That's not really true. Almost all AAA games use flash + scaleform these days. It may be why they're so horribly slow, but building your menus in flash doesn't mean they're necessarily slow. If you run everything through actionscript it'll be a touch slower and take up a lot more memory, but you'd have to have a bunch of know-nothing engineers to do that, and even then it wouldn't account for the speed of the ACIII menus.

More likely they're slow because they've got pretty much their entire memory budget used during gameplay, and have to swap out some of their bundles when accessing the map or menu - and may even need to swap some bundles for each sub-section of the menu.

Just got ACIII on the Steam sale. I had avoided getting it before because my laptop has half of the minimum processor speed but it was so discounted I figured that even if I couldn't play it right away I might play it a year or two in the future with a computer that could run it.

Actually it runs, which shows that their minimum processor speed is inflated. It slows down sometimes but so far it's remained playable, although I'm still in the beginning parts of the game.

I noticed there seems to be no option to turn down the graphics, only to reduce the resolution, which strikes me as unusual. I haven't been obliged to turn down the resolution yet.

I appreciate all of the historical research that went into this game and the blurbs. I really like a game where you can learn something while playing, so I love brushing up on my American history while playing. If anything I am annoyed by the fantasy alien blah blah aspects of the story.

In some ways the game seems really easy. Getting hit by enemy attacks does ridiculously small amounts of damage and you regenerate. They might as well have decided that all the Assassins are vampires and it would have made more sense than that you're basically a physad. However, it's harder than the first AC game (I only played 1 and III, having skipped II) to time the counters so it's harder to play a perfect game.

One thing I really like about the combat system is how you can bayonet people. I feel like bayonet combat is an extremely important part of historical western martial arts that was much more advanced and developed in the 1700s and 1800s than today. So it was good to see an appealing representation, albeit fantastical, in a game.

One of my big pet peeves is how your superhuman assassin can apparently eat a volley of musket fire from like ten guys and keep fighting (which almost looks comical like a Monty Python sketch), but somehow if a wolf tackles him he dies. Which is more grossly traumatic, getting hit by a bunch of musket balls or being bitten by a dog? Come on....

Just now my guy kept jumping out of a hay cart when I wanted him to stay in there. When you want to stay in the hay cart do you press a direction or is your directional control neutral?

Thinking about it, I love the atmosphere and storytelling that they manage to do with the engine.

For someone like me who is more interested in historical fiction or even historical speculative fiction than out and out historical fantasy, I would have appreciated someone making a similar game just dealing with history, where you get to play a historical figure or something.

It would obviously still be a little fantastical due to the engine, but it would also be hilarious and awesome.

Like, what if you got to play as the Marquis de Lafayette, except that he basically has Matrix powers per the game engine? It would be hilarious and a good game while still being able to present lots of artistic takes on various moments in history.

So, when you're about to get mauled by wildlife, are you supposed to tap E once, hold E, or mash E? Because I can't seem to avoid getting mauled.

I still think it's ridiculous that being stabbed with a bayonet or shot barely damages you all, but being bitten by a wolf or other wildlife drains over half your health meter. There's no comparison between the kind of penetration and organ damage we'd expect from the former and the latter.

"You look like you could pass for a Spaniard! So, you should call yourself 'Connor'!"

"What? Is 'Connor' a Spanish name? Why not 'Guerrero' or 'Lopez' or 'Mendez' or something?"

"'Connor' will be much more convincing for portraying a Hispanic persona, just use it."

Wow, I am really impressed at the selection of historical weapons you can acquire. I have to appreciate their attention to historical detail.

I figured out that usually when it tells you to hit a button, it means to mash that button. I wish they'd explained it in the tutorial text a little better; after all in some games you don't get credit unless you hit the button once with perfect timing, so I wasn't sure exactly what to do.

In every Assassin's Creed I've played, you cannot hide in a hiding spot (haycart, etc,) if you are in combat or running away from enemies who have line of sight on you. The Assassin will leap into it, then realize "no wait, this is stupid, they saw me jump in here and are gonna set the cart on fire or something," and will then immediately jump out.

If you're not in line of sight of hostiles, though, just hold the directional key towards the cart until the Assassin jumps in, then let go of the movement keys and wait. Or jump into it from above.

Oh, I see. I tried it out now. Yes, I suppose that is more realistic.

So, I was playing this evening and watched my guy swim across a lake, reach the other shore, and immediately start running.

Once, in real life, I participated in a triathlon. I jumped into a lake, swam as fast as I could, got to the shore, and planned to immediately start running.

To my amazement I had to take a whole bunch of careful steps once I reached the shore. After swimming my heart out, I actually felt kind of unsteady on my feet. I didn't want to start running and immediately do a face plant so I took the time to make sure I was really OK before I started running.

So when I saw the guy swimming with the heavy overcoat and carrying like 4 weapons reach the shore and just start swimming, it made me fondly recall my real life experience which was far less glamorous.


I'm still having trouble with the wildlife killing me. I think not dying to wildlife is the hardest part of this game, because you can't fight them normally, but rather force you to mash only specific buttons.

Wolves suck hard in that game. The whole hunting(or getting mauled by aggressive, starved wolves) thing felt more tedious than any other part of the game. Also: QTEs are a pox upon huge manatees.
This being said: Don't look for realism. After all, those haystacks apparently soak up all momentum you have from 200m up when you jump into them.

I like the AC games' eye for detail, such as the accuracy of the dying dates of historical personalities, but personally, I'm playing for the lovingly created environments. The amount of empty woods in AC3 honestly put me off a whole lot, but on the other hand, the naval missions more than made up for it. Because of this stroke of (accidental) genius, AC4 is my personal favorite of the series.

I havent't played Unity yet, (and probably won't), but the criticism surrounding it and the lack of pirate ships seem to make it very weak.

Having just recently finished Far Cry 3, I'm fairly confident that at least one game designer at Ubi Montreal has a sexual fetish for Quick-Time Events.

You're also not an 18th-century Native American-born Assassin, who's been running, jumping, climbing, swimming, diving, hunting, and murdering since he was a mid-teen.




I'll let you in on a trick with the wildlife: you can fight them normally in every mode of combat except open-conflict melee.

You can whip out a gun, or your bow and arrow, and shoot them dead. You can hide in stalking spots and hiding spots and assassinate them with your knife when they get close. You can climb trees and other things and avoid them, or air assassinate them. And if you're riding a horse, they basically can't do shit to you.

When you're in the wilderness, you should try never to be running around in the open on foot. Take to the trees if at all possible, steal someone's horse if you need to travel a long distance. Unlock the fast-travel points and use them.

And, lastly, the QTEs to kill aggressive wildlife tends to be the same pattern per animal, with maybe one button varying, and the timing is reasonably generous. Learn the patterns, watch the variable, and git gud. You'll get a lotta pelts that way, even if hunting beavers is still going to be far more profitable in the end.





They do indeed suck hard.



It's my theory that there's some kind of minor supernatural enchantment or a greater tapping of Precursor genes on the Assassin's Brotherhood that lets them do all the slightly superhuman things they do, like make 200m haystack dives and not wind up pavement pizza, or swim across a lake and transition directly to sprinting and murdering.




The lack of pirate ships - or naval frigates, or what-have-you - in ACU really put me off it, too. The availability of AC Rogue is kind of like a wet-dick slap in the face. "You liked sailing around and kicking ass? Sure, do that again! But now you get to be a Templar, you evil Templar bastard you. Go murder a billion Assassins." Fuck you. I'd only play AC Rogue if it was literally free.

ACU was... Okay. It is far and away the worst Assassin's Creed game I've played, bearing in mind I haven't played AC 1. It's So Okay it's Average. Revolutionary France is breathtakingly gorgeous, and I don't even hate the story so much, but they did so much fucking wrong:

Combat is a lot harder now. Some people like that, but I was perfectly fine with the combat in AC3 and Black Flag. You have to git gud or you will experience terrible rape at the hands of even street thugs, and this wasn't helped by the first weapon they gave Arno being a fucking useless blunted sabre, meaning that even street thugs did like, 5x the damage to you that your strikes did to them. It wasn't so bad once I got a better weapon in my hand, though that annoyingly only happened after I'd joined the Order, which was itself after I'd been let free into Paris to roam, meaning I fought a lot of needlessly difficult battles.

They also locked practically everything behind unlocks in the name of "Character Customization." This I found frustrating: Do I want to be able to assassinate two guys now, do I want to be able to Air Assassinate one guy now, or do I want to be able to throw a pouch of money (something even Ezio figured out before he was even an Assassin,) to distract people. Or do I want to be able to open up those FUCKING LOCKED DOORS AND CHESTS!

Those locks. Oh, those FUCKING LOCKS. Do you remember how annoying locked shit was in AC3? Remember how Edward Kenway solved the problem of locked doors and chests by BASHING THEM THE FUCK OPEN!? AC Unity backslid to worse than AC3. In AC3, you moved the mouse until you found the sweet spot, then moved it again to find another sweet spot. Literally anyone could do it, you had infinite time (limited only by the time until some guard came and saw you and ran you through) to do it, your lockpicks didn't break, etc.

In AC Unity, it's now one of those "press the button at the right time to stop the sliding arrow when it's in the sweet spot to unlock it" minigames. You have a limited number of lockpicks and they BREAK if you miss. And to make it worse, there's three levels of locks, corresponding to three DIFFERENT levels of lockpicking ability. You'll spend as many points learning to lockpick as you will learning to beat people's faces in with a sword AND assassinate them with your Hidden Blade. The upper-level locks may be ATTEMPTED as soon as you unlock Lockpicking 1, but each tier of locks has one tumbler (IE, one vertical bar with a sweet spot,) and if you try to pick a higher-level lock, the sweet spot will be smaller and the arrow moves faster.

Oh, and the unlock points? The VAST MAJORITY OF THEM are only gained by doing the multiplayer missions, and even then you need to go out of your way to find floating synch points. Now, the multiplayer is CO-OP, thankfully, and it's not bad, except there's LITERALLY NO WAY TO COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR TEAMMATES, so even if you WANT to play and do the subtle assassin thing, or want to use support abilities, unless you're Skyping with friends, any strategy beyond ASSASSINRUSHYOLO is basically impossible. But that's okay, because you can pick up other assassins from what would otherwise be desynchronization, so if you're doing a four-player mission, ASSASSINRUSHKEKEKEKEKEKEKE is perfectly workable, and can indeed be fun. Unless you have a shitty connection, in which case you're going to be doing very hard missions keyed for several players by yourself - which is still preferable to not being able to do them at all, mind you. Plus, only one of them is timed.

There were significant UI annoyances, too. Boxes would pop up reminding you that you have unspent unlockable points. They pop up like, every FIVE FUCKING MINUTES, and usually on top of the text boxes for investigation clues, which is VERY FUCKING ANNOYING.

Investigating murders, however, was very, very cool, both some historic murders and some which I presume they just made up.

Oh, and locking weapons and armor without exactly statistically equal equivalents behind participation in online events which they weren't even running was a shit move. Making them events which you had to join a guild to compete in was an even shittier move. No thanks, I do NOT want to join a guild to play my singleplayer game, asswipes.

Further shittery includes the Assassin Brotherhood minigame being an exclusive to the mobile device, and being far more frustrating and annoying than Kenway's Fleet was. I liked being able to do the Kenway's Fleet stuff from my phone AND FROM THE GAME ITSELF, and it being a relatively simple management thing, NOT FUCKING ANNOYING PUZZLE BASED ARGH!

Thanks for the tips! Been using them.

I gotta say, this thread is not motivating me to pursue the Assassin's Creed series. I never got beyond the second or third mission in AC1, and it sounds to me like Ubi is raping the franchise as hard as humanly possible.

Assassin's Creed II was very good. Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed Revelations - if you liked Assassin's Creed II and liked Ezio Auditore, you'll like AC Bro and AC Rev. Bro and Rev revised the control scheme significantly, too, and quite frankly they had some of the best features, features which haven't yet been fully replicated in the later games. (Specifically, I rather liked the bombcrafting from AC Rev, and the ability to call on other Assassins to aid in battle. That latter one sort-of made it into AC III, but instead of Assassins you trained and raised on your own, they were all named characters.)

AC III was Assassins Creed during the American Revolution. Lockpicking was slightly annoying, but on the whole they made a pretty decent transition from old, built-up European cities to the fledgeling cities of the American colonies and the frontier wilderness. The sailing bits shone, which probably explains why they went all-in with sailing in the next one. The story was kind of hit-or-miss, though; Connor speaks largely in a controlled monotone, which, while appropriate for a person who's very fluent but speaking in a second language, makes him somewhat hard to like. Also, the story is largely a cavalcade of "you done fucked up son, and here's why," and there isn't a very happy ending to be found for him. It's not a tragic ending, but not a very happy one.

AC Black Flag was basically third-person Assassin's Creed gameplay bolted onto Pirates! Live the Life. Edward Kenway is at the same time kind of a huge douchebag, and awesome, because he's a freaking pirate during the tail-end of the Golden Age of Sail. The game doesn't make you unlock or learn how to do anything - if you're already familiar with how to do something, it lets you do it from the get-go, and it brings something that was desperately needed to Assassin's Creed - the ability to free-aim your projectile weapons. If there are complaints I have with Black Flag, one of them would be the inability to choose a primary weapon other than two swords, and the other would be the fact that, though it's on the freaking splash screen and boxes, by the time Edward actually gets the Assassin's Black Flag, about 85-90% of the game is over with.

Also, don't read the tie-in novels or the wiki re: what happens to Edward and his daughter after the events of Black Flag. Just trust me on this, or it'll make you feel like everything you did in Black Flag was all for nothing.


And then there's AC Unity. I covered it upthread. They revamped everything for AC Unity, and not all of it for the better. Despite the addition of the "Parkour Up/Down" button distinctions, the lingering problem with AC parkour - that is, the possibility that your assassin will decide to cling to a small shrub's planter rather than jump onto a wall next to it, or what-have-you - lingers on, which can really slow you down in a hurried run. Combat was made significantly tougher with the removal of the ability to counter-kill and chain-kill enemies, meaning that even clearing out the riff-raff low-tier fighters can take a while, the lockpicking is just atrocious, and they focused so much on the multiplayer aspects, even with good co-op intent, that the actual game experience suffers for it. I won't say I regret playing it, but... Well, there is some element of buyer's remorse there.

Since I realized that "Connor" is basically a superhero, I started running around and using unarmed combat as much as possible.

The game goes from being Tarantino-gory to being hilarious when instead of killing the redcoat squads that come and attack you simply beat them up so that they're all lying on the ground and rolling around and moaning. And then you stand there and loot them all. It's like you just beat them all up and added insult to injury by rifling through their pockets and stealing all their money and issue ammunition.

Yep. It's a damn shame they took the ability to manually beat someone unconscious out of AC Unity.

I mean, you can still do KOs instead of kills by using mace or the butt of a rifle, but still.

Well, I think I might be done with AC 3. I haven't finished the game but based on reading on gamefaqs I think I did all the parts that are worth doing.

In stark contrast to the rest of the game where they tend to bombard you with directions now I'm supposed to "find the cores" to end the game. According to FAQs it means I have to run around and look for some objects so I can watch a few movies; there's no real gameplay left. I don't know what the cores look like and while there are directions on the FAQ the directions sound pretty confusing and it doesn't seem worth the aggravation. So I guess I call it quits.

I enjoyed the game on the whole. I did feel like it suddenly became acutely annoying at the end because of how while before the game was all about being open ended at the end it suddenly whiplashed to being very proscribed (eg. find the cores). Also, I had accumulated over 100,000 dollars through trading but now realize there was nothing in the game to spend it on.

Much as in the first AC game I completely don't understand the storyline with the aliens. So, at the end of the game, the village is empty and the apple is just lying there? WTH? And this is supposedly keeping the apple safe? How does that remotely make sense? If no one is there, how do they know someone isn't just going to wander by and take it? How come no one took it with them or otherwise discovered it?

So, on the whole, I loved the game, but the very end just seemed like I was suddenly force fed a turd sandwich. I guess that's what often happens with games. They start to run out of money towards the end, and the end gets rushed and sucks compared to the rest of the game.

I guess the games are very much geared to reward completionists. Without collecting the cores (and / or finishing the previous games in a similar manner) you'll just get the main storyline, not what happens behind the scenes.

I'm guessing by cores you mean the part of the game in the 'present'? If yes, you'll indeed have to run around a bit in the cave. It's not too complicated, honestly, and there are video guides available on youtube. However, without having finished the other games, the revealed story won't make much sense.

The thing is, the metaplot was the least interesting thing for me even in AC1. My favorite part of the game is the historical detail and realization. Bleep bleep bloop about aliens or whatever if anything just seems to detract from the lovingly realized historical setting.

It's kind of like people who claim that the pyramids were built by aliens. Aren't the pyramids majestic enough without having to doodle in flying saucers and artsy fartsy aliens who have taken an interest in anonymous monument building on a pre-medieval planet? Is the story of how the pyramids were built truly improved by saying aliens came with a space ship and did it using a magical laser light show?

So, I figure I enjoyed the best part of the game and the ending wouldn't interest me very much anyway.

I see where you're coming from, but that doesn't make you the main audience of those games. But good for you that you still enjoyed it. After all, if one is so inclined, you can always read up the story on the mighty internet.
For me it's both the detailed historical environments and the conspiracy theory backstory. Also, I'm one of those people who just can't leave those secrets alone until I've got 100% on the save file. ^^
Just a hint though: It wasn't aliens

Ha ha, okay, I guess I'll just watch the ending on youtube.

Just watched the ending on YouTube. Glad I didn't run around looking for the cores. I guess I'm more nihilistic than Desmond. I think I would have let the world be nearly destroyed if for no other reason than to disenfranchise the powers that be. After all the game world is being portrayed as controlled by evil corporations, secret societies, and glowing alien hipsters.