So. AC3 has come and gone for me. And while I don’t claim that everyone will agree with me, here are my thoughts - plus and minus - on the game in a random order (ie, as I think of them), trying to keep them as spoiler free as possible:
++ Storyline. Enjoyed it immensely. Even the Desmond parts.
Segments 1-5. I get you need a series of background/tutorial missions, but they went on a little too long.
= Combat. Better in some ways, worse in others. Not a big change, so easy enough to get into, but the camera didn’t work for me in a lot of cases (kept hiding people who were swinging at me and gave me little chance to counter w/o just guessing)
++ Setting. All good. On par with AC2 for me.
++ Naval missions. Like AC:R, added a new element to the gameplay. Unlike AC:R, this one works and is, more importantly, FUN!
Peg-Leg missions. The replacement for secret bases/dungeons/etc this time around.
Mission design - overall, it was good for me, and the checkpoints were (mostly) well placed. But
– Mission design - there are a few that are just rage-quite worthy. Don’t need to rehash. Hope they get ‘fixed’ somehow in a patch.
Homestead building - the ‘replacement’ building up the city by buying stores. Some nice stories in that section.
– Armor - All outfits are cosmetic only. Not a fan of this change at all.
Weapons - much less difference between them, outside of 1 vs 2 shots per load for guns. Only weapon you really need is the hidden blade (and poison darts).
Crafting - I like the idea, but it doesn’t really work. First, it’s very confusing. Second, there didn’t seem to be anything you could craft that would get as much as just selling beaver pelts, much less bear pelts. Lot of effort for less money.
Conner. Nothing wrong with him, but he just wasn’t an enjoyable main character as Ezio was. Had his moments, but overall seemed like a whiney, pre-Darth Vader Aniken Skywalker.
Money in general - just less to spend it on. Big need was upgrading your ship. That’s it, really. Collectible maps, maybe.
– Almanac pages - These things sucked. Not that they moved, but they moved quickly, and the sweet spot for catching the things was stupidly small. I collect EVERYTHING in games, and I didn’t finish these. They were that annoying.
Liberation missions - replacement for reclaming part of the city from AC:B and AC:R. Done well.
– Viewpoints. Not that they weren’t there, but that exploring all of them no longer uncover the entire map. BIG fail.
– Hidden stores. Didn’t show up on the map unless you actually went inside the store. I’m really not up for walking down EVERY STREET looking for a store. It should at least show up on the map when you get close (see Viewpoint issue).
Fast travel points - liked the way they worked, but need more of them in the Frontier. However…
++ Underground - this was awesome. Exploring to open up all the fast travel points w/in Boston and New York was great.
Hunting. Enjoyed this, for the most part.
++ Free-running in trees. Just awesome. Wish it were available more places in the frontier.
Overall, I’d slot AC3 as third best. AC:B is still my favorite, with AC2 close behind. AC3 fits in here, and it’s not a big drop off. Then AC:R (bigger drop off), and AC1.
Yeah, so far the crafting+hunting system seems badly thought out. Smells like someone came up with a system, and then someone else changed it without consultation to be more player-friendly and in doing so destroyed much of the system’s in-game value. Sure, I want to build up the homestead, with its miraculously nice-looking country mansion. That’s not the problem so much as the costs and benefits after I’ve got my homesteaders.
Why should I go to all this trouble hunting difficult prey when there are dozens of high-value beavers sunning themselves on convenient local shores who can only run about 5 kph? Those sad little meeping noises they make aren’t much defense against blood-simple Connor… It may conceivably even be realistic – for all I know back in the day eastern MA was just drowning in beavers – but it’s not very balanced, economically.
So I can make all these… things… but I don’t really have much motivation to do so. As noted, I have all the tools and weapons I’ll ever need from the get-go. Oh well, I suppose it’s at least more interesting than the AC2 thing where you go in to the room once, buy everything for the town, and then you’re done. Yeah, the naval upgrades are expensive, so I guess I’ll have to slaughter a whole bunch of beavers soon if I don’t happen to get the money I need from other kinds of gameplay.
Yeah, the game is full of stuff like that. The dialogue is really bad and the actions of the so called brilliant templars is simply idiotic. Really, the masterplan to assassinate someone was the best they could come up with? Its simply horrible.
And then there are the little things, like riding a horse, then fast travel to a place - Whoopsie, then the horse is gone…where? I have no idea.
Muskets floating in space, people disappearing right in front of me, others appearing right in front of me - The same with enemies. People griping about spawn mechanics in Dragon Age 2 should probably stay away from this game, because the spawn infinitely, right in front of you.
Seriously - Screw this game. I’m travelling to New York in the Deep of Winnter to help someone, when suddenly George Washington is there, and I yell at him that he never should ask me for anything again after “something” - I have no idea what drugs connor are on, but apparently its now Summer, and George washington is on the same drugs, and says he is sorry but he has to ask me…??? Why? What? who?
Yeah, a bit later I’m told to fight someone and stop a sniper - Well, the camera starts rotating like crazy, because I’m fighting two people and trying to move away from them. Apparently Connor isn’t able to move away from people…And the camera thinks its funny to look at people through a wall.
Fun game.
I seriously do not understand why this game has the high ratings it has - Its a mess.
Well, despite everything, I still like the game quite a bit.
But it’s too ambitious, and the art and worldbuilding is so much better than the gameplay and mission design there is a serious break there; the high quality of the former makes the mediocre quality of the latter seem even worse in comparison.
OK, now I’ve experienced that goddamn counterfeiter chase mission. You’re right, this is grotesquely bad. There’s no way the designer could have bothered to playtest this. Apparently it wasn’t run through QA either. You’d have to run through it over and over again succeed after the first inevitable failure, because it respawns you in combat. And then there’s that goddamn wall issue. No I don’t want to hump a goddamn wall during a chase sequence. That’s not a good failure mode.
Also, not that it’s very important, that’s a red foe, and you fail if you just shoot him down; he should be yellow, as in the previous phase, if you’re not supposed to just kill him.
Heh, that mission is why my PS3 controller now rattles whenever I shake it :-D
The camera is horrible though, and I still haven’t figured out how to move away from people when you are in combat, and its little niggles like that which makes the game unplayable in certain areas, and causes so much frustration.
As someone on another forum wrote, its like reviewers reviewed the game based on its potential, because its riddled with errors, mistakes, glitches and the like.
and its such a shame, because the game is gorgerous - Whomever designs the clothing needs to be worshipped like a god -the series has always been good like that though, and the wilderness is pretty cool as well. The game does have a lot of potential, but man - the bugs, and the lack of playtesting is killing it.
I guess I’m playing a different game. There have been some glitchy things early on, but now that I’ve gotten to Sequence 6 and beyond and things have fully opened up, I’m loving every bit of this.
Let us know how this mission sits for you in sequence 8 :) I still like the game, as I said above, but this is a story blocker; you just have to do it, and it is really bad.
I’ve done harder things in games before, of course, but this seems to be hard by accident more than by design – the stupid wall jumping thing. It’s bad partly because it’s so much harder than any other story mission, despite not using any core gameplay mechanics like stealth or combat – in fact it’s contrary to normal mechanics because “free running” will lose the mission for you if you happen to jump up on something. When you insert an unusual mission into a game like this, it should be both easier and more fun than the usual ones, because it’s deliberately going contrary to the mechanics they’ve taught the player over the rest of the game. Thus it shows very bad craftsmanship on the part of the mission design team, production especially. It’s hard to believe anyone actually played through the sequence before approving it.
Learning to be OK with failing the secondary objectives is critical to enjoying the game, because a lot of them are absolute bullshit. Then randomly a bunch of them are incredibly easy? I dunno, it does seem like this game was not entirely playtested.
Just like all the previous AC games, the sound is all fucked up(music and effects too loud, dialogue too low), and what dialogue you can understand is borderline gibberish in terms of telling a coherent story. The mechanic where you randomly jump forward in time is still not a good idea, Ubisoft.
I just kill the red guys, steal the glowy thing, move towards the green dot, etc.
For example, I beat that Sequence 8 mission by taking a shortcut and going to where I knew the bad guy would go(he runs in a loop lol, and while I imagine they assumed you’d tackle him before he makes a circuit I sure didn’t. Also they don’t tell you to tackle him so I killed him the first time I caught him). Obvious lack of playtesting, I’m sure the dudes at Ubisoft who are AC experts sliced through the crowd with ease.
Miramon and Razgon, what mission is that specifically? Sequence 8, you say? I’d love to go back and check it out, since I don’t remember any such frustration.
By far the most frustrating thing for me was trying to figure out what I was supposed to do in the battle of Concord. Also, there’s a sort of timed horse ride challenge late in the game that gave me fits. But for the most part, assuming I wasn’t trying to do the full synchronization optional goals – some of those are brutal – I’ve had only minimal frustration.
Actually, I take all that back. The most frustrating part of the game was breaking up a fight between those two Scottish lumberjacks. Who the heck came up with that infernal minigame?
It’s the one where you have to chase the counterfeiter (Hickey, I guess? The drunk, loud one of the five main templars). It’s the first mission in New York.
Ha yeah, that could have been annoying, those silly lumberjacks. But I got it the first time due to my superior qualities of insight.
At Concord, I failed once before I realized that there were multiple militia groups and that the whites-of-their-eyes thing was bullshit, so what I was supposed to do was to race back and forth like a fool telling each group to fire as quickly as possible, without even wasting time looking to see if anyone was there or not.
So by “superior qualities of insight”, you mean you can unhinge each eyeball to look at a separate part of the screen? Because I’m pretty sure that’s what you have to do.
Exactly! That was a classic example of writers and designers basically ignoring each other, to the player’s detriment. Ugh.
Yeah, the lumberjack thing was stupid. I wonder why they think minigames like that are in any way interesting?
And yeah, it was the Hickey chase.
Also - Does anyone know how to disenange from fighting when you have to do something? Last I played (Where winter became summer in the span of a conversation) I had to kill some snipers (Its the PS3 extra missions) but cant because I’m always engaged in fighting someone else, and its impossible to move away from them.
