Don’t tell me you didn’t hate AC1?
So, I’m not sure about Syndicate, but AC3 is a weird one. It starts very very slow and isn’t the most engaging or interesting. I just like the characters.
I really like that as we’ve gotten a bit of distance from AC3, people have kind of come around on it. The game still has a terribly long tutorial and Conner is going to rub some folks the wrong way no matter what, but the foundation was solid, they introduced the ship combat mechanic that everyone loved in AC4, and the story was really good. I especially liked the village-building aspect.
The weakest part of AC3 for me was the fact that there just wasn’t much in the way of the normal AC tower vistas. Colonial America just didn’t have the buildings to pull it off.
It’s my favorite one. It starts off poorly, but then you see that view of Damascus, and then Acre and Jerusalem, man I love that game so much. Plus it isn’t padded out with busywork either. You just do a couple of quick activities, and do one of the 9 assassinations in the game. Each of the 9 is different and unique and fun, and happens in a different district in the 3 cities. So each of the 9 sections of the game features a different, new location, it features vantage points to climb, new places to explore, and then a unique assassination. This doesn’t happen again in any Assassin’s Creed. The whole game is tight, taking place over 11 hours of gameplay or so. Whereas Assassin’s Creed 2 starts the trend of taking the same area of open world space and filling it with dozens and dozens of hours of similar activity instead of the nice terse gameplay in the original.
Now, with that said, my second favorite is Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, which managed to fill Rome with over 120 hours of really good gameplay. Unlike Assassin’s Creed 2, the routes around the city were really well designed, the parkour was more fun, the assassinations were more fun, everything was better.
(In Assassin’s Creed 2’s defense, the last 20 hours of AC2 are very good, it’s just the first 80 hours I had a problem with. The last district you unlock in AC2 in Venice is finally well designed, the unique makeover of the city for festivals is inspired, and the story becomes a lot more interesting too. But I wish I didn’t have to suffer 80 hours of sheer boredom to finally get to that good part).
I’ve always loved AC3, and for a number of reasons. Tom has talked extensively about how enjoyable building up your little community and it’s citizens, and as Telefrog mentioned it’s the first (and in my opinion, best) implementation of the series’ ship-to-ship combat. But one thing that never really gets mentioned (except by me, and I talk about it a lot) is that it’s so far the only game that’s done anything with the idea that the Animus lets you replay memories, not necessarily actual events as they happened, and gives us an unreliable narrator for once.
Just chiming to say I agree. Those are my two favorite AC games as well.
Yeah, AC3 did a lot of things right. The only reason it’s not in my top 2 AC games is that the things it did wrong (IMO, of course) are things that are really grating to me - that is, disjointed gameplay elements, and its dreadful use of “invisible walls”. The latter is the worst by far.
That said… I liked everything else. The new gameplay gimmicks (well, most of them), the story, the characters, the “message”. Even the “Forrest Gump”-iness of it all.
Yeah, it got pretty silly, the lengths they went to shoehorn Connor into every little thing that happened in American history. I’m a little more tolerant with the inherent goofiness of the plots of these games, I guess.
Yeah, it’s a weird little lore sidestep for the series. The closest you get to that concept again is AC4’s encyclopedia entries that explicitly talk about how the setting is manufactured by Abstergo for gaming and therefore not historically accurate. Syndicate supposedly carries on this Abstergo gaming conceit, but there’s no mention of London being rejiggered for game presentation over factual recreation.
Huh. I played the first two assassination mission and quickly got the feeling that every mission after that we’re pretty much the same. Getting to a new town, replaying the scenes where you save some guy getting beat up and he helps you inside the city, help people, eavesdrop, jump from towers, get blocked by ANNOYING BEGGAR LADY, assassination. After the first two missions, I really didn’t feel like doing that 7 more times, so I just dropped it. I didnt feel like spending hours and hours of walking painstakingly slow through that many more cities with the same kinds of missions.
(It should probably be said I tried AC1 just a few weeks ago, I’m not saying I wouldn’t have been enthralled by it had I played it when it came out)
You’re certainly not alone. Even when it came out, those were common criticisms of the game from reviews. I personally didn’t see it. You could chose to do any two missions before an assassination. If last time you did an eavesdropping mission and didn’t enjoy it, don’t do it again. If last time you jumped through to get a series of flags, but didn’t enjoy it, don’t do it again.
You did have to climb the towers, but come on, who doesn’t enjoy that part? That part is the best.
But yeah, there’s a lot of variety in each of the 9 areas. Some areas of Acre have water near the docks, some areas of Jerusalem involve missions around a big mosque or temple, it’s all very diverse and excellent, IMO. But a lot of people agreed with your take even at the time of release for AC.
Another note, I should point out that unlike later iterations of the franchise, you won’t have to play for hours and hours. Unlike AC2 onwards, AC1 is very short. I played it for about an hour each evening after work. Each hour ended with an assassination at the end. So your perception of walking around for hours is probably colored by future AC games in the series.
Secondly, this is just one of those unique aspects of AC that I absolutely loved. The fact that stealth involved blending with the crowd instead of skulking in shadows? I loved it. The fact that it had a “low profile” and “high profile” way of making your way through the game? I loved it. It took some getting used to, but once you did, it was such an innovative way of traversing the game world. Instead of worrying about pressing a button to jump, you just control high profile or low profile, and your character takes care of the rest. I loved it. It added to the flavor of being an observer of someone else’s memories of events as opposed to creating events yourself.
AC1 may be the shortest, if you can power through it, but by the fourth assassination contract it was becoming such a repetitive slog that I just couldn’t go on.
I talked about this the other day over on nGAF, people were listing, so I listed!
List:
Brotherhood
2
Revelations
Syndicate
3 Murrica!
4 Black Flag
Rogue
1
Unity
Liberation
Chronicles
Ezio trilogy was the pinnacle of AC for me.
I certainly was excited when the first AC came out but really didn’t like it because of how tied down you were in the way you had to perform each assassination
And you couldn’t swim, and like 15% of the stuff takes place over water. Ugh that instant de-sync in AC 1.
Back to Syndicate, I was doing a very strange train robbery as there were no enemies on board , the usual 3 things to steal.
I steal the stuff, unhook the engine from the rest of the cars (for the lulz) and I hear a whistle all of a sudden! That’s my HQ train! I look left and its cruising the other set of tracks headed right toward me.
Easiest escape ever!
Side note, Charles Darwin makes no sense in this game, but his beard is fantastic.
Yeah, I still think I like Brotherhood best, then AC3 and maybe Unity third because of that awesome grenade launcher with a bayonet. And then all the rest are jumbled up at fourth place because I’m lazy and I didn’t really hate any of them, some just make no impression. Probably Syndicate and Revelations felt the most like treading water to me.
Alright, so… I still want to play all of them. And I just MIGHT give AC1 one more mission before I give it up.
I have played Chronicles actually, I just didn’t really think they counted. I liked China and India, but by the time I hit Russia, I was pretty tired of the series.
We used to be friends. Am so sad right now.
Look at it this way, if we matched up 100% it would be weird. And what would we have to argue about?