Assassin's Creed

Legion?

And agreed, a big nope to live service games.

Yes, I bought the last Watch_Dogs game because I love cyberpunk even in the present day.

Between them dropping the narrative ball when they ditched Desmond, the series getting a mechanical reboot with Origins, the controversies over Unity and now Eivor apparently, I am genuinely surprised most of you stuck around this long. I keep popping in just to see how much this franchise has strayed, and to find out when they'll finally just make Ghost of Tsushima a Japanese protagonist.

Hell, when they moved from giving you DLC's where Connor had superpowers to making basilisks canonical, I thought that was too much.

Edited by FOFD on Jul 8th 2021 at 5:40:20 AM

Well, I could still consider grabbing Valhalla from the bargain bin someday once all the DL Cs are out, or at least get the Discovery Tour mode, but yeah, otherwise I'm pretty done with the series if this is the direction they are going.

GTA seems to be heading in a similar direction, neglecting single player in favour of developing Online. I wouldn't be surprised if the next GTA will suddenly be a game as a service as well, it seems the natural conclusion to all the Online DL Cs.

Well GTA Online is a service making money hand over fist.

Its just done with actual competence.

I'll admit that I enjoy GTA Online, but the drawback is that this instalment has been going on for too long, and even with updates is getting a bit stale. And now they're porting it to another Playstation generation. They effectively skipped all of the PS 4 era with this one.

To be fair, that was due to Red Dead Redemption 2.

Live Service Model is also just not very good for storytelling so far. GTA Online doesn't really have any storytelling at all. And I think why RDR 2 has been such a harder sell is that RDR and especially RDR 2 have been much more narratively driven games that to one degree or another feel much more grounded than the online batshit insanity of GTA. RDR 2 isn't going to give you rockets and nukes or flying bikes. And it isn't going to give you compelling characters with storylines like the main game either.

Or, compare Destiny 2... yeah, it has lore and kinda a story going, but it's not particularly deep or complicated. And, what little story and cutscenes and character development that has occured since launch has taken three years to get there across dozens of individual updates and patches. Yeah, the times where it does have story are genuinely cool and fun, but they're so few and far between that it does make it hard to care to a degree.

Assassin's Creed... I don't think it fits the live service model at all. Ok, so, say we're doing a "Create Your RPG Hero" for a modern setting and we jump into the animus for these variety of settings... I can't see the game getting this rich, detailed, historically developed story and setting delivered via regular patches. Take Syndicate for example, I don't know how you'd really split Jacob and Evie's story up over, say, a 12 month update period and I feel like, yeah, the story would be truncated, less developed, and just more bare bones as to meet release deadlines.

To know that they further intend MULTIPLE historical settings... That reads to me as smaller open worlds with smaller and less developed stories as a developmental need. We're shipping Edo Japan in 3 months and we need to launch on time rather than... taking the time to do something interesting and compelling with it.

Say what you will about Odyssey, Valhalla, and Unity... I do think there's A LOT to those settings as portrayed. I don't agree or like everything, but there's clearly a lot of work and effort. I feel like we're not going to end up with an AC game that has 5 games branching off from it... we're going to get an AC game with 5 half-assed settings branching off within it.

It might end up being exactly the issue I had with Origins; All of the little plot arcs with each target kinda just existed in an episodic format but didn't really do much for an overall narrative. They were all just kinda... there. Each target will be a different patch update but none will really carry a deep developed narrative on their own. And then we'll climax and fight the big bad cuz it's time to and because Ubisoft has their Year 2 Season Pass ready to launch the next setting.

I have had consistent issues with AC's writing being rather shallow and not engaging their settings in interesting ways. Live Service just means it's only going to get shallower.

Edited by InkDagger on Jul 9th 2021 at 11:42:33 AM

...I’m just bored enough to play Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag on my PS 3. Never got far into it, got my own ship last time I checked.

Yeah, it sounds like it is going to be the theme park edition of AC, with a lot of small, shallow maps.

Tried that too a while back, it didn't go well because I had forgotten the controls and it was hard to figure out what was what.

Edited by Redmess on Jul 10th 2021 at 10:28:53 AM

As I recall Ghost Recon Breakpoint was a prior attempt by Ubisoft at a live-service title and....... it did not go well.

The live service model has been an enormous failure for a lot of game companies chasing it because SUCCESSFUL versions actually screw with their business model. EA found out that if you have a game everyone plays forever, they're not buying your other ones.

That's a good point, so for that model you'd basically have to accept that you are going to be a one game studio.

And they never realize this until they make multiple games that end up bombing.

It's also a problem with the live service model that... once you have the game out... you are stuck with that game. If there are any issues that require a sequel to course correct on... too fucking bad. Whomp whomp.

Even Destiny isn't actually that great of an example of a success. They struggled with the fact that Destiny 2 was a separate game from Destiny one and they halved their own player base.

You need to be like WOW and only add to it.

So be an MMO basically.

Probably the reason why Destiny 2 is nothing but expansions.

Questions for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag:

1. This might be the first time I've actually noticed and utilized the whole "corner assassination" thing. It's weird, I could never remember doing that whenever I played Assassin's Creed.

2. Does anybody have any tips for ship combat? I remember the last time I played it, I couldn't get the hang of it.

3. So, is there a way to tell wind direction? Just curious since there's this long arrow thing on my compass so I thought that was it.

That's because previous games didn't have corner assassinations. Or hiding behind cover, for that matter. The only thing Ezio could ever do was awkwardly stand behind a corner waiting for his target.

And the long arrow is wind direction, though I don't think it really does anything. This is not a sailing simulator. You go equally fast equally easily in any direction you want.

Edited by Redmess on Jul 14th 2021 at 7:05:52 PM

Thought this was interesting.

Is Bowden's Black Flag novelization worth reading?

The best Discovery Tour yet apparently.

I always love Bowden's work. I actually think his biography of Haytham is the best, though.

Wow, this Discovery Tour is basically its own game. That sounds like great fun.

It is a bit of a shame that they seem to have saved the larger production value, like voice over narration, for behind the scenes stuff rather than historical information, and the latter tends to be less detailed than the former. A little navel gazing from the developers, it seems, more interested with the game design than with the history.

Still, the new way of discovering things through quest lines is really fun and innovative.

Edited by Redmess on Oct 21st 2021 at 11:30:35 AM