Alistairs plan is pretty spot on. I’d do that.
Personally I’d swap 1 for 2, but I can understand not wanting Italy to overstay its welcome.
I’ve put 4-5 hours into the game so far and I’m really enjoying the story and setting. I didn’t play Unity so the last AC game I played was Black Flag. My immediate gripe is that the game has a lot of odd behavior. NPCs disappearing and or bugging out, clipping through objects, people disappearing, and so on. I don’t remember it being so prevalent in BF. Or it might just be that the last string of open world games I’ve played, like The Witcher 3 and MGS5, are cleaner. Anyhow, it gives it a cheaply made feeling that can be a bit of a turn off. The other thing I’m not too fancy for is the framerate, which is solid when not around crowds but dips when you are. The dips aren’t major but definitely noticeable, and you do run through crowds quite a bit.
As I mentioned, the setting, i.e. 19th century London, is gorgeous. It’s everything I hoped it would be and more, in fact. If it’s one thing Ubisoft always gets right, it’s the worlds they build. I love running through the city, I don’t even bother with fast travel or other modes of transportation outside of running and the rope because it’s a joy to take everything in. And there’s still fun to be had assassinating people and climbing buildings, even though it feels extremely familiar at this point. The main characters, Evie and Jacob, as well as the supporting cast, are all interesting and likable. The story itself is very coherent - London is corrupt to the core and you aim to take it back.
The main gameplay supplemented by side quests, as usual, but what I’m really enjoying is building up my gang, the Rooks, and gaining new territory. You basically challenge rival gangs and once you defeat them you take over their territory. Opening new territory installs your Rooks, who you can call upon to help you if you see them around, and opens up the area for side quests and collecting.
I plan to spend a lot of time with the game this weekend and I’ll post more impressions. So far this is a solid title… nothing groundbreaking, but fun nonetheless.
I see the disappearing people as well - especially in cutscenes where at times, there is absolutely no-one, but a gun moving around. Also, the first gang battle, where I was hopelessly outmatched, I had to crawl around on the sides of where you fought, and suddenly the gang boss was just dead? No idea why or how.
This is on the ps4 - There are noticable dips in framerate here as well at times.
Am I the only one struggling like crazy with the controls? Trying to fight more than one person is a frustation like nothing else Ive ever tried - Try to dodge something has me picking up the body of the person I just killed, trying to avoid a fight with the police has me killing them and so on.
Its driving me bonkers. There is no series that can get me to ragequit a game like the AC series it seems.
Looks like my PS4 copy of Syndicate is out for delivery…in the wrong city! Good job, Amazon Logistics!
Report in qt3ers , I need to know if this remains on my Steam wishlist. :p
Er, well it’s turned up today anyway. Along with a twin. Amazon sent me two copies in separate parcels.
Curses, I had no idea the PC version comes out a month after consoles. So, what’s the state of Unity (PC) these days? Worth playing?
There are a lot of serious gameplay issues with it that won’t ever go away. If you’re really, really into the history and seeing virtual Paris, there’s some value to be had, but beyond that I can’t recommend it.
With 970 the game looks utterly stunning and runs well (55-60fps). I finished it and had no significant bugs or issues. That said, it is more AC. I liked it because I loved Paris and they improved parkour, which was nice. I hated sailing so I was fine without it. But it is still AC which means checklist design, shitty collectibles, map full of bullshit. But I did have fun with the main story and some good sidemissions. The DLC was for free and nice too.
Dat graphics though (videos I recorded, no spoilers)
Mine might have looked like that but it certainly did not look that smooth :)
On Syndicate, as it’s part of an Nvidia bundle it’ll inevitably be cheap on ebay…
Would like to know how much of the modern day stuff is in the game before I buy another Ass Creed. I ain’t fixin’ no more servers and reporting to the project manager to do performance evaluations.
I mean, what idiot thought it would be a great idea to get yanked out of fighting on rooftops to decide where the team is going to lunch that day? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Imagine in the next Elder Scroll game you get yanked out of the world by your Mom so you can go take out the trash. Ridiculous!
Other than a couple of cut-scenes near the beginning of the game, the modern day stuff is barely present. I’m about six hours in, we’ll see if that holds up.
I’m really enjoying the game so far. I bought it last night at Best Buy, mostly on a whim, and have no regrets. The story, characters, setting… it all ties together nicely. It feels like a more tightly focused game than Unity. Ubi clearly learned some lessons.
That also bodes well for this new studio. I believe it’s their first game. Obviously it’s built heavily on the work of Ubisoft Montreal, but still, the Quebec studio is off to a good start.
I pre-ordered this with 35% off from Greenman gaming, and my CE guide arrived from Amazon today, but I’m very disappointed. There is a thick section in the guide for Dreadful Crimes, but these side missions are a PS4 exclusive. Some research via Google says it is on PS4 “first” but most I’ve what I’ve looked up points to this being a full exclusive. What a shame. Yeah I’m sure Sony paid a ton for it, but what a rip off to the customers. I wonder if the money from Sony even covered the development cost for these missions, because there appears to be quite a bit of content. I love the AC series, but I always seem to come away disappointed from a dick business move by ubi.
Absolutely. As I mentioned, I played Black Flag but skipped Unity (and before that hadn’t played an AC since 2). This is clearly an evolution of Black Flag - there are a lot of subtle improvements and the rope launcher is fantastic. If you generally enjoy AC games, Syndicate is a good one of those. Victorian London is awesome.
Cool beans, and glad to hear its a positive evolution. I still need to play Rogue also!
From what I understand, Ubi uses as least two distinct groups of multi-national development teams to achieve its annual release strategy for AC. This means that Syndicate was entering its final lap of development when Unity came out. It can also help to explain the contrast in results between Unity and its immediate predecessor, Black Flag, and its close parallel, Rogue. I wouldn’t be surprised if Syndicate had a number of Black Flag people working on it, and relatively few people from the Unity dev group.
The lead studio this time was Ubisoft Quebec, which has predominantly done ports in the past (they did the Wii-U version of Black Flag). There were at least eight other studios involved, many of them working on parts of all the yearly games.
Quebec worked closely with Montreal (possibly the Black Flag team), who apparently focused on London’s landmarks, creating crowds, and improving the parkour gameplay’s smoothness. A different team at Montreal was lead on Unity.