Assassin's Creed: Buccaneer

[Brannigan]

I bounced off of asscreed 1 hard, stopped playing after about an hour. So I largely missed out, may have done one assassination? I feel like you get that once in a while in the others, but yea often it's tail a guy then kill.

[Badfinger]

I loved the concept and ideas of AC1, but yeah I only made it through about a third of the game. AC2 and especially Brotherhood were exactly what I was looking for from a game of that style.

[Twig]

I beat AC1! I can definitely attest to Merus' claim that the core story assassinations in AC1 were the best. There's already enough side mission assassinations for the solve-the-puzzle type of kills, I definitely wish they'd bring back the storytelling type of kills for future Asscreeds. Though I haven't played AC4, the trend of the games' progression so far leads me to believe it'll be the worst of them all in that regard, even if the rest of the game is the best so far.

[Brannigan]

It actually makes a bit of sense in IV because of your character really, he's not interested.

[Bjorn]

I beat AC1! I can definitely attest to Merus' claim that the core story assassinations in AC1 were the best.

 

I fully agree, I loved the assassinations in 1.  The change in core assassinations is one of the reasons I gradually soured on the series, it just took away something I really dug. 

[Erkki]

It actually makes a bit of sense in IV because of your character really, he's not interested.

True, and what I really like is how (relatively) little ludo-narrative dissonance there is in Black Flag -- the player's own created story and the narrated story are pretty much aligned, and some aspects of the final bits and ending brings that out even more.

[Brannigan]

Was finishing up assassination missions...walking along the shoreline I saw a dolphin seemingly jump out of the sand and into the water.  

[Brannigan]

There should have been more of those assassination missions where you had to dive through caves first and ended up having to do everything without your weapons.  I liked actually having to figure out the best way to clear the area and actually being in danger if noticed.

[Erkki]

Agreed, those were good! Also,

 

I got 100% now, and trying to do the last "Challenges" but I think I'll drop those as the last ones are just too much work (discovering social chests, finding all locations in Kenway's Fleet).

[Brannigan]

I basically called it done after finishing the naval contracts and assassinations, I can never be bothered with collectibles.

[Twig]

I like collectibles (to an extent), but dislike them in the AC games. Largely because the movement is nowhere near as fluid and uninhibited as I'd like it to be if I'm going to be running everywhere. I want it to be as fast as possible, but even up to AC3 (doubt it's fixed in AC4), I still get that "run up a wall because you accidentally hit a corner" bullshit that just breaks me out of whatever action I'm doing. I mean, it's annoying during missions, too, but at least there I'm not usually in a rush heading straight for a specific point on the map to open a chest to then move on to the next chest. Or feather or whatever.

 

The other reason I dislike them in AC is because there's so goddamn many of them.

[Brannigan]

The only collectible worth it is the sea shanties, because fuck yea sea shanties. They're like 80% of what made ac4 good.

[Erkki]

Interesting that they never patched these, while for me it seemed obvious opportunity to do so on the PC:

 

* Give sea shanties a separate volume control (I wanted them to be a lot louder than the awfully repetitive/boring/annoying music). This lessened my enjoyment of the game considerably as I didn't want to be going into menus to adjust volume each time I switched between ship/land.

* Fix the god damn bug where fixing the ships in Kenway's Fleet's naval map didn't work (had to go to fleet tab and scroll to the right ship there)

[Brannigan]

I didn't really have an issue either way on that.

[Architecture]

The only collectible worth it is the sea shanties, because fuck yea sea shanties. They're like 80% of what made ac4 good.

And it's unfortunate that they were the least fun of the lowest-level fetch quests. Chasing down a chart only to miss a jump because of AC's frustratingly imprecise traversal mechanics is just plain bad design.

[Brannigan]

Oh that part sucks for sure, but at least there was an actual purpose to them that I gave a crap about it

[Merus]

And it's unfortunate that they were the least fun of the lowest-level fetch quests. Chasing down a chart only to miss a jump because of AC's frustratingly imprecise traversal mechanics is just plain bad design.

 

I feel like they'd be a lot more fun if they were structured like a time trial: the shanty is always just ahead of you, and if you run to where it blows away in time, without getting too far away from it, it blows into your face and you collect it. A lot of the problem is that it's not hard to go where you mean to go, but it's very hard to change direction once you're going that way, because the traversal is made up of lots of blended animations. If the game was more obvious about the path it means you to travel, it'd be much better.

 

Many of those shanties were best collected by climbing up to it, jumping off, running across the ground, then waiting for the shanty to float by.

[Brannigan]

I started approaching them like an assassination target. Get as close as possible without alerting it and trying to get the jump on it before it moved far. When I was successful the chases only lasted a few seconds.

[Cordeos]

I would love it if Ubisoft would spin off the ship combat systems into a new game series with that as its focus. Especially if they had real-time fleet battles.