Assassins Creed 4 Pirates

What’s the best point in the story to just ignore the missions and go take over the world and do side-missions/collectible hunts forever?

Been doing a bit of that in Sequence 3 and it doesn’t seem like I’m really held back from going everywhere and doing anything I want, other than diving bell missions which need to be unlocked later.

Just curious if there’s an ideal point to abandon the story and let me map-clearing OCD take the wheel for a while.

Do you have a boat?

That point.

Yarrr, me map clearin’ OCD be one of me better typos.

It’s been a while since I played but I do recall certain forts being reset for story missions.

I haven’t run into any being reset yet, but I did find one that was just deserted until a story mission walked me through liberating it.

I did realize I need to keep moving the story along further to unlock the diving bell stuff though.

Why hasn’t this thread title been updated to refer to it by its proper nomenclature: AssPirates?

This game is just endless bullshit if you’re actually trying to get full synch on all the main missions, isn’t it?

I was having a grand old time somewhere around sequence 5 when I ignored the missions long enough to do literally everything else in the game. But now that I’m back to playing the main story, it’s just finicky, random, stupid objectives and an endless string of bad checkpoints and worse behavior when time after time you’re punished for not lucking into the one true path through the mission or glitchy behavior.

Does the franchise ever fix this?

100% sync kind of was the fix - at least, up to that point, haven’t played later games yet. Originally, the game just failed the mission for those sorts of finicky, bad objectives. From I think Brotherhood onwards, that sort of shit is optional (well, I won’t swear mandatory objectives are never bad, but for the most part…). Actually trying for 100% sync isn’t worth the hassle, but if you abandon that as your goal, your life can be so much lower stress. You don’t even get anything for it in Brotherhood or I think 3, no idea if they added a reward in Black Flag.

I sort of play these because the rest of the game appeals to my completionist tendencies. I don’t have to 100% all games, or even most, but Assassin’s Creed mostly hits the right vibe for me where it’s satisfying to methodically clear objectives off a gigantic map.

To do all that and then abandon 100%’ing the actual missions frustrates me.

Yeah, I’m so glad I abandoned 100% sync really early in Brotherhood. That game already lasted 80-100 hours. I can’t imagine how much longer it would be, and how much more frustrating, if I’d gone for 100% sync.

And yet, it’s not worth the bullshit.

But these games kind of aren’t not worth the bullshit either. At least, a big part of the appeal is lost if I’m not doing the rest of it. I’m sure not playing for the story, and if I’m not trying to do all there is to do, then it’s just smoke bombs, berserk darts, I win, game over.

It sounds like you want a game that’s well-designed. But we can’t always have the things we want. :/

I guess this is me coming to terms with that, Black Flag isn’t as great as I hoped it would be. It adds some cool stuff, but it doesn’t fix the broken stuff.

Maybe when I move on to Unity I really will abandon the idea of 100% completion, because my roommate said that’s even worse. Maybe knowing that from the start will help.

I think a lot of the problems come from requiring very specific mechanics as optional objectives. The mission where you go to Principe in Africa, for example. It’s a whole little “town” of its own, just used for that mission. The optional objectives are to free two groups of slaves, and avoid conflict for most of the mission. It’s fun! Just leave it at that! I methodically assassinated that whole island, like 70 guards. Carefully planned encounters, mixing up my approach, it was beautiful. When I got to the final area it added “double assassinate the targets” (I forget their names) as the final optional objective. Okay, that could be tricky, but I wasn’t worried. I had another 30+ guards to take out silently first, then I cleared out the whole ship, I’d killed literally everyone else in Principe except for the two main targets, and two guards standing with them.

And they just stood there. On the dock, next to the boat, not moving, not following any route, and just far enough apart that there was no perch on their empty boat (did I mention I killed everyone?) where I could take them out with a double assassination.

What the hell?

So I google up a walkthrough. Turns out these guys do one predetermined loop through the shanty town as soon as you enter the final section of the level, and then permanently stop at their ship where I found them.

Total bullshit. No indication that I was missing a single chance for that final objective by being an excellent fucking assassin.

Now I’m on Black Bart’s Gambit, final section. I’ve got to move through two camps, eliminating two guards in towers, then swing onto an enemy ship and kill the captain while swinging from a rope.

The sure fire way of getting up to that rope is a tedious, 15 minute affair of berserk darts from hiding places, slowly whittling down the island population. The faster routes of just taking out who I need to along the way and mostly stealthing it keep getting blown by inconsistent detection or the fun quirks of Edward occasionally blowing a jump, jumping when he shouldn’t, or the usual not-quite-precise-enough controls. And then every 3rd attempt or so is me getting frustrated and impatient because the game “cheated” me on the previous attempt so then I just blatantly blow it.

But the kicker is that even when I resign to just doing the tedious, thorough, methodical elimination via berserk darts—the only method that’s actually gotten me to the ship so far—all three times the rope swing kill has failed. So I’ve spent an hour on just this third part of this mission, because even if I play it safe, I get spend 15 minutes just to fail my Tarzan move and have to start again.

This is not great. It’s a big part of why I’m mad, because both of these missions would be easily fixed by just leaving the optional objectives at avoiding combat. Instead it keeps adding precise, specific demands in a game that doesn’t handle well enough for that to be a satisfying goal.

All yer come-plaints are land lubber talk, matey. This pirate hasn’t seen port since he first set sail. Real pirates don’t care about your Templar and Assassin troubles, that’s for fine folk. All this pirate cares about is to broadside the enemy, leap aboard a line and swing his sword through the guts of a Spainard!

Best pirate game ever made, full stop. YMMV with whatever story they made corridor crawl missions for. Get through those dumb narrative gates then go live on the sea for a week.

This is the King of the Pirate Game!

This still seems like a weird self-made problem to me.

The logic here seems to be:

  • It’s fun to do all the side activities in an Assassin’s Creed game
  • if I’m doing all the side activities I might as well 100% the game, since I’ll be close to that anyway
  • therefore I must also get 100% sync which means doing all the sadistic bonus objectives in the story missions.

Here’s an alternative logic that I follow:

  • It’s fun to do the side activities and explore
  • It’s not fun to do the sadistic bonus objectives required to get 100% sync
  • Therefore I should do the side activities and exploration that I like, but not worry about 100% sync.

I think that seems like better logic, but maybe that’s just me.

It’s fun to make the bars go up to 100%. That’s not the only fun I get out of games, not by a long shot, but it has some inherent appeal of its own. That appeal manifests in varying degrees across all kinds of games. It’s probably connected to the satisfaction from idle/clicker games as well, I don’t know. It’s a thing in games that appeals to me at times.

On some level it’s as simple as the presentation. I don’t go for all the Achievements/Trophies in AC games. I didn’t finish all the Abstergo challenges and don’t feel compelled to, but completing total sync feels narratively significant. I was the best Edward Kenway I could be! That pirate sure did some nutty, complicated stuff, but I did my part, I relived it all accurately.

The vibe I got in the responses here was I was playing the game wrong. My fault for not embracing the high seas adventure and ignoring the storyline. You do you everyone, but I was enjoying the Assassin’s Creed games in the way I described before they had ships, and I plan to (eventually) keep going with the series, so I’m probably going to raise these concerns again.

Because as I elaborated in my examples, I like the idea of the optional objectives in theory, I just think they made some particularly poor decisions in execution, especially on a few late game missions. And that was my original question, do they manage to do this any better in future entries?

Edit: PS4 trophies say only about 2% got the 100% main sequence. I wonder if Ubisoft had a goal in mind for how many players would do all the optional objectives, and how close that was to reality.

I wouldn’t say playing the storyline is doing it wrong, but stressing over completely optional objectives in a way that’s making you not enjoy the game kind of unquestionably is. I won’t say that the only point of games is to have fun, but the AC games are definitely not about making you miserable on purpose.

Yes, boom, end of story. Getting 100% is it’s own reward. You’re either into that kind of thing or you find it sadistic work.