Assassin's Creed

They don't. I managed it once. Your crew do seem to react, but I jumped back to my ship and kicked him into the sea before they had a chance to actually do anything.

Fastest way to win ships is to spartan kick all the enemy crew into the sea.

Seems the only person who can swim with heavy bronze armor is you.

Don't forget the pocket dimension where you store your hundreds of pieces of armor and weapons.

Entertainingly, if you have any need for two copies of a particular piece of the Pirate set, kick the Cultist off his ship, then kill him with a bow in the water. You'll get two pieces, one when you kick him and the other when you kill him. Found that out when I decided not to leave the death part to chance, even kilometers away from shore.

Edited by RedSavant on Oct 22nd 2018 at 1:34:01 PM

Hunting down Skylax the Fair, a Cultist. Only to find he's gotten ambushed by Athenian soldiers and they are kicking his ass. Just left them to finish the job.

Yeah, it's amusing how these things can happen dynamically at times.

It is only a matter of time before someone tries to break the game by killing as many cultists as they can before the game reveals their existence.

I wonder what would happen if you kill a cultist before that first cultist mission.

They don't spawn, I don't think. I walked into a location with only Cultist Guards, murdered them all, looted the place, and came back later to find the cultist.

What about the woman in the bear cave? I know I saw her there before I knew she was a Cultist (didn't kill her because it was a rather tough fight).

I found an odd bug where sometimes the hitbox for an enemy does not align with the actual NPC. You can see this most clearly with the bow - sometimes it shows you can hit them even when your aim is just beside them, or you can't hit the NPC at all unless you aim a bit lower or to the side.

It's possible to kill a cultist without knowing they're a cultist. I've done it twice.

Some won't spawn, but others can still be killed entirely by accident.

I actually really really like that in an open world game. It doesn't feel like they were just put there for you and the plot. They were there, living their own life, and you just so happened to stumble across them. That is fantastic and I wish more games were like that.

Although

the lovers despawn after their quest is done. I haven't been able to find my hunky Chora of Delphi doctor ever since....

I R sad.

I know. I was hoping he could be required as a lieutenant...

And half of them decamp to your ship and become a name and a few stats.

Speaking of the ship, don't be fooled into thinking that this game is Black Flag. Your crew is immortal, storms don't do much anymore to stop you, there are no more rogue waves, and your ship will be utterly crushing enemy ships left and right before you even start unlocking the legendary stuff. This is more like Black Flag Lite.

Though I am very thankful that they got rid of the 200 tiny islands and shipwrecks idea from Black Flag.

They still don't give you a boat to row to shore. Wtf kind of captain just dunks into the water every time they want to go exploring?

Also, this is the Mediterranean, not the Atlantic.

Yeah, I remembered some of the absolute dread open water caused in Black Flag, and it felt like something was missing. I keep catch myself waiting for the real storms. I guess part of it is that it's the Mediterranean and not the full might of the Atlantic Ocean?

Anyway, I've learned that a high Assassination build and poison will let you take down targets much stronger than you. I've killed cultists and Mercenaries at level 47 (I'm 42 currently), so I basically only have the story-linked cultists in the Delian and Peloponnesian Leagues, the Sages, and the Ghost left.

I guess getting into & lowering a rowboat would take too long.

It’s a lot faster to just jump off the ship straight into the water.

Indeed the ship mechanics in this game are pretty underwhelming. Feels sorta tacked on.

Edited by slimcoder on Oct 22nd 2018 at 5:24:56 AM

Also, no more helpful fisher boats come to give you a ride. That was a great feature in Origins.

I actually hated the Fisher boats in Origins. They kept flat-out ramming me.

I like how you can run across Isu ruins just sitting there, especially the sphinx and those volcanic islands. I wish there had been a little more of that, and some more Isu tombs, instead of the rather generic ones we have now.

I'm seeing not a lot of heavy bronze armor, and a whole lot of shirtlessness instead. I'm 100% not complaining, of course, but what's with the nearly naked fighting?

Well ya know Ancient Greeks, specifically Spartans have been stereotyped into fighting half or just fully naked.

...no? That's only the soft porn movie with the Scottish dude? And the comic it was based on? What's bizarre is that like, camp leaders had correct armor. The Athenians common soldiers had correct linothorax as well. It's only the Spartans, who have heavy Corinthian helmets, and no other armor.

Okay so just the Spartans then.

I think it's part of making the Spartans the cool guys. Note how the plot also tends to favor the Spartans. We are clearly supposed to root for Sparta. Which kinda makes sense, I guess, since they won the war historically.

That's a thing to remember. We are not seeing the rise of Athens, here. This game chronicles the fall of the Athenian empire, and the game wants us to root for the Foregone Conclusion.

Which is historically weird, by the way. We call it the Peloponnesian war because we historically tend to side with Athens, even though they lost. The Spartans would have called it the Attic war. They say history is written by the victors, but in this case, it was written by the losers.

You know what I miss about these tombs the most? The intricate puzzles and beautiful settings of the first games. They were unique, fun, and memorable. And most importantly, there were never more than a dozen of them. Now they give us a hundred tombs because they tied it to the ship upgrade mechanic, so they turned tombs into something generic they could easily create dozens of superficially different but essentially identical tombs with. And they are ALL dark and drab looking. Would it kill the devs to put a few tombs in one of those temples?

One review claims this game has not made much sacrifice of quality for quantity, but I disagree. This game has definitely made sacrifices of quality in exchange for quantity, and it shows. The gameplay mechanics have all been simplified to some extent, the voice acting is not up to par in places, and while visually stunning, I see a fair amount of graphics glitches around, especially when it comes to the corners of interiors letting in light where they shouldn't. One barn I remember in particular was so bad with this that turning around in it turned it into a disco ball of flickering spots of light.

And some mechanics are made less fun, as well. The Bazaar from Origins, where you could buy rare items for high amounts of cash is gone, replaced with a system where you have to collect yet another rare resource just to be able to buy something. And those missions you need to do are a lot more convoluted as well. The Bazaar used to be a reward for when the player was doing well, giving a little extra. Now it is another excuse to give you the runaround, just like the ship upgrade resource.

These riddles to get engravings are another mechanic stretched thin by the "quantity over quality" mentality. On their own, they are fun, but again, it is the sheer quantity of it that turns it into a slog over time. These dozens upon dozens of puzzles, often sending you to places you've already been anyway, do a lot to bloat out the playing time.

You're still collecting feathers, guys. They just give you tiny stat boosts, instead.

The tombs aren't tied to ship upgrades. Ruins are.

Tombs give out skill points.

Get a quest from an NPC complaining about the water tasting bad and an animal getting sick from drinking it.

Go down to the river.

Kass: It's probably the metal in that armor that's making the water bad.

Quest objective: Carry bodies out of the river

Yes. It's the metal that's the problem.

They honestly might not have known. This was thousands of years before Hook and his microscope.