I’ve played most of them to near 100%, and the temptation is still there in Origins. Sometimes the mindless checklist of collectibles, tasks, and side missions is satisfying to me. Going section by section on the map can be relaxing for a while. But yeah, I’m just not that invested in Bayek. I don’t think the writing was that strong in any of the AC games so far, so I doubt it’s actually a step back here, but the missions in Origins are really dragging for me. I think the errand-boy vibe in particular is grating. As a Medjay, everyone has a problem, and I blindly help everyone with no question. I don’t know why that should feel different, the missions themselves are pretty much the same sort of homicidal work I’ve done throughout the series, but it felt different when the context was different.
I already own Odyssey from when it was on sale at some point, but I think if I start it I won’t go back to Origins at all.
One thing Odyssey does a lot better than Origins is integrating the various systems, particularly around hunting down the Cult and to a lesser extent whatever those named ranked enemies are called. It really motivates you (or me, anyway) to engage with them, rather than just being cruft. The mission system I was less enamoured with, as it felt very GAAS to me.
That…would be terrible, for their bottom line and for us. A lot of us have just gone through a period of upgrading, as the price of video cards fell to something more or less reasonable. And I’m not sure there are any looming CPU great leaps forward on the horizon either. A generation for PC gaming hardware these days is a lot longer than it was a decade or two ago.
Not only that, but really, stuff is so complex now and the hardware so capable even with the current gen that I think developers are better served spending time figuring out how to design and build games that actually make full use of what is out there rather than kicking the can down the road and relying on more horsepower to do stuff for them.
One thing I didn’t notice in any of the gameplay stuff yesterday is any climbing. The last one I played extensively was AC: Revelations, in which I climbed around the Hagia Sophia. Has climbing stopped being a core part of the AC games since then? The brief time I spent in AC3 didn’t have much climbing as Haytham Kenway, since Boston is pretty flat in 1760 or whenever it was set.
Pretty much, yeah. You still do a tiny bit of it, to climb over fort walls and such, but it’s not a major mechanic. Even the fast travel towers aren’t really climbing puzzles any more.
Climbing’s certainly been de-emphasized in the modern “RPG” versions of the game. There are still “synch points” throughout the landscape that can be climbed, but they’re no longer required to fill in the map, and they’re not generally anything more than holding a button and pushing up. They’re also, by and large, not very high up, since these are ancient environments.
I can’t imagine that’ll change much in Valhalla. There’s a shortage of really tall construction in that era.
One of the gameplay videos showed quite a bit of climbing, including the return of moving along tree limbs like in AC3. Also, climbing and running to chase paper drifting around!
But yes, climbing as a gameplay puzzle has mostly been done away with in this gen of AC games. You scuttle up just about anything with nary a thought.
Climbing has been less important as the franchise has progressed, but I don’t remember it being a challenge even back in the Ezio games. Is that just my memory smoothing over the differences in games? They’ve changed the control scheme a few times and experimented with the idea of “parkour up/parkour down” buttons, but going up was still pretty much holding down a single button and pushing the control stick up. I remember you occasionally have to move around to another side of a tower where there were more windows, but it never felt more challenging in a meaningful way than it does to me as recently as Origins.
“Challenge” would be overstating it, but you did have to work a bit to find a viable path of handholds to the top, and at least in some cases that involved some hunting. It wasn’t as simple as pressing a button and holding up. Now, whether that was in any way interesting gameplay is a perfectly valid thing to debate.
