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Erkki

Ass Ass In Creed Too

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Really, what the fuck is with the outfit? Hey you there, half a mile away! Look at me, I'm an assassin, and I'm coming your way! I'm on the internets and I already hate this game.

Also, WTF, Leonardo da Vinci is your personal weaponsmith? Fuck you.

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Indeed. The beginning of the gameplay demonstration seemed pretty nice and I was almost ready to stop nagging about the incredible laziness of character/clothing design when they dropped da Vinci bomb. It was really quite stupid and I was decently disappointed. I felt like kicking someone in the teeth.

EDIT: God I hope they don't actually go Da Vinci Code with this one.

Edited by Nappi

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I was moderately enthused about this game until I actually saw it in action and it was exactly the same stuff as last time. I don't know what I was expecting though. It's just that; I saw Venice sprawled out underneath the player and I thought... meh, can't really be bothered.

I hope I'm proven sincerely wrong though!

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I love how the cinematic they showed had the assassin dressed in a white coat and no mask when "infiltrating" a masquerade ball. And how the DaVinci glider actually encourages you to get close to the bright light of fire when you're trying to "sneak in" late at night. :shifty:

I was still hoping for them to make a medieval Hitman: Blood Money. :blink:

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I think it looks really good actually.

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For me it comes down to variety in missions. If they have at least some pretence of uniqueness in the different missions I have to do, I'll be pretty pleased. Having the exact same format throughout the first game was such a colossal let-down. In particular, I'd like some more thought to go into the main assassinations. Ideally, I'd like three or four intended approaches and methods (stuff like using the scenery to take the target out, and so on), but also the freedom to find my own path if I want. I've only watched the bit from the Sony conference properly once, and it didn't look like it had that. I haven't yet seen enough to confound my first wish, though.

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I've only watched the bit from the Sony conference properly once, and it didn't look like it had that. I haven't yet seen enough to confound my first wish, though.

Well, in an interview the designer said they have about 15 mission types and by combining them they can create infinite variety! I call that bullshit. An example was that an escort mission might turn into an assassination mission.

But anyway, it does look good even though I hate those things I already mentioned and a couple of more. And I'll probably play it.:violin:

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With 15 mission types there are only 1307674368000 possibilities, it's a large number, but not infinite. Also, most of them will look identically.

A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F ->G -> H -> I -> J -> K -> L -> M -> N -> O looks a lot like A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F ->G -> H -> J -> I -> K -> L -> M -> N -> O

Besides, in ass#1 quite some assassination missions started off with a eavesdropping like part.

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It's not entirely about what mission types they're combining and in what order. I think it's probably more about presentation and specifics. Ultimately, a lot of games have very dull and repetitive objectives. In Call of Duty, except for things like sniper or vehicle missions, what you're doing is shooting men until you reach some geographical location, at which point either the mission ends or you are given a new location to start moving towards. But the various environments are presented differently and structurally distinct enough to (for some, at least) keep things fresh. The problem with Assassin's Creed (for me) was that the repetition was completely undisguised and unchallenged (I felt similarly about the new Prince of Persia). Perhaps this was in part due to the sandbox nature of the game; when you're being drawn along a particular corridor it's relatively straight-forward to show you a load of cool stuff. But that's not insurmountable.

It was kind of weird how all the missions seemed almost atomic in nature. It's like they reduced things to the simplest possible components and served them all separately. It's like being served a meal one component at a time. Or one ingredient at a time. Or something. I guess combining the mission types could help things a bit, as long as they're not too mechanical about it. I want it to feel natural and [lazy word inbound] narrative. I don't want to feel like some sort of android programmed to perform a very rigid set of tasks. I guess the fact that they're even breaking down the number of mission types suggests that they are thinking of them in a very utilitarian manner, which concerns me. Still, I'll hold out hope. The game could be wonderful.

I finished the first game, so I must have liked it well enough. It was getting to be a bit of a chore by the end, though.

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I'm actually going through AC1 for the first time right now and while I can see how shallow and binary the whole package is, pieces of it, like scaling uber-tall towers and the combat (especially combo killing and counter killing with the hidden blade) are some of the most fun I've had with a game this gen. Now just imagine these mechanics in something as deep as a Thief game and we have something really special. Will they make something that complex? I doubt it, but if they even come close to delivering on the potential here, AC2 could be really awesome.

Edited by AkuMifune

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I'll probably get this game, as much as I hate to admit it I did enjoy parts of the first game. However I didn't pay for the first (came with my 360 for no additional cost). At them moment I am reserving judgement till I play the actual game.

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I don't hate to admit it. I thought AC1 was awesome. Repetitive, I'll admit, but I loved the freedom of movement and I'd spend hours just running around looking for cool things to see. Pretty psyched for the sequel, actually. The DaVinci stuff is kinda dumb, granted, but if it's fun I'll forgive it.

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Man I can't wait for another "fuck you, d'ya want the story? buy our next game" ending!

Assassin's Creed: The good stuff

- cool freedom of movement to climb high stuff

- fighting templars

- the first mission

Honestly that's about all I got out of it. I enjoyed the game for a couple hours until my heart started sinking, slowly realizing that I'd essentially seen everything the game has to offer. The assassinations offered no room for experimentation, something Thief and Hitman have been improving on for years and years. The combat blew my mind when I accidentally discovered hidden blade counters, and then subsequently bored me to tears with repetition. I really wanted to like it but it seemed like the game was actively trying to stop that.

It sure was pretty though.

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AkuMifune, I don't know how far you are yet, but I have one suggestion for anyone who hasn't played it yet:

Forget the areas outside of the cities. There's nothing interesting there. Just try to get through them as fast as possible. I initially tried to explore it all until realizing there was nothing to be gained, just more repetition.

I enjoyed the first game too, BTW, but yeah it wasn't deep in any way.

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I wish I could avoid The Kingdom areas, but I'm kind of an Achievement whore. I mean 'completionist' which is exactly the same thing, but less insulting for some reason. So I agree the hub area is devoid of personality, but I'm hunting Templars.

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Assassin's Creed was way cooler than the new Prince of Persia, however repetitive it became...I'm looking forward to the new one for sure, but it's going to be a hard decision to actually pay $60 for it.

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Assassin's Creed was way cooler than the new Prince of Persia

Definitely. It had its problems, and some pretty transparent repetition, but at least the whole world didn't seem dead and uninhabitable. They might not have bothered with the façade of varied missions, but at least they bothered with the façade of a world that makes some kind of sense, rather than a series of abstract obstacle courses.

I don't know, I finished Prince of Persia, so I can't have hated it, but it really bothered me in some quite serious ways. It was a weird and cold and empty experience for me.

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But the design of PoP was much more compelling that Ass1's design, which was quite repetitive and boring. But Ass1 also had a lot of those weird specially crafted elements, but not as obvious as in PoP.

For example, quite some of those hiding spaces (hay or those curtain thingies) were on places only some wall runner could reach.

The earlier PoP games (SoT, TT) looked much more natural. PoP:WW didn't, it had a lot of those weird traps which wouldn't make sense in a normal castle.

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I'm not saying AC was free from game-ness (the hiding places were all completely contrived, as you say), but I found it a lot less jarring than PoP. It may just be me, but I found PoP's design much less compelling than AC. I'd rather play more AC than more PoP. I'm not sure I can quite put my finger on what it was about Prince that made it fall so flat for me. I suspect it was a combination of factors. A lot of people seemed concerned with its easiness, but I don't think that's really a problem for me, although the degree to which the checkpoint system was forgiven may be related; it encouraged me to treat the whole thing as a trial-and-error process rather than feel any concern for my character or sense of investment in his fate. This is obviously my own doing, but often, rather than properly observing my environment (because it was all abstract nonsense to me), I'd just try each of the compass points until one of them didn't lead me to my doom. That's kind of like the "combine everything" thing one resorts to when frustrated in adventure games, and is similarly devoid of fun. I prefer it when I get at least some kind of idea as to what I ought to be doing by observing my surroundings, which I didn't feel like I was being encouraged to do at all.

I actually have quite a high tolerance for lack of realism. I wasn't particularly put off by the weird traps in Warrior Within, as far as I can remember. Perhaps it's because I'd been trained to expect that kind of ridiculousness. I don't know. But the new game crossed some sort of line.

I don't know, I feel like a lot of this comes down to idiosyncracies on my part, but I think they only heighten stuff that is up with the game in the first place. I guess I'd sum my feelings up by saying that at the end of Assassin's Creed what I wanted is for them to do a sequel that refined and fixed all the stuff that's wrong with it, which is a lot of stuff, but I was really fond of the basics of the game, whereas when I finished Prince of Persia I was left wondering how long they'd be putting out games based on this model before they move on to something else that I'm more likely to appreciate. The game seemed to be fundamentally at odds with what I wanted from it. Perhaps that's too strong -- it is, after all, all about the same sort of traversal that's at the centre of all the PoP games that I had such a good time with -- but it felt wrong. In Assassin's Creed, the way Altaïr moves is probably the best thing about the game.

Sorry, I'm rambling. I could go on about how I think the claw messes up the mechanics further and so on, but it really wouldn't be interesting.

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Aarrgh. I can't watch this. Why is Mona Lisa in this game?

Hmm. I like Justice as much as the next douchebag, but wow is that music so completely mismatched from the content. That's almost Dragon Age territory there.

I do like the setting though and the world design. Just wish that somebody would do something more with it than typical-action-game-fodder bullshit.

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Argh :( :( :(

Much as I like Justice, how did they think electro would work with that setting? Not much better than a song like that with choppily edited clips of a renaissance dude killing other renaissance dudes to kill my interest :/

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In the sequel it looks like they are fixing the lack of mission variety, and a bunch of other problems, which is great, but none of those things were really what made the game suck.

The biggest problem for me with that game was its pretence of telling a story, and of forcing you to sit there and act out the bits that trigger the story, even when it is blatantly contradictory to how the entire rest of the game encourages you to play.

For example, in one early mission I spent ages scouting the area around the assassination target, silently clearing the rooftops of guards, planning my escape route & picking the perfect spot for the kill. I would come out from behind a pillar, drop down directly infront of the target, stab him in the chest, wallrun straight back up and escape via my pre-cleared route. My hiding spot was close enough for the 'accessing assassination memory' prompt, but it wouldn't trigger the goddamn cutscene. I moved closer and closer, from good hiding spot to poor, to practically out in the open, but still no cutscene. I eventually realised it wanted me to go out into the damn crowd of gawkers and stand there in the open like an idiot while this guy says his lines, and then i just had to run up and kill him like a street thug.

Assassins Creed had, i think, the best 3d platforming I've ever played, so i'm definitely going to play the sequel, i just wish i didn't have to swallow all the cutscene bullshit. Push the story into the background instead of forcing it down my throat and i might appreciate it more.

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ugh... again retarded assassination sequences. That really bothered me a lot in the first game, almost every hit was in public.

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