Assassin's Creed: Origins - 2017, Ancient Egypt, hawk spotter drone

I’ve been playing through AC: Syndicate and there’s actually some really amazing world detail and character moments in the game. Having a fully realized Victorian London to run around in is fun. Gameplay is same ol’ clunky AC though. Origins, in contrast, looks like it still has the clunk but without the highly detailed setting.

This is one I have on my radar for the year, but that video (I skipped around in it to avoid too many spoilers) actually dulled my interest a little. The visuals (like the fire effects at the 12m mark) were kind of poor, and the lack of dynamic lighting or detailed textures through the entire thing was sort of off-putting. I know it’s a WIP but it’s not that far out really.

Also, while I like the more RPG like combat in theory, seeing a guy get impaled and keep fighting because he still had HP left was… um… strange.

I did like some of the stuff I saw, not to get too negative, but overall I maybe should have skipped that video if it’s not going to be representative of the final product.

It’s not that far out, and we’re talking Ubisoft. I doubt it will change all that much before launch.

Yeah, that’s just… honestly kind of disappointing. Definitely waiting for reviews.

The E3 video looks way better than this Xbox One S thing. It also looks like they stole everything they could from Horizon: Zero Dawn.

So whatever on how it looks, they butchered my favorite series with this, I think. It looks like Assassin’s Creed: Zero Fun. I’ll go install Syndicate and play that for the 5th time.

Shit, I laughed out loud at this.

That’s good, but you of all people should understand my crushing depression after seeing this…this…thing.

More details on the game’s revamped combat system. Remember, they’ve dropped the locked-in paired animation combat and gone entirely to hitbox-based combat. It’s a big change that hearkens back to the way Unity’s fights worked, except they’ve completely disassociated the units from each other here, allowing multiple hits from different enemies at the same time.

I was not aware Romans would be included in this. Hype intensifying!

All looks rich and mysterious until the fighting starts, then it’s just another melee sim. Still, if the soundtrack’s all Cohen I’m in.

I wish it was Batman style melee.

PC Gamer confirmed a few items of speculation that came from the Gamescom trailer.

Depending on how spoiler-averse you are about the setting, you may not want to read that.

Nevermind on the possible spoilers above. Ubi’s all over it now.

I think the people saying the game graphics doesn’t look too hot are kind of crazy



Another thing it’s the gameplay, but it looks very good.

The views with clear, long-distance vistas reminds me a lot of Ghost Recon Wildlands which I think has some of the best-looking open-world terrain out there. Which makes sense since this is built on the same engine - Anvil. Thankfully, the towns in this look like they contain a lot more unique buildings. GRW had a lot of copy+paste buildings that made every town look alike.

The full game map even looks very GRW.

I’ve always loved the virtual tourism aspect. They do ‘touching living history’ really well, enough I can excuse lackluster and uninteresting gameplay and bastardizations of historical figures. Renaissance Rome was glorious for me.

This might nail that. Alexandria looks beautiful.

Looks good to me!

To the best of my knowledge they haven’t shown or discussed anything about the present day story, is that right?

Nope. They’ve been pretty careful to avoid any of the Animus/Abstergo stuff just yet.

I am curious to see where they go with that because the last game left that story completely hanging.

Also - SPOILER - If this isn’t a full reboot, we know what happened to Cleopatra according to AC:2.

The gifs look beautiful, but then every actual gameplay video I see lets me down somehow.

Also, they need to do away with that terrible interface/HUD design. Just…throw it away completely.