Assassin's Creed

Played the first DLC, and while it was fun, well... what's up with the dialogue? Why are the lines so disjointed? Nearly every conversation is interrupted with awkward pauses between characters.

Also, weird shenanigans with those caves. You fall through the floor during your fight with Darius, but when you go back there, there's no hole. Same with that cave at the end. It's just gone, it seems.

Also, it's weird how Kass is commenting on how lonely she is, when at this point I have saved her entire family, and they're all on board your ship, to boot. Same thing with the Order of Kosmos, who are all dead and gone at this point, but the characters treat them as if they are still around.

What are you supposed to do with these little medallions?

Had a side mission where I needed to find... the Pythagorean theorem? Not being able to bring up that you know him personally is a missed chance, as is not being able to bring it up with Pytha Ggoras. I think they killed him off a little too soon. Who is going to guide us into Atlantis, now?

It was apparently written and done by a separate team so I'd chock janky dialogue and other things up to that? Idk.

Odyssey will get a New Game Plus this month.

I don't understand why they don't add that from the start, same with those extra save files.

I find the Tempest rather hard to take seriously at this point in the game. I must have killed a dozen ships that claimed to be the most feared in the Aegean. At this point, there is only ONE feared above all others on the seas, and that is the Adrestia.

It also makes all the hesitation about direct confrontation look rather silly.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 9th 2019 at 5:08:21 PM

Yeah I will said japan in meji restauration could be intersting, rather than another ninja vs samurai in general.

... How did that engineer get murdered? HOW? He could have hidden on your ship, for one. And where in the hell was Darius??

Reading about Akhenaten and his "golden orb", it is remarkable how well it fits in with the AC lore. The Aten is depicted as a golden orb in hieroglyphics, and Akhenaten even claims the Aten guided him towards the location of his new temple.

A Kotaku story about the patch for the second DLC fixing the romance options, at least to some extent. You can't forego it entirely, and you WILL have a baby, because that's clearly where the story needs to go, but it is made more clear that the alternative to romance is preserving the bloodline.

I feel rather indifferent one way or another, but if this makes people happy, sure. The author of this article writes that narrative changes should be fair game if the choices presented to players are not to their liking, but I feel that in this case, the story clearly takes precedence over any choices the player gets to make. I feel the developers shouldn't have leant so much on player choice in the first place, and that the RPG elements to the story do not really fit the kind of fixed and involved narrative AC wants to tell.

As for the next DLC, it is coming next week. Can't wait for Atlantis, though, which I expect to be much more fun and interesting than this trilogy (that's not to say I didn't enjoy the first DLC trilogy, mind you).

Heh. I find the fix equally awful for a huge number of reasons, but frankly my sympathy well for Ubisoft is empty over this. They paved the road they then chose to blindly follow off a cliff themselves.

I can say that I know a handful of LGBT players who were thrilled when the game came out to be able to play a character as lesbian / gay (Especially the former. Strong Action Lesbian protagonists are rare in video games). And the DLC to them came as a betrayal, and saying "But it's the way they want to take the plot" didn't soften the blow one bit.

I don't think the patch will fix anyone's opinion. It's just there for Ubisoft to get quick PR to say they addressed the problem without actually doing it.

Heck, honestly I find the new plot even worse. Hetcon the player (Thank you Jim Sterling) or go "Well Gays and Lesbians should bite the bullet and breed for the family's sake!" Coz non-heterosexuals don't get told enough that they could just try and be straight.

Edited by Ghilz on Mar 1st 2019 at 8:07:11 AM

I mean, plot-wise everything makes sense. I don't think anyone's arguing otherwise. The problem is that they hyped up being able to play as gay/bi/whatever you want, and then they decided to immediately put a baby making plot in the DLC.

If they wanted the mistios to have descendants, I think it should have been offscreen. Kassandra has two thousand years of history. A brief line of "yeah, the blood was drying up so I had to take one for the team" might have caused problems, but there would have been significantly less outcry than this.

Yeah, having it happen of screen and not make the DLC about it would've probably been less bad.

Or heck, just make it clear the character's bisexual from the get go. Just include a line in the core game where they say they swing both way. Don't just whip it out post game when the players have grown attached or identified with their character.

And don't play the woke card about "Our game is super inclusive y'all. You can play whatever you want" and then turn around and go "LOL No jk Thanks."

They learned well from Bioware, didn't they?

Offer all the choices and then take over and decided the characters gender and sexuality and make everyone hate them.

Well the game doesn't retcon your gender.

I also can't remember a bioware game that actually changes your character's gender and sexuality? There's sequels that have done that to their previous entries, for the sake deciding on a specific status quo, but I can't think of a Bioware game that went "Nope, you're straight now!"

The game doesn't, but the Misthios is canonically female.

And Bioware are notorious for writing for a specific character in mind while using choices as a marketing ploy, which is what Ubisoft essentially did. They were just worse about it.

Edited by deludedmusings on Mar 1st 2019 at 11:18:44 PM

Heh, I don't mind the "Character is canonically X" because when you do sequels you often want to pick a previous state. So I cam roll with that. Even sequels deciding what the previous character was. It doesn't change how I played my character, or my experience with them. My choices still mattered for my playthrough. What the dev says in Word of God is background noise and sometimes even necessary.

Doing it mid game however I find despicable.

True enough and, obviously, changing a characters sexuality after getting players emotionally invested is an extra kind of fucked up. Even this sad little ace was annoyed.

Edited by deludedmusings on Mar 1st 2019 at 11:33:33 PM

That depends. Do you regard the DLC as a later addition to the story, or was it always going to be part of the narrative? I wouldn't be surprised if the DLC story was planned out well in advance, together with the main story.

They should never have started the gay character hype wagon when they never intended to go that route in their story. And I agree making her canonically bi would have softened a lot of it.

The DLC are still part of the same story. You literally pick up from the same save, with the same character, wearing the same gear, at the same spot where you last played. Heck, you can even play the DLC without having finished the main game.

So I don't really give them the exemption I might give sequels.

The third installment of Legend of the First Blade is out.

Watch Darius make an incredibly cruel joke to Kassandra's face about her child "missing" (actually playing hide and seek). What a dick.

Edited by Redmess on Mar 5th 2019 at 12:45:43 PM

May have to take an anthem break to finish that off. I really enjoyed the DLC so far.

Looking forward to seeing what they do with Atlantis.

So are the rumours of Japan bearing any fruit? I think we've got more in terms of live service from this game before that rears its head. Plus since we know what happens (Mostly) with the Misthios I wonder how much mileage they can get out of them.

Shockingly, nothing has leaked yet for the next Assassin’s Creed.

Other than rumors, nothing confirmed; there was a new rumor that came out in the last couple weeks that the next installment (due out in possibly 2020) is codenamed Legion, which hints at Ancient Rome, which feels unlikely, though between feudal Japan and Ancient Rome, I’m leaning towards Rome a little more, though the setting, guessed at around the second century AD, is less than three centuries after the Hidden Ones start making their mark on Rome.

Why unlikely? There is PLENTY of history involving Rome. It would be good to cover a bit of interesting Roman history that doesn't begin and end with Julius Ceasar. The first Punic War (of Hannibal fame) would be an interesting period, for example.

The new DLC revolves around your domestic life, which explains why Ubi's hands were pretty much tied with the ending of the second DLC.

Edited by Redmess on Mar 5th 2019 at 3:17:48 PM

Which is a pretty bone headed concept... if you're advertising on a pure "choice" basis.

But anyway - it makes sense if you follow Pythagoras' attitude of "continuing" the blood line.

I would have liked more Bayek and maybe some more Egypt exploration. They had a lot they could've done there that now feels wasted. Also, the whole Aten thing... yeah darn cool. Though it says a lot of about symbolism across myths and the nature of stories sharing themes, doesn't it?

Without adding that Rome has the big advantage of letting them re-use a lot of assets. And we know how much Ubisoft loves that.

Probably not as many as you think. The setting would be centuries removed from Brotherhood, and the technology is already almost a decade out of date, and a console generation removed.