[Console] Imma stab a Ubisoft programmer in the face!

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redthirtyone

redthirtyone

Alright - I know I'm late to the party on this one. I'm trying to pass the summer doldrums waiting for Borderlands 2 to come out, so I've been playing older stuff I've never played before on my 360.

Enter Assassin's Creed I

I'd heard decent things. Over the course of the last couple of years I'd accumulated the followups (AC2, AssRev) from my Gamefly subscription, so one day at GameStop I decided to pick up a used copy of AC1 to play when the doldrums hit. So a couple of weeks ago I started playing.

Where do I begin? The gameplay was extremely repetitive. Sneak into town, go to the bureau. Climb a tower, save a citizen, fight some guards. Climb another tower, save another citizen, fight more guards. Do a couple of quest objectives, assassinate a mini-boss, escape.... repeat. 8 times repeat.

The camera angle. Oh God the camera! Which thereby made the controls frustrating. Yes, I did want to jump off this ledge & fall all the way to the ground below. Why would I have wanted to grab that ledge just over there?

The cut scenes were OK, but the fact that I had to walk everywhere was frustrating. The story was OK. As usual they throw in the "find all the hidden stuff" concept to keep the achievement hunters playing, but I'm not about to do that crap.

Then there's the annoying beggars & madmen/drunken sailors. Who's dumbass idea was it to put some annoying bitch on every street corner to come running at ME & ONLY ME wailing about "Please you don't understand I don't have any money". ESPECIALLY when I'm trying to be stealthy & assassinate someone without being spotted. I only wish I had discovered the achievement for tossing these urchins to the curb sooner than I did.

Oh and then there's the end. Never mind the repetitiveness of the FIRST 85% of the game. THEN the last 15% becomes nothing but endless fights of hordes of guards. The last assassination target? "Surely God will decide which man is telling the truth"... & then apparently God allows 20 of Robert de Sade's crew to gang bang me first.

All that work leads of regaining my skills & ranks & synchronizing my DNA bar... all trashed in the final fight. Counter / punch my master *poof* he respawns somewhere & now I have to be perfect. Really?

As for the "real world" ending... huh? I seriously would not have known it was over had the achievement not popped up. What a spectacularly suck-ass ending. Did they fire the writers or something?

Anyways - as I said, I have AC2 still hanging around. I have friends who tell me that it gets better - not as repetitive. I'd like to believe that - hell it can't get much worse. But I guess the most annoying factors were the camera / controls & the annoying "flavor" aspects.

So I ask YOU for your opinions - should I carry on?
 
Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh

I dunno what to tell you, I thoroughly enjoyed AC1 but for very different reasons. It was the first time since the Hitman series that I truly felt like an assassin (during the assassiny parts). I will agree that some of the quests were just busy work but some of them were really damn fun.

I didn't seem to have the camera angles you're complaining about so not sure how to tackle that issue.

Walking everywhere is frustrating? I was playing the TICK theme song in my head whilst running through the whole city on pure roof tops. Never got old.

Bear in mind I have a huge history boner for that time period so being in that time was just the icing on the cake for me. I have not however played AC2 (on my to-play list at the moment) but again it's in a very fun historical time for me.
 
LittleKagsin

LittleKagsin

I, personally, think AC1 is the weakest in the series. Especially for the repetitiveness. I got bored and actually didn't finish the game. I did however watch my husband play it in it's entirety as well as platinum that sucker. I don't think it's a terrible game, I think the problem comes when you look at what they created afterwards.

I think it's a good thing to see how far the series has come in terms of gameplay, (I've even gotten in to the story!), graphically and other minor adjustments to make a more polished experience. And then they leveled up the musical score in Brotherhood.

I say carry on! The second one is legues better than the first and the second one is where Ubisoft more comes into their own with the series. Everything is better.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

Most, if not all, of your gripes are fixed in AC2.

The game is less repetitive. While yes, you still try to go around shanking people, the story structure is much less rigid this time. Instead of basically the same idea repeated eight times, in AC2 you gradually uncover the narrative and wider conspiracy as you kill your way up the ladder. You also get more gadgets and more tricks to use, so you can vary your kills and strategies.

Not sure about the cameras, since I never found them to be a problem. Same with walking, I never found that too big a problem. After all, for long journeys I could use a horse.

Madmen are gone, beggars are rarer, but now you have Italian minstrels to deal with. However, they drop their lute and run away screaming if you draw your sword in front of them, so generally they're not too annoying.

There's still a few collection quests, but like you said, you don't have to do them if you don't want to. Oh, and AC2 explains some of the real-world stuff from AC1, but then hits you with a much bigger WTF ending at the end.

After you finish AC2, I heartily recommend Brotherhood, which I consider the best of the series. And after that, there's Revelations, which feels slightly rushed and inferior to Brotherhood, but still a solid fun game.

Oh, and from AC2 onwards, you can swim. Yes, between the time of Altair and the time of Ezio, someone taught the Assassin Brotherhood that not instantly drowning when you step into water would be beneficial to assassin longevity.
 
redthirtyone

redthirtyone

Gilgamesh said:
I didn't seem to have the camera angles you're complaining about so not sure how to tackle that issue.

Walking everywhere is frustrating? I was playing the TICK theme song in my head whilst running through the whole city on pure roof tops. Never got old.
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Most of the camera problems were when trying to jump around & such. The next to last target where you have to jump around the harbor - there a couple of places you can jump from post to post to post. I'd jump on the first post & go for the second, but the camera would try & turn to follow me & the second jump would go off about 45 degrees to the right & I'd jump in the water. (Speaking of which... WTF I can't frickin swim?)

And the walking thing was frustrating in the present tense scenes in the Animus lab. Walking everywhere, no running, and I think you could only use the eagle vision at the end/
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

redthirtyone said:
Most of the camera problems were when trying to jump around & such. The next to last target where you have to jump around the harbor - there a couple of places you can jump from post to post to post. I'd jump on the first post & go for the second, but the camera would try & turn to follow me & the second jump would go off about 45 degrees to the right & I'd jump in the water. (Speaking of which... WTF I can't frickin swim?)

And the walking thing was frustrating in the present tense scenes in the Animus lab. Walking everywhere, no running, and I think you could only use the eagle vision at the end/
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Huh, I play on PC so the camera always follows my mouse pretty precisely. Not sure how to help you there.

And don't worry, Desmond definitely gets to run in the second game. He runs lots.
 
Espy

Espy

Yeah, 2 really did what a sequel should do: It improved on everything. I still enjoyed 1 though.
 
Frank

Frank

I hated Assassin's Creed 1 too. Like, outright loathed. I got the whole series on some Steam sale cause I kept getting told how good the series got from there but I just can't play through the first game.
 
Frank

Frank

Yeah, that's it, not that's a mediocre game with awful blending mechanics, shitty combat and repetitive missions.
 
Frank

Frank

Also, Fuck Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed.

Dan Hsu of EGM etc. said:
A few days before Assassin's Creed was due out, we started seeing online reviews appear well before the explicit embargo date.... Because our 1UP score was a 7.0, we still had to abide by the original embargo date, but we learned that if the score was high enough, Ubisoft was allowing outlets to release their reviews early. In other words, give the game a great score, and you're rewarded with an early, higher trafficked review (all three early reviews were 10/10).
So we tried to do a fair, objective news story about this to explain to our audience why we were one of the last websites to have an Assassin's Creed review out and why there was this selective release of reviews... and, well, this is a longer story best saved for another day. But the short of it is, this all lead to Ubisoft's blacklisting of EGM and 1UP, and even so, our parent company Ziff Davis Media didn't allow us to publish that story anyways because it wanted to stay on Ubisoft's - a huge advertiser - good side (no way we would've been censored like that had this been some small-time, no-name game publisher).​
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AshburnerX

AshburnerX

Yeah, I've been part of similar events involving publishers back in the day. It's one of the reasons why I won't go back to the game industry, despite a few offers I've received: I simply don't want to give up my dignity for advertising dollars, especially if it means I have to outright lie about quality.
 
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