But if you don’t go up to the rooftops you could miss a sea shanty, and that would be a shame.
Which is the real reason to run around on rooftops like a drunken sailor.
“Leave her Johnnyyyy, Leaaaave Her, OooOOOOhhh, leave her Johnnyyyy, Leave her”…such a great, great song!
For reasons I don’t quite understand, I got through about 90% of AC4 back when it came out and just failed to finish it for some reason. I need to correct that.
Last events I recall:
Blackbeard’s death and the SHOCKER that the very androgynous pirate is in fact not time-traveling David Bowie but a woman. ;-)
That’s got to be pretty close to the end, right?
Sped through this during Easter. What a drag. There is the usual Ubisoft icon hunt. The RPG upgrade of your ship and home base etc. etc. Pirating is just boring. Ship boarding is boring and a drag. The on foot control is just shite, unresponsive and lacks finesse. So many times I want to jump up a wall but the game tells me that I want to hug the wall instead.
Edward as a character is less interesting than his supposed grandson because for most of the game he is just a brute murdering and pillaging across the West Indies. Historical fiction is right up my forte but this I just don’t care. (I can see that androgynous pirate reveal 10 nautical miles away!)
Yeah I played this because I heard lots of good things about it. I like AC3 but not this. Maybe this game just doesn’t age well.
Man, completely disagree about every single one of your points. I think this was the best in the series and fighting, naval combat and boarding were exciting and awesome. First game in a long time I liked the collecting, too. The underwater diving bell collecting was particularly cool, and whaling/fishing was superb.
This was like a dream game for me, and in my opinion easily the best pirate game ever made.
Great pirate game, not so great Ass Creed game.
I recall finding the overall story and ending mediocre.
Yeah, absolutely the very best in the AC serie - Maybe on par with Origins.
I admit I was also finding it fairly underwhelming in the early game, which is as far as I’ve gotten. I don’t have a single reason to care about the plot so far, and while a lot of people complained about the Desmond stuff in the previous games, that was my main hook, personally. This weird “be a game dev” stuff so far is not a viable substitute.
And I really fucking hate chasing the sea shanties. I’m sure they’re enjoyable to have but the mechanic of collecting them is complete horseshit.
Also, you sped through the entire game in one day? Man, to me that misses the point of an open world game. I like to explore and check out the world a bit, I usually get through as much of the opening tutorials as needed in this type of game and then relax and enjoy for a week or two.
Speeding through an open world game would ruin the game for me. I took my time with GTA V, for instance, and messed around a lot in between story missions, just doing bike jumps, playing around with the physics, trying out everything. Can I blow up the gas station? Yes. Can I buy something there? Yes. Can I rob it? Yes. Can I park a car in the entrance blocking all the cops and hole up in there for a while raising my star level? Yes. Am I going to find out the respawn mechanic while off mission? Yes.
I got it through in 3 days or so. Map full of icons just turns me off. Did a few side activities and they are just more of the same. Only the OCD part of me wants to complete them, but every other part of me says leave them alone.
Yeah pirates. Argh matey. (Painful rather than delightful growl).
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.