Assassin's Creed

The design of Odyssey would be great for a Scandinavia-based game.

My only problem with it is you know they'd make us the Vikings and we'd be cheerfully pillaging away without a hint of Values Dissonance or the idea we should be stopping the invaders.

As I understand it, the sidescrollers (Russia, India, and China) were rejected main games.

They were going to do a Shao Jun game but felt it wasn't AC-ish enough.

Ditto one set during the fall of the Sikh dynasty.

But they didn't want to do that one either.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 15th 2018 at 1:39:47 AM

I personally find ship combat in Assassin's Creed to be incredibly artificial. The way you absolutely disappear when you aren't at the helm of your ship; the way crews seem to be comprised of roughly six or seven people; the way you can see every single landmass within feet of each other, making the Mediterranean feel absolutely tiny.

Also, the water in this game got really ugly. The wake left by your ship is utterly unconvincing, and all ships and boats seem to float too shallow on the draft. I feel like Origins did it better. Also, there are models that are bizarrely low-res. Most of them are the "prop" corpses that are used as set dressing. Low-res and simplified physics. They honestly look like blow-up dolls or something. Swim up to a shipwreck, and try to interact with the people floating in the water. They're like inflatables.

Oh wow that walled road between Athens and the port city of Piraes was miles long◊. Man, the game really doesn't do them justice, does it? It's like a thirty second sprint!

It's nice to know one thing is perfect though: The tombs of the ancients was EXACTLY as extra as video games depict them as. This motherfucker had a solid gold coffin.◊

Space Compression isn't new to the franchise.

I don't need to tell you that Boston & New York aren't a short run through some woodlands from one another either :-P

Not seeing the issue since we're playing as someone who isn't an assassin and the game lets you be a total dick about it. That barrier broken.

Also Black Flag exists.

Edited by Ghilz on Oct 15th 2018 at 6:01:58 AM

What's wrong with Vikings? They weren't all pilage and plunder, you know.

They were also traders, but by definition Vikings refers to seafarers known for the raiding. Not the Norse culture as a whole.

Besides, Viking ships were more built for lightning raids, not open battle. In actual direct fights, they fared worse than the castled ships the English sailed. Because of said castling.

So I'm playing through Origins because I had gotten a free copy when I bought my new CPU and finally decided to give it a go. Haven't played since the very first Assassin's Creed though.

What first struck me was the equipment system. It went straight up RPG. In the first game you had your set of equipment and that was it, upgrade as you go. Now I almost feel spoiled for choice on what kind of bow or melee weapon to use.

Next thing that caught my eye (or ear, to be more accurate) is the voice acting. The main characters are alright, but a lot of the quest givers and stuff seem very stilted. Maybe it's just me or maybe the accents are throwing me off.

Finally, Layla seems extremely naive. I read through all the documents when outside the Animus and she really should know better about what she's getting into.

Also, why aren't my "assassinations" actually killing anyone? I just knock them over the head and leave them writhing there without even the option to hide the body. In fact I've mostly been doing straight up combat more than stealthy assassination.

Edited by danime91 on Oct 15th 2018 at 3:44:39 AM

You don't have the Assassin Blade yet.

If you want to do pacifist (somewhat) run, you can unequip weapons (make sure the weapon icon shows a fist) and all assassinations will be nonlethal. However, in Origins, you can't move living unconscious bodies. Clearly an oversight.

Is there even a point to going pacifist? From what I've seen so far, there was only one quest where being pacifist might have resulted in a different outcome (The woman who scammed some Greek dude into "marrying" her, and her brothers come to beat you up. I had no idea about using my fists for nonlethal combat at the time, so I just took my big mace out and killed them. Whoops). And even when I nonlethal assassinate someone, if they're some sort of quest target or whatever, they just keel over and die after a bit.

Origins does not have branching storyline. However, nonlethal in Oddysey can spare you a lot of pain if you're under leveled for the local bounty hunter. Also, it can affect some quests

To actually answer this:

Leaving aside two of the three Chronicles games...Assassin’s Creed III, Liberation, Black Flag (and by extension due to being sold separately, Freedom Cry), and Rogue all take place in the Americas. And Revelations is set in both Europe and Asia, thanks to Constantinople’s unique geography.

In fact, out of the 16 games I would consider the main series and core spin-offs, only six and a half (Revelations) take place in Europe.

To catch up:

Civilians are the worst. Like, yeah, I get that they're civilians, but come on. They're armed and trying to kill me, and if they are a plausible threat to me, I shouldn't be charged for killing them! Though I think your bounty goes up if you kill faction guards in the street, too. Maaaan, I miss the Assassin Blade and its subtle stab-and-keep-walking ability.

@Charles: I totally agree with you about being held back by being AC. I've posted a number of times already how disappointed I've been to realize that there are no gods. I remember wondering what would happen if I fought a particular cultist in the Temple of Poseidon and spilled blood in there, like maybe the seas would be rougher or something, and then I remembered that the gods are dead scientists idolized by monkeys, and cared just that little bit less.

On the subject of lethal/nonlethal, at least the options kind of work the way they're supposed to now. In Syndicate, knocking out bounty hunt targets counted as killing them for the bonus objective to leave them alive (though didn't count against bonus objectives not to kill policemen or so on). Though personally, I find going lethal and not being lethal enough to be more of an annoyance in Odyssey. Crit assassination is nice, but it is a stark change from the previous games to make the 'drop on someone and put a spear through their head' option not actually kill automatically.

Well, they're "undead" digital ghosts.

Not just Juno survived to the present day via Consciousness Uploading. I was very interested in the discovery the Oracle of Delphi knew who Kassandra was and was disappointed it was just another Isu artifact. One of the best elements was when they flat out had Bayek visiting Egyptian Heaven and Hell.

But yes, a full on fantasy setting would have been better.

These games having the AC title is just marketing at this point.

They could just make a stand-alone game or a new franchise in general but it’s easier to just slap on the title & be done with it.

Yeah. I get that it's part of the setting, but this late in the series' progress, there's really no way to present it as anything but dramatic irony when you see everyone taking it so seriously, when you know it's practically nothing to be concerned about at all - even if the Isu do still exist, they can't do anything, so.

Like, I should be worried that I threatened a priestess of Hera who was harassing Hippokrates' student. Hera should be an imposing presence and I should be worried about making her, of all people, angry. Instead, I couldn't care less because she's stuck in a vault in Italy for the next 2500 years, and because they killed her offscreen before the previous game in the series, or whatever they did with her.

I'm confused by this conversation. Why, exactly, do people think that if this game wasn't Assassin's Creed, it would suddenly be God of War, instead of just...historical?

Nailed it on the head. I'm fine with this context as it is.

Besides, this show already exists.

Edited by blkwhtrbbt on Oct 15th 2018 at 9:09:44 AM

I’m not that caught up into adding actual fantasy elements but I do think that the current direction is slowly stretching far & farther than what AC was.

I rather miss the old days when you didn’t have to worry about higher leveled enemies or a shit-ton of useless equipment clogging your inventories forcing constant management.

Edited by slimcoder on Oct 15th 2018 at 7:15:09 AM

But those were the days when you would drop your cool new sword or axe that you picked up just because you were too dumb to carry a harness or sheathe for it. And you were also too stupid to pick up a bow or a crossbow that your enemy dropped and, y'know, use it.

There's totally a "Sniper" ability in Odyssey that makes the bow useful again. I feel like the latest two protags are the best armed in the history of the games. I guess Edward did have guns. And a cannon ship. Never mind, Edward was the best armed.

Because historical fantasy (e.g., God of War) would be more interesting, really. As it is, I'm thirty hours into the game and I couldn't tell you what artifact they're looking for in the modern-day frame plot if you held a gun to my head, so it's not like that's really integral either. I'm not saying I want Kassandra to be dismembering gods, but if you're going to include supernatural abilities in the age of mythology, at least make them actually mythological.

I do agree with slimcoder too, though. The first AC was very minimalistic - you had your toolset, your target, and a plan, and that was about it. There was definitely more of a feeling of finding the perfect window to execute your kill, then bug out and go hide, rather than just dicking around the world until you get a weapon with enough DPS and the right bonus modifiers to be able to assassinate someone instead of just tickling them and having to fight the entire fort and every bounty hunter in the province.

Edited by RedSavant on Oct 15th 2018 at 10:25:25 AM

Excuse you, Edward had two cutlasses, four guns, and a cannoned ship. He is by far the best-armed.

See, but you're phrasing your desire for a historical fantasy as "this game should be a historical fantasy" when it's already not that and there's no indication that it would be even if it wasn't Assassin's Creed.

What you're asking for is a game where the gods are real and active in ancient Greece. But if you're "constantly reminding yourself" that the gods in this game are "just" precursors, that means that there's not really that many fantasy elements in the first place to build that off of. What you're asking for is a fundamentally different game than the one you're playing, regardless of whether it's called Assassin's Creed or not.

Edited by BadWolf21 on Oct 15th 2018 at 9:28:25 AM