There is a thread for it, and its basically Black Flag v.1.5 and people enjoyed it - I think it was hurt immensely by not releasing it on current consoles, though.
You know, I think I’m just not as interested in the boat warfare as I thought I would be. That paired with another dreadfully boring tutorial sequence, and the fact I bought it on sale, meant I could just give it a pass and not dwell on it too much. I suspect I’ll return to it sometime, like I have Unity. I just need the right frame of mind for it.
Oh and while we’re in the Unity thread: playing with the HUD off makes everything a little bit more daring and fun. You have to watch animations closely to parry properly, having more than a few guards can be quite deadly, and guns are a very risky business. I find myself taking a lot more care about where and when I do things, almost like an Arkham game on the harder difficulty.
Could be I just hate myself, though. I do like my games to be a little punishing for some reason.
Well, if you prefer Unity over Black Flag, the game that even Ubisoft disavowed and cancelled all DLC for, I do think you enjoy punishing ;-)
I, too, enjoy some good hyperbole now and again.
Well, the cancelling of all DLC is true, though, but other than that - thats what the smiley was for :-)
I’m pretty sure all the DLC was released, one way or another.
They gave away the Dead Kings DLC for free.
They repackaged the 2D China DLC into a separate game, and gifted ACU season pass holders a free game. Which was money in the bank for them. I suspect the numbers crunchers figured they’d come ahead by separating the development of AC Chronicles from Unity given the ongoing internet hysteria and related memes.
But maybe they didn’t add on the planned Parisian missions, which was the third item on the list for the Season Pass.
This x1000. I’d play Rogue in a heartbeat if it were on the PS4.
Just fired up Unity again to test out the new 970 - this really was a pretty game, and generally 60 fps so far. It’s a shame they scaled back a bit for Syndicate, which came for free with the GPU.
Novigrad is pretty, but I think Paris takes it.
The funniest thing I’ve seen about Eagle Flight is on the Ubisoft official PR piece for it.
2016 is shaping up to be a big year for virtual reality, and Ubisoft has just announced its first major foray into the world of headset-enhanced gaming. Eagle Flight, unveiled during PlayStation Experience 2015 in San Francisco, gives players the chance to soar freely through an abandoned Paris as eagles, moving their heads to steer as they swoop through alleyways and dogfight with avian enemies.
We were hugely impressed with Eagle Flight when we tried out the early demo at E3 2015. Piloting our eagle avatars was as easy as looking where we wanted to go, and the experience of plunging into a nosedive between buildings and then pulling up into the sky delivered an exhilarating sense of speed and freedom. Testing our new skills against each other in quick multiplayer matches only heightened that feeling, and it’s a huge thrill to weave your way between buildings at high speeds when you know there’s an enemy following right behind you.
Gee, Mr. Ubisoft PR Man, it’s good to know you were “hugely impressed” with that Ubisoft demo of that Ubisoft game.
I’m sure this has been mentioned before, but if directions for starting a new game include having to look up how to do so on the internet, you’re doing something wrong.
Not sure what was wrong with the ‘three profiles’ method used by every other AC game in history.
OK. So Unity is ‘Done’. Just one game left.
Have a lot of feelings about this game, so I’ll break this up into multiple posts. The TL;DR version is this - lot of good ideas, lot of fair to poor execution.
Gameplay (base game)
Movement - Certainly, one of the biggest addition to the franchise in this game is the ‘Free Run Down’ button. Great concept. Usually works. I did find a temple somewhere where if you were descending from the tallest point, you’d get stuck on the way down, where the only way out was either back up, or fast travel somewhere else. But that only happened in one location (still, with a collectible at the top, surprised this wasn’t caught). The other issue was there were times I wanted to only go part-way down the building. But if there was a hay cart anywhere w/in 180 degrees of the wall (it seemed), you’d just jump into that. Still, the positives from ‘free run down’ far outweigh any of these annoyances.
LT to enter window - this worked less well. Good idea, but it still seemed like you needed to be entering the window from the ‘correct’ direction (or two). There were many, many times - even with LT held in - that I’d just dance around the window which, when it’s the only entry into a building, is a bit on the frustrating side.
The ‘return’ of the ‘free run up’ button. For climbing things, this worked very well. But it wasn’t taken far enough. When on the ground, if the ‘free run up’ button isn’t pressed, then dammit, stay on the same level. When running on the streets, quit jumping on every railing, stand, char, table, hiding spot, cart, etc you see. Because once that happens, there is no effort to return to the street w/o holding in the ‘free run down’ button, and even that only works so well. Can’t count the number of times I just had to stop moving and hammer the drop button to return to the street. The only way your character should climb anything is if the ‘free run up’ button is held in. Would just work so much better that way. Having to enter a upper-story door w/ a balcony was always the worst, as getting you to drop from the railing to the actual balcony was much harder than it should have been.
Combat. Yes, it’s harder in this game - which in and of itself is fine, I guess - but it just doesn’t work. Killing blow animations are still far too long (when you’re in the middle of combat against a dozen guys, do you really need to perform an 18-point execution?) If you get knocked over, you just can’t move for however long it takes for someone to wind up and hit you on the ground - there is zero chance to even roll out of the way. Frustrating to lie there for 8 seconds not being able to do anything while Mr. Brute winds up with his axe. The icons that give you warning just don’t work maybe a 1/3rd of the time. And what makes it all terrible is the camera. Especially once you finish your 18-point executions, the camera is set to - seemingly - randomly circle around you and place itself at the worst possible location for battle awareness. Or it gets stuck behind a tree so you can’t see anything. It just doesn’t work and is the worst combat of the series - none of which has to do with the fact it’s a little harder this time around.
Side missions, collectibles, etc. For the most part, no real complaint. The crowd events were awesome (and I think they are still there in Syndicate as well). The side missions were, in general, very well done. Especialy the murder mysteries. The Nostradamus things were decent, but the reward was awful for all that work. But overall, the ‘side’ parts of the game were pretty well done.
Message interface/Database - the pop up messages for database entries were just terrible. Not in and of themselves, but they hung around FOREVER. This can really be seen during the murder mystery missions. When you investigate a clue, a text window pops up with the info - and that’s fine. But then you’d also get a pop-up message telling you about the database entry, and it would hang around for, I don’t know, 37 minutes. You could, of course, go ahead and bring up the DB entry and read the info, but then when you closed the DB entry you’d be looking at the same info again in the text box, which you then need to close. On top of that, they moved the immediate DB access back to the same button as the map, so that if you wanted to see the map during one of those 37-minute notifications, you’d be forced to go through the DB entry first (or just wait for the notification to clear). Having it on the start/pause button was so much better, but at the very least, they should have made it a ‘hold to see DB entry’ method like I believe they did w/ the last few games.
Story/Characters/Setting.
I liked the main two characters, their back story, and just them in general. Elise was one of my favorite characters of the series, even tho she was a Templar (in name, anyway). And Arno definitely seemed a bit of a return to an Ezio-like character. So they were great. And I loved the depection of their relationship. You really coudl see/feel the emotion from these characters - especially as you got closer to the end game. So really enjoyed them (if not the sad but predictable end). Also liked the depiction of the Marquis de Sade. What was disappointing from a character standpoint was the Assassin’s council. For the second straight game (#1 being Rogue), it just seemed like the Assassins were a bunch of idiots. What? You’re investigating someone who clearly is a dangerous threat not just to us but all of France? When we didn’t tell you to? YOU’RE EXPELLED!!! Just dumb. Plus - OK, they expel him, but they apparently let him keep all his weaponry? Just weird. And I have no idea what he’s supposed to be at the end of the game or during the DLC - is he an Assassin’? Is he rogue and needs to watch his back from other Assassin’s? Just - ugh.
Setting - I thought this was probably the best looking game to date from a setting standpoint. They did a great job with Paris, and the crowds, and having the overall ‘right’ feel of a city in turmoil. Can’t say enough good things about that. It’s a shame, then, that they didn’t do a better job integrating the story into the revolution. With AC3, you could come away feeling that if not for Connor, the Americans would have lost their revolution. Here, you’re just doing things that happen to be taking place at the same time as the revolution. You’re not really a part of it. And that’s a missed opportunity.
Story - already said that it seemed like a wasted opportunity to really have this game be more involved with the revolution. But the other part of the story is the present day stuff. I know I’m in the minority on this, but I always liked the present-day part of the game. To reduce it all to just one introduction movie and some voice overs just bothers me. I have no idea who this woman is sending me to do this work to start with, even with Sean (sorry, Deacon) in the background. And then on top of all that, it turns out that you’ve spent all this time living the memories of Arno, only to learn that if you (the present day character) had done absolutely nothing, everything would have turned out the same because the thing you were worried about ended up to not be a concern.
Integration of present/past - I realized that there’s been a problem with this since AC2, but it seems to be getting more and more absurd with each passing game. Take AC2 - Clay breaks into the Animus and leaves these code fragments all over the place, and you (as Desmond) track them down. Now, those glyph puzzles were a lot of fun, but here’s the thing - they didn’t exist when Ezio was actually alive. So why would he be investigating them to begin with? There was nothing there. How can you relieve the memories of Ezio looking at these glyphs when they weren’t actually there in his timeframe (or even at all, since they only exist w/in the Animus)? By Unity, it’s just gotten stupid - those server sweeps that send you to different timeframes in Paris. Arno didn’t actually time travel. So how can you be reliving the memories of him doing so? It just makes no damn sense. Same thing with the helix glitches, or whatever those missions were. Even giving the game a bit of leeway, this just makes no actual sense. If memory serves, at least when they did something like this with Syndicate, you ended up reliving another persons memory, and not taking one of the twins to a different time.
Finally - how hard can it be to put a ‘new game’ button or menu entry in the pause menu, or right up front? The hoops you have to jump through to start a new game is just beyond stupid.
DLC - First time through the Dead Kings expansion. The guillotine gun was a nice toy, although would have been nice to have more spare ammo. I thought the additions of the ‘leaders’ to whatever the new set of enemies were in the catacombs were a real good idea, and added a nice element of strategy to just defeating or sneaking your way through giant mobs of low-level enemies. The bases you took over - much like the café missions in the main game - didn’t seem to really buy you anything, or nothing noticeable from my standpoint. Granted, in the base game, the café missions gave you more money every 20 minutes, but I didn’t really seem to notice a difference between a liberated area and non-liberated. Same thing w/ the DLC. The story was typical AC stuff, with the only real complaint being - why bother w/ the ‘mistaken’ Elise character? Didn’t seem to be any point to that at all. I mean, it could have led to something better, but there just didn’t seem to be any reason to put that there. Yes, it got Arno to where he needed to be to talk to someone, but a basic thief could have done the same thing. Just no emotional payoff for chasing Elise to find out it wasn’t her. Just - odd. Overall, the DLC added some hours of gameplay and didn’t really detract from the main game (and, depending on your feelings about the new weapon, may add to it).
Overall, it just seemed like I really wanted to like Unity. And there are a lot of things to like about it. But where it fails, it fails hard and just becomes and exercise in frustration. While not saying I wouldn’t play through it a third time in the future, as much as I want to like it, it definitely is pretty far down on my list of AC games. Not the worst - certainly. But so much wasted potential.
I’m usually not a big AC fan, but I’m liking this so far. I think the key for me is sticking to the main plot / missions and not worrying about collecting chests and stuff so I can turn off the mini map. I think I set the HUD to light. When UBI games are all about going to the next icon I just find them dull, but there are elements to them that are good.
Is there any downside to not collecting stuff, like opening chests? It looked like I was getting some type of currency for opening them - not sure what it is used for. I’m still early in the game - in prison.
Are there any settings that you used to maximize your enjoyment of the game?
Yes, there will be a downside made apparent to you soon. Weapon and “armor” (really additional skill modifier) upgrades are highly dependent on your income. You get some new equipment for free as the story progresses, but the majority of stuff needs to be purchased with money.
There is a tavern upgrade system that will give you money automatically in a chest over time, but the upgrades to that require money. Unless you want to play the game like a f2p mobile title and wait for the chest to fill every hour, you’ll want to open random chests and loot bodies a lot.
I do open ones that I notice, but that is probably a small percentage. Maybe if I find myself short of money I’ll need to turn on the mini map just for chest hunting and then turn it back off.
At GDC, Ubisoft talked about the mistakes they made with this game. Basically, they got bogged down in the tech and didn’t spend enough time on the actual game.
Back on my Assassin’s Creed backlog, reporting in to say Unity: also a bullshit, stupid, trial and error game that I can’t stop playing despite my frustrations.