake. He could have been shifted away from the main character position, but they put too much effort into developing him. The next 4 or so installments had zero direction in terms of the meta plot.

I disagree. Black Flag's use of the meta plot was great. I liked the first person, "You do corporate espionage at Abstergo" shit. I wish they'd have done more of that.

The rest were awful and terribad though.

None of which explains how Desmond saved the world. Which is what I said. Besides the fact that it's implied rather than told (And the description doesn't match the cutscene since it's supposed to be a bunch of grounding stations, and what we see looks more like a shield). If they could automate it to build itself. They could automate it to launch on its own. None of this requires Desmond. So we're again at "How did Desmond save the world?"

Edited by Ghilz on Oct 9th 2018 at 11:05:15 AM

Yeah the modern day plot really should have just been dropped at this point if they have no interest of actually doing anything substantial with it.

As the series has shifted away to just being a general exploration of various historical eras it makes all the Isu stuff a ball & chain.

Edited by slimcoder on Oct 9th 2018 at 8:03:00 AM

I mean, I read the culmination of Desmond's arc as him failing. He gave in to Juno and doomed the whole planet to life under Juno's heel instead of believing in the resilience and strength of humanity, and it killed him and freed a vengeful precursor into the world's networks. That doesn't exactly scream success to me. (Disclaimer: I don't remember if the coronal mass ejection then came immediately afterward, because I played that game in high school.)

Though yeah, I mean, the Assassins never win. Which makes sense given that there always needs to be Templars to fight and dismantle and so on, but it was still pretty pathetic watching the end of Syndicate boil down to 'Assassins lead Templars directly to the treasure, completely fail to secure it against at most three enemies, then get shot and fail to kill, injure, or even tail any of them'. I understand the modern Assassins haven't had the Animus training Desmond did, but come on.

Though really, Syndicate did lean pretty heavily on the 'solve all the puzzles for the bad guys and then watch them get away with it' trope in general.

^Like I said, I would have loved for Odyssey to contain actual mythological creatures and the gods and so on, but knowing that it's all just the Isu is some bullshit.

Edited by RedSavant on Oct 9th 2018 at 11:16:56 AM

Kotaku Editor Jason Schreier Berates YouTubers for Criticizing Microtransactions:

I placed it here because Jason apparently did this in response to people criticizing Odyssey's microtransactions.

Actually I wouldn't say Desmond failed. The alternative would have been for the apocalypse to happen and most of humanity being wiped out, leading to the complete collapse of civilization. The alternative was doing the Toba bottleneck of the human species all over again. Next to THAT, releasing a single Isu, no matter how powerful she may be, is almost trivial.

Also, the Isu may be powerful, but I still don't see how a single one of them is going to conquer all of humanity. An entire civilization of Isu had trouble with a human uprising that was probably far smaller than what Juno would be facing today. Add to that that humanity has not sat still when it comes to technological development, and even the Isu admit humanity is rivaling the Isu in some areas.

And given how easily she apparently went down, well, that proves the point, doesn't it? They may style themselves as gods, but they are still, for lack of a better term, very human under all that advanced technology and their magic sixth sense.

I think Hubris is one of their defining traits? They rely far too much on that sixth sense and the assumption they are superior. It's one of the underlying themes of the games: the Templars veneration of "Those who came before" - using their tools to try to control and ultimately falling into the same traps as the Isu.

Essentially the Assassin / Templar conflict is the Human / Isu one, writ small.

As for Juno, I think she was planning on using the reactivated Apples / artefacts to sway a humanity that was more vulnerable thanks to technology - the internet, space travel etc, allows for easier transmission of the Apple and other tools. It's a plot point in AC 1 that the Templars wanted to launch the Apple into space to expand its range planet wide, using satellites. I think Juno had a similar game plan.

Also, looking at the flashier elements of Odyssey - it makes a lot more sense that you don't have fall damage, or how you can do a lot of what you do - the Spear.

Imagine playing AC 2 with the Apple from the start - because that's essentially this game.

Not dying from falling is a skill you develop as you level up. Many of the weird things are.

I think my biggest issue with them using the AC underpinnings for this game is that, like I said, it kind of ruins the anticipation you get from other fantasy works. Like, normally I'd be excited to go see the Temple of Artemis, or I would get to knowingly tip my head when someone says something about pissing off Zeus or something, like, oh, just wait until the mid-late game. But no, we already know that they A) were basically just scientists and pencil-pushers and B) are all dead anyway.