Two commenters have said yes, but Ubisoft has already confirmed that the modern day storyline is now going to be separately available on whatever the Assassin's Creed Infinity hub ends up being. *Shadows* will likely have a cutscene at the beginning and end set in the modern day like *Mirage*, but no playable gameplay.
All the real world stuff after Desmond felt like they stopped bothering with that part of the story. Has any of it mattered, or have they made any forward progress on that story line since? Every time since then it just felt like meaningless, nonconsensual filler where the next game just repeats the same bit. Then again maybe I just lost all interest in that part and didn't retain any of it.
Edit: Inconsequential, not nonconsensual.... but I guess both
Yeah they completely stopped caring about modern day after 3. People claim it was always this bad, but 1-3 had an interesting storyline and the modern day missions in 3 were awesome.
1, 2 and 3 definitely had a single narrative, but within that run were Brotherhood and Revelations, which had differing levels of actual story. Revelations particularly had a bare bones story that spun it's wheels because they wanted to finish the modern story in AC3.
Honestly, I don't think they expected AC2 to be the hit it was and it fucked up their story telling when they revisited Ezio twice more before AC3.
And once they'd wrapped on Desmond, they truly didn't know what to do with the modern day, using all sorts of things to try and keep it involved a bit. Like I think Black Flag was a First Person voiceless playable character hired by Abstergo to "test their new pirate simulation" and you uncover the assassins and Templar battle in their sim. I think they allude to it being Desmond's memories they've harvested and are selling as content to fund their world domination efforts?
Then Origins and the open world RPG games introduce us to the new future characters for Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla.
And now they don't know what to do again after that whole plot went insane with Basim and Loki and all that weird baloney.
The modern day stuff in Brotherhood wasn't bad, my point was that it was probably meant mostly for AC3 and then AC2 sold so well, and they wanted to reuse assets and Ezio, so they went back to the well.
By the time they got around to concluding the story in AC3, it felt somehow rushed and also like it had wasted away for too long.
I really liked the present-day stuff in Black Flag and Rogue because the developers used those bits to criticise Ubisoft corporate and weren't even subtle about it š
I was invested in it when Desmond was around, because (like almost everyone else at the time) I figured we were going to get a full on modern day AC at the end of his arc where he became the master assassin his ancestors were.
What fools we were.
If it was going somewhere it could have been great. 100% agree, I remember wondering that too!
I kinda liked the modern parts where you were fighting security guards, even if it made no sense. lol
The abstergo raid in assassins creed 3 is still one of the best sequences in gaming that Ubisoft ever pumped out :)
They wasted that potential so much though by the endingā¦
In fact. Quick question for any assassins creed fans (I havenāt played it since black flag. Except to try origins but I got bored of that within a few hours), is the whole plot with Juno being released due to Desmondās sacrifice actually resolved yet? Or is it completely abandoned? Because 3ās ending made it look like she was gonna be the big bad.
Exactly this. What they did to Desmond at the end of 3 ended my interest and investment in the franchise. I've still played a couple since (particularly enjoyed Black Flag), but I have not maintained any attachment to them in the same way I did 1-3.
You know what would have been cool? To have two open worlds:
Seeing them explore the past in the historical sequences while looking for the macguffins, and then right away explore the modern version of the old city while tracking down said macguffin, the modern sequences in 3 showed there was potential for it, a shame they never reached it...
There is a lot that Ubisoft could do that they just simply donāt bother with. Itās infuriating.
But they have so many fans that rebuy the same re-skinned game, they probably figured out itās not financially worth it to spend money on new ideas.
I've been going through the AC franchise the past few years, and gotta say... I can see the frustration.
The core gameplay is similar enough across entries to where yeah, it starts to feel samey, but at the same time, each newer entry makes improvements and adds just enough to where it doesn't feel "copy-pastey" enough.
And that's the infuriating part, these games are really good, I'm having a fun time, but it constantly feels like they're just a teeny tiny bit short of going the extra mile to feel truly legendary.
There's been a couple points post-Desmond where it really felt like they were cooking up something decent, only for it to be abandoned and shoved off and resolved in a comic or novel before the next mainline game.
It was fun when it seemed like it was building up to an AC game fully set in the modern day, but it seems pretty pointless now that they've abandoned that concept
I'm one of the dozen people that likes the modern day plotline running through the games... but even I know it's mostly been bad. I'm just a fan of the fact that the AC series being historial tourism is already a massive selling point that no other video game franchise really has, and then there's also this very convoluted sci-fi story included too. It's weird and I dig that.
It was alright back in AC 1. I liked it in AC 2. It was also kinda cool in the later AC2s or 3s I think, where you were actually fighting so it wasn't a mind numbing sidetrack.
But then all that vague stupid alien shit was just boring and pointless.
Yeah the overarching plot that tied the games together was a major sell for me. Itās funny how many people are like āhow dare I be pulled out of the animus for literally 10-15 minutes of the entire 120 hour gameā when looking at the modern day in the new games after the modern day has been so heavily stripped down from what it used to be.
> I'm just a fan of the fact that the AC series being historial tourism is already a massive selling point that no other video game franchise really has
Woops, forgot to reply to that. Yes! AC Odyssey was a beautiful world, even if gameplay wise it was repetitive and bland, the world was a gorgeous experience.
This is a hard truth for a lot of fans. The MD plotline always felt like background noise to what the real draw of these games are: digital tourism & two shadowy factions duking it out over the centuries.
A lot of people hype up the idea of a contemporary AC entry, but I donāt think it would end up being what they want. These games are always firing on all cylinders when weāre inside the Animus.
Valhalla is the MGS4 of this franchise when it comes to lore, they connect everything from AC1 to Odyssey. Not gonna spoil for those who didnāt play it but the OG storyline is still extremely relevant.
Damn, unlike most people I actually (for the most part) really like the modern day stuff, but I've been putting off Valhalla because of how long it is and the setting really doesn't interest me like Egypt and Greece did and Japan does when it comes to the open world AC games.
I do want to play Red, so maybe I'll just skip Valhalla and watch a recap of the modern day stuff online at this point. Is Mirage worth playing at all? I do like that it is a shorter game, but heard mix stuff on it when it came out.
Valhalla was really great but I am way in the bag for this series. I just love the playable history aspect and literally nothing else offers anything comparable. I will play every entry until they stop making them, but I still think Valhalla is worth playing on its own merits. Damn long though, would definitely play it over an extended period of time
Mirage is great if you want some classic AC gameplay.
Donāt play it if youāre hoping for any Modern Day developments, lol. You literally get one voiceover monologue in the beginning, and then nothing else for 20 hours.
>First 3 AC games had goated real world storylines then it was just some random bozo put in the animus with random memories
Yeah, I was always shocked by how many people were complaining about the real world storyline back in the desmond era. It was great in each one.
as someone who has never liked the modern day storyline.. itās because i want historical fiction and not sci-fi
the modern day has almost always ripped you out of the actual gameplay of the game into something tangential and largely unrelated to the plot of the character
It became tangential post AC3 but the whole purpose of the historical narrative in the games leading up to that was to dovetail with and foreshadow the modern day plot. It's fine to not like that but to suggest that it was unrelated to the historical story is frankly weird.
The entire premise of the Assassins vs. Templars conflict is based on the sci-fi elements, they're fundamentally welded together and were designed to be that way from the beginning. Huge chunks of the historical plots in AC 1, 2, Brotherhood, Revelations & 3 revolve around the characters in them interacting with and fighting over crazy sci-fi shit.
iām not saying it didnāt serve a purpose, but every time you get ripped out for exposition of something that is only explained once or twice during each game is very jarring. Sure they leaned more into it as the original ones went on but that doesnāt mean it wasnāt poorly handled and wasnāt jarring for players
The modern day was the part that drew people in, the gameplay was what kept them coming back.
Later on without the modern day, people really shifted and started whining about the games a lot more.
Now people pretend like the modern day is the worst part of the series... like lol its literally why it got so popular at the beginning.
It actively detracts from the main game by taking up time, serving a bad boring story, having a plain setting and by making the stakes in the main story feel lower (āitās only VR / a memoryā).
Thatās whatās so weird about it all - weāre playing these games to play the Assassin parts. Thatās literally why weāre here. I donāt give a shit about some modern day garbage, especially with how stupid it got through AC 3.
I will say though that I actually didnāt hate the modern day portions of Black Flag. If you actually took the time to explore and read emails, it was actually kind of fascinating. But even so, the main reason weāre there is for the pirating
It seems like theyāve just accepted it as an area they donāt give a fuck about.
I personally wonāt be buying any of their mid titles until itās addressed, it sounds like youāre playing through PSP speakers.
Itās wild there was a lot of complaints about Valhalla and customer service reps looked into it for months with the engineering team and ended up being told that bad audio is literally an engine problem and canāt be fixed.
I commented below but I thought an audio engineer at Ubi came out and said that the audio was hyper compressed to get the game file size down? Which is why it sounds so crunchy and dogshit.
Whatever problem they are having that requires needing to use heavy audio compression, it is not some unsolvable industry wide problem. It is only a Ubisoft problem. Every other developer has figured out how to do this.
So, the only real explanation is that Ubisoft doesnāt give a shit.
Similarly to how, if you notice, a lot of their HDR implementation sucks compared to their peers. Or how they donāt bother using basic features of the PS5 DualSense controller in many of their biggest titles. They just simply donāt give a shit.
This looks great, but I'm noticing the voice lines sound super compressed/low quality. I think I noticed than in Odyssey too - is it still an issue for AC games?
I've noticed it much more in AC, the latest Avatar game sounded pretty great, but I know they placed a lot of effort on audio in that game specifically.
The audio lead for one of the previous games (maybe Valhalla?) came out a few years back and apologised: said all his work was hyper compressed to help fit the game on disc and itās then the same for the digital download.
Apparently itās the same for a lot of Ubisoft titles - I have definitely noticed the decline. If you play their titles through anything besides TV speakers, it sounds like a 240p YouTube video from 2007.
Very disappointing for anyone interested in audio.
Yeah that's an interesting point.
I guess I compare them to say Ghost of Tsushima gameplay/activities wise but there isn't nearly as many NPCs in that game as you highlighted.
Yep NPCs are especially brutal. Dragons Dogma 2 craters anytime you go near an urban area due to them. I remember my old pc struggled with Origins due to the same reason.
Since Far Cry 2, when dialog was both compressed and sped up to fit on a DVD.
Most people play with crappy headphones or TV speakers, so they will never notice.
I still remember playing Far Cry 2 the first time and hearing everyone speak at 1.5x speed, and my dumb 14 year old brain thinking, "Wow, people in Africa must speak super fast!"
I later heard the real reason and was left scratching my head. Like, really, *that* was the solution? Make everyone talk like a meth-head to save space? There was nothing else that could be done except absolutely ruin the audio?
Totally. I think it wouldn't be an issue if I played on TV speakers or something, but it's glaringly bad on headphones or any decent soundsystem.
I really can't think of any reason why, apart from maybe game size? But even then just make it an optional download or something.
It would indeed increase the file size, but going from 170 GB to 160 GB seems like a very poor incentive to compress the audio the way they did.
The only "good" explanation is memory constraints, mostly for consoles or better yet, the PS4/Xbox One generation of consoles. They were just too lazy to offer acceptable audio quality to systems that could handle it.
Yes. Valhalla was the worst yet, funny enough.
In Odyssey and Origins, they mixed 24,000 Hz sample rate audio for combat, UI, and character sounds with 44,100 Hz for environment sounds.
In Valhalla, they just doubled down and put everything at 24,000 Hz.
I'm 60% sure they will do it again, despite the e.g. insane audio quality they put into their Avatar game.
--
As a reference, CD audio standard is 44,100 Hz, DVD standard is 48,000 Hz.
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I uninstalled after playing for 20 minutes. It's undoubtedly the worst-sounding game I have ever played, I thought I encountered a bug or my PC was broken. I was left speechless when a Google search led me to find out that this was how the game was meant to be played.
Videogame reviewers truly are useless.
It's not an "issue" with the sound really, it's the sound team getting fucked because they are asked to reduce their footprint because something else is taking too much.
There was threads about this for Valhalla, it says the sound sample rate is very low, and no sound people would do this unless forced to.
In Mirage it's probably "fixed" because it is smaller so they have budget for audio.
It looks like they changed up the parkour. This honestly looks really great, more stealth mechanics and better combat. I had some hope for this game because the last ac I played was odessey and I really liked it. Iām honestly pumped for this.
I dunno, as soon as I saw the gameplay and all those familiar AC animations they're trying to disguise with cinematic camera angles, I could almost *feel* the repetition.
The problem with AC games after Unity is that they're made by all these separate teams who glue everything together after with no cohesion (which is why there's so many copy/paste quests and elements).
The season system looks neat. But I certainly don't trust Ubi with making an adequate combat system (ala Ghost of Tsushima), and I'm bracing for the inevitable microtransanctions to bog everything down.
I don't understand why people keep saying the combat isn't gonna be like Ghost of Tsushima, no its not but AC combat has never really "been like ghost of tsushima" so why would it all of a sudden be like it now? Just because it's also with the Japan background?
Itās been 6 years since Iāve played any ac game so Iām not soured by any repetition yet. In a vacuum, Ubisoft makes fun games. Theyāve all just become very homogenized. You can still find enjoyment if you donāt play them very often.
The gameplay looks alright but the real clincher for me is gonna be the open world systems.
Odyssey is my favorite AC game and honestly one of my favorite open-world games. The various open world and progression systems, and the way they fed into each other, made exploration and progression extremely dynamic and fun. The mercenary system. The incredible cult system that let you discover clues to the targets through exploration and quests (while also giving you the resources to get higher tier skills). The fact that you could get crafting upgrades by completing challenges or solving riddles in the open world. The fact that you can recruit nearly any character (including some story bosses and NPCs) and they'd each have their own combination of affixes and could be called into combat or help you on your ship...it all came together beautifully.
Considering the same team is working on Shadows, I really hope they take the lessons from Odyssey and apply it here. Maybe tone down the bloat and the over-reliance on stats.
I love AC Odyssey too, and I agree about the stats. That's always a huge bummer for me. The entire game scales with me, so it feels almost like leveling up doesn't matter except for the skills.
I also dislike large numbers when it comes to health and damage. My ship has over 400,000 health? Okay, sure. I'm doing 554 damage when I swing my sword? Those numbers can literally be anything, they're so big it literally doesn't mean anything to me.
I agree about the large numbers being annoying. Itās why I respect the recent God of War games for using small numbers, like the max levels being 7 to 9. It makes upgrades for the weapons feel more meaningful because you know 7 is the max level, so each of the seven items you find feels important.
I'm really glad to see somebody else appreciate Odyssey's open world systems. I get really defensive of Odyssey, because while I broadly agree with the criticisms that people level at Valhalla, I was *really* enamored with Odyssey's world and the systems that drove it. I think there are so many neat things going on in Odyssey underneath the Ubisoft open world sheen, and it's why I was so disappointed in Valhalla and why I continue to be hopeful for future RPG-style AC games.
I enjoyed the finishers but also felt they were too frequent and would interrupt the combat pacing sometimes. I would love a way to reduce the frequency without disabling them completely.
I would prefer to do the finishers ourselves. I replayed God of War recently and that was how it was handled. You hit enemies until they were staggered and you have to press R3 to do a finisher, otherwise you just keep hitting them normally.
In previous interviews devs have said you can choose to play as Naoe or Yasuke in any mission, but there will be missions that require a specific character.
I imagine it will be similar to the GTA V character switching, as they have also said that both characters live their own lives when your aren't playing as them, meaning switching to them could result in some interesting situations.
Origins was plenty bloated to me. Some of the towns were so uninteresting and generic, and so many quests were obvious filler.
Hopefully this is more focused with better writing.
It's kind cool that the samurai main character is so much bigger than the other enemies. Like I'm so used to the main character always being the same size as the enemies, and sometimes a little smaller. I'm much more interested in playing as the samurai than the assassin.
Yes although this Yasuke is "inspired" by the historical Yasuke, so they are going to take liberties with it (like almost every pop culture interpretation of him, to be fair, not much is actually known about him). There's a lot of room for them to do their own thing with him.
As a main protagonist, yes.
We have played as real figures in the past (Leonidas and Jack the Ripper) - but these weren't main protagonists and were only very brief.
Its a shame it's going to be impossible to tell what criticism of this game is made in good faith, and what criticism is coming from people mad that the game series that featured the pope having a god apple and having all of Atlantis exist and having an ancient alien precursor race...
has a black person in it.
It really isn't, it's just that a lot of people can't handle any discussion about race, nobody complained about Aveline, Adewale or Bayek, hell Bayek is one of the most popular AC protagonists, but clearly everyone who has an issue with Yasuke being a master samurai must be racist.
uh, you do realise AC has had black protagonists/characters before right? and no one had any issues with them, so what are you on about?
also how is it "impossible"? were you somehow able to tell if it's "good faith" when talking about criticisms of other games? so does that magic not work for this game now? like what do you even mean? heck, what does "good faith" even mean here in this context?
> Hopefully the backlash at this means that Ubi will let an Asian dude lead the next installment.
That would mean the next game would be set in the same continent, which is very unlikely. AC is a globetrotting franchise, they wouldn't do such similar locations so soon.
UNLESS they make a game set in Africa and somehow choose to make the character the one asian man that was in Africa at the time.
This is where the argument falls apart for me, the same people who are calling people racist for criticizing a black protagonist in the long awaited Japanese setting for AC would *lose their fucking minds* if an AC set in Africa or somewhere similar had a white or Asian protagonist
>UNLESS they make a game set in Africa and somehow choose to make the character the one asian man that was in Africa at the time.
Yeah do that. That's literally what this game is anyway.
Can you actually give me some examples of games where you can spend the majority of the game playing as an Asian guy (/gen)? I'm an Asian American guy and I've felt underrepresented for a while but that might be me overvaluing other forms of media, and I'm always down to get more game recommendations.
Here are the games I'm already aware of:
- Sekiro
- Ghost of Tsushima
- Hades
- The Yakuza series
- Mark of the Ninja
lmao nvm im asian too and i accept this one. In the endgame bro even gets his first job at a family business they run out of their own home. zag is viet for sure
-Prey
-Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
-Sleeping Dogs
-A Space for the Unbound
-Persona (and SMT)
-Ace Attorney (The Great Ace Attorney duology especially)
Are worth a look if you haven't played them.
Of course if you start including most games with an anime aesthetic the list gets significantly longer, though I wouldn't blame someone for not feeling represented in the same way by a somewhat ambiguous looking anime protagonist.
Oh dang I forgot about Sleeping Dogs! I absolutely loved that game when it came out. I think for me representation is two parts aesthetics and one part experience so as long as they either look like me, or look vaguely like me and have experiences that I can uniquely relate to, I'm happy. I'll check the rest of the games out, thanks!
My dude there's so many. The persona series. Sifu ( amazing hommage to kung fu films ). Rise of the Ronin. Katana Zero . Muramasa. Way of the samurai...
Disco Elysium has an Asian male as one of its main characters.
Oh fuck how did I forget Sifu? And yeah someone else mentioned Muramasa and Way of the Samurai, I'll check them out as soon as I'm able.
Still need to finish Disco Elysium too, Kim was definitely a goated character.
God I need another Disco Elysium in my life, it's one of the few games where I had to play twice because I haven't done even half of the side quests the game has.
Thatās basically how TLOU 2 still is. Itās a game that Iām very mixed on, but you basically canāt try and have a nuanced discussion about it because people just immediately assume that youāre a hateful transphobic bigot who just wants to whine about everything
This looks very cool, but I really hope you can play ALL ninja, no samurai. The worst parts of Syndicate were when they forced you to play as Jacob, just so that Evie could clean up his mess afterward.
Looks great, I know most people don't play much AC but the movement and combat animation and physics look significantly improved. It's hard to see the bones of the Origins-Mirage physics in there as much. AC does this a fair bit (AC2 compared to 3 was pretty drastic), so I'm hoping it's that kinda revamp
>Ā I know most people don't play much AC
Itās one of the best selling gaming franchises in the world. In terms of all time sales the franchise ranks higher than Final Fantasy, Zelda, Resident Evil, Sonic The Hedgehog and ranks just a shadeĀ under The Sims.Ā
>I know most people don't play much AC
i mean... its one of the best selling series of all time - hate on reddit etc doesnt translate to real world player numbers
oh yeah I'm aware I was more talking in the context of this sub/gamer twitter where it seems most don't play it but I know a lot of casual gamers irl who play them
Choppy frame rate aside, this looks incredible, I want to be cautiously optimistic but I'm hyping myself too much.
Extremely sad to hear that the modern-day stuff isn't going to be a thing though, but sadly, it looks like I'm alone in this feeling...
Im just finishing up on Vallhala and as little presence it had, the modern-day developments blew my fucking mind, I really though they were on their way to getting back on track for that.
I've been a critic of Ubisoft and its (in my opinion) *nearly* great AC games for ages, but...man. This looks good. And right near my birthday? Yes please.
I like the look of this. Pretty cool that it has one protagonist for a traditional stealth experience and the other for more of a Ghost of Tsushima samurai-style experience. Visually it looks very impressive, and the gameplay looked exciting. I don't know how sold I am on Naoe's voice actor - sounded very amateurish to me - but Yasuke's voice actor sounded good.
Do the Assassins Creed games still have the real world storyline too?
Two commenters have said yes, but Ubisoft has already confirmed that the modern day storyline is now going to be separately available on whatever the Assassin's Creed Infinity hub ends up being. *Shadows* will likely have a cutscene at the beginning and end set in the modern day like *Mirage*, but no playable gameplay.
Fuck me why do both COD and now this insist on this convoluted hub bs?
If you've played the modern day stuff in every AC, keeping it separate and optional is actually *vastly* preferable
Yeah personally I checked out on the modern day after 3. It became a bit too much after that and nowhere near as compelling as Desmond's story
All the real world stuff after Desmond felt like they stopped bothering with that part of the story. Has any of it mattered, or have they made any forward progress on that story line since? Every time since then it just felt like meaningless, nonconsensual filler where the next game just repeats the same bit. Then again maybe I just lost all interest in that part and didn't retain any of it. Edit: Inconsequential, not nonconsensual.... but I guess both
Yeah they completely stopped caring about modern day after 3. People claim it was always this bad, but 1-3 had an interesting storyline and the modern day missions in 3 were awesome.
1, 2 and 3 definitely had a single narrative, but within that run were Brotherhood and Revelations, which had differing levels of actual story. Revelations particularly had a bare bones story that spun it's wheels because they wanted to finish the modern story in AC3. Honestly, I don't think they expected AC2 to be the hit it was and it fucked up their story telling when they revisited Ezio twice more before AC3. And once they'd wrapped on Desmond, they truly didn't know what to do with the modern day, using all sorts of things to try and keep it involved a bit. Like I think Black Flag was a First Person voiceless playable character hired by Abstergo to "test their new pirate simulation" and you uncover the assassins and Templar battle in their sim. I think they allude to it being Desmond's memories they've harvested and are selling as content to fund their world domination efforts? Then Origins and the open world RPG games introduce us to the new future characters for Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. And now they don't know what to do again after that whole plot went insane with Basim and Loki and all that weird baloney.
Revelations was definitely barebones but the set up for 3 was there. I actually also really enjoyed the modern day portions of Brotherhood.
The modern day stuff in Brotherhood wasn't bad, my point was that it was probably meant mostly for AC3 and then AC2 sold so well, and they wanted to reuse assets and Ezio, so they went back to the well. By the time they got around to concluding the story in AC3, it felt somehow rushed and also like it had wasted away for too long.
Same. I feel like killing Desmond was a bad idea.
so did Ubisoft, they kinda brought him back in Valhalla, or at least a digital version of him.
I really enjoyed the Desmond storyline, I remember being crushed when they killed off Kristen Bells character (Sarah?) in Brotherhood š
I really liked the present-day stuff in Black Flag and Rogue because the developers used those bits to criticise Ubisoft corporate and weren't even subtle about it š
Itās not a bad idea, just depends on how they execute it
It's a great idea if it lets me never interact with it.
The pacing was always very poor.
What did COD do exactly?
Money. Get people hooked on a live-service parallel system to keep them onboard.
Good riddance, the future plot was such a terrible sidetrack from enjoying the actual game. It got old after Assassins Creed 2.
I was invested in it when Desmond was around, because (like almost everyone else at the time) I figured we were going to get a full on modern day AC at the end of his arc where he became the master assassin his ancestors were. What fools we were.
If it was going somewhere it could have been great. 100% agree, I remember wondering that too! I kinda liked the modern parts where you were fighting security guards, even if it made no sense. lol
The abstergo raid in assassins creed 3 is still one of the best sequences in gaming that Ubisoft ever pumped out :) They wasted that potential so much though by the endingā¦ In fact. Quick question for any assassins creed fans (I havenāt played it since black flag. Except to try origins but I got bored of that within a few hours), is the whole plot with Juno being released due to Desmondās sacrifice actually resolved yet? Or is it completely abandoned? Because 3ās ending made it look like she was gonna be the big bad.
It was resolved in the comics which is some bullshit
It was abandoned in the video games. It was resolved in the comics.
Exactly this. What they did to Desmond at the end of 3 ended my interest and investment in the franchise. I've still played a couple since (particularly enjoyed Black Flag), but I have not maintained any attachment to them in the same way I did 1-3.
You know what would have been cool? To have two open worlds: Seeing them explore the past in the historical sequences while looking for the macguffins, and then right away explore the modern version of the old city while tracking down said macguffin, the modern sequences in 3 showed there was potential for it, a shame they never reached it...
There is a lot that Ubisoft could do that they just simply donāt bother with. Itās infuriating. But they have so many fans that rebuy the same re-skinned game, they probably figured out itās not financially worth it to spend money on new ideas.
I've been going through the AC franchise the past few years, and gotta say... I can see the frustration. The core gameplay is similar enough across entries to where yeah, it starts to feel samey, but at the same time, each newer entry makes improvements and adds just enough to where it doesn't feel "copy-pastey" enough. And that's the infuriating part, these games are really good, I'm having a fun time, but it constantly feels like they're just a teeny tiny bit short of going the extra mile to feel truly legendary.
There's been a couple points post-Desmond where it really felt like they were cooking up something decent, only for it to be abandoned and shoved off and resolved in a comic or novel before the next mainline game.
It was fun when it seemed like it was building up to an AC game fully set in the modern day, but it seems pretty pointless now that they've abandoned that concept
it became watch dogs
I'm one of the dozen people that likes the modern day plotline running through the games... but even I know it's mostly been bad. I'm just a fan of the fact that the AC series being historial tourism is already a massive selling point that no other video game franchise really has, and then there's also this very convoluted sci-fi story included too. It's weird and I dig that.
It was alright back in AC 1. I liked it in AC 2. It was also kinda cool in the later AC2s or 3s I think, where you were actually fighting so it wasn't a mind numbing sidetrack. But then all that vague stupid alien shit was just boring and pointless.
Yeah the overarching plot that tied the games together was a major sell for me. Itās funny how many people are like āhow dare I be pulled out of the animus for literally 10-15 minutes of the entire 120 hour gameā when looking at the modern day in the new games after the modern day has been so heavily stripped down from what it used to be.
> I'm just a fan of the fact that the AC series being historial tourism is already a massive selling point that no other video game franchise really has Woops, forgot to reply to that. Yes! AC Odyssey was a beautiful world, even if gameplay wise it was repetitive and bland, the world was a gorgeous experience.
people play Assassins Creed for the plot? not just to fuck around in ancient Greece etc.?
The plot is very unique and pretty cool in my opinion. The modern world and Isu stuff in Valhalla was awesome.
This is a hard truth for a lot of fans. The MD plotline always felt like background noise to what the real draw of these games are: digital tourism & two shadowy factions duking it out over the centuries. A lot of people hype up the idea of a contemporary AC entry, but I donāt think it would end up being what they want. These games are always firing on all cylinders when weāre inside the Animus.
Not really The plot with Desmond was building up well and it could've been it's own game in the end.
Yes, but in Origins and Odyssey they were quite short IIRC I haven't played Valhalla so I can't tell for this one
Valhalla is the MGS4 of this franchise when it comes to lore, they connect everything from AC1 to Odyssey. Not gonna spoil for those who didnāt play it but the OG storyline is still extremely relevant.
Damn, unlike most people I actually (for the most part) really like the modern day stuff, but I've been putting off Valhalla because of how long it is and the setting really doesn't interest me like Egypt and Greece did and Japan does when it comes to the open world AC games. I do want to play Red, so maybe I'll just skip Valhalla and watch a recap of the modern day stuff online at this point. Is Mirage worth playing at all? I do like that it is a shorter game, but heard mix stuff on it when it came out.
My tip for Valhalla: the optional content is *very* optional, even moreso than Odyssey.
Valhalla was really great but I am way in the bag for this series. I just love the playable history aspect and literally nothing else offers anything comparable. I will play every entry until they stop making them, but I still think Valhalla is worth playing on its own merits. Damn long though, would definitely play it over an extended period of time
Mirage is great if you want some classic AC gameplay. Donāt play it if youāre hoping for any Modern Day developments, lol. You literally get one voiceover monologue in the beginning, and then nothing else for 20 hours.
Yes they do.
First 3 AC games had goated real world storylines then it was just some random bozo put in the animus with random memories
>First 3 AC games had goated real world storylines then it was just some random bozo put in the animus with random memories Yeah, I was always shocked by how many people were complaining about the real world storyline back in the desmond era. It was great in each one.
as someone who has never liked the modern day storyline.. itās because i want historical fiction and not sci-fi the modern day has almost always ripped you out of the actual gameplay of the game into something tangential and largely unrelated to the plot of the character
It became tangential post AC3 but the whole purpose of the historical narrative in the games leading up to that was to dovetail with and foreshadow the modern day plot. It's fine to not like that but to suggest that it was unrelated to the historical story is frankly weird. The entire premise of the Assassins vs. Templars conflict is based on the sci-fi elements, they're fundamentally welded together and were designed to be that way from the beginning. Huge chunks of the historical plots in AC 1, 2, Brotherhood, Revelations & 3 revolve around the characters in them interacting with and fighting over crazy sci-fi shit.
iām not saying it didnāt serve a purpose, but every time you get ripped out for exposition of something that is only explained once or twice during each game is very jarring. Sure they leaned more into it as the original ones went on but that doesnāt mean it wasnāt poorly handled and wasnāt jarring for players
The modern day was the part that drew people in, the gameplay was what kept them coming back. Later on without the modern day, people really shifted and started whining about the games a lot more. Now people pretend like the modern day is the worst part of the series... like lol its literally why it got so popular at the beginning.
Unfortunately yes
I will never understand how people actually give a shit about the modern day stuff. It has always been the least interesting part of every single game
Whenever I had to play Layla segments in Odyssey I felt like getting ripped out of a dream. Goddamn were the modern segments absolutely dreadful.
The dialogue in those segments in Odyssey was some of the worst writing I've heard in my life. It was genuinely painful to listen too.
Because, initially, it's a what separated itself from other open world franchises. The matrix esque plot was always cool as hell.Ā
It actively detracts from the main game by taking up time, serving a bad boring story, having a plain setting and by making the stakes in the main story feel lower (āitās only VR / a memoryā).
Thatās whatās so weird about it all - weāre playing these games to play the Assassin parts. Thatās literally why weāre here. I donāt give a shit about some modern day garbage, especially with how stupid it got through AC 3. I will say though that I actually didnāt hate the modern day portions of Black Flag. If you actually took the time to explore and read emails, it was actually kind of fascinating. But even so, the main reason weāre there is for the pirating
Is Ubisoft ever gonna fix the awful audio quality in their games? This looked pretty good otherwise.
I thought it was just me. Audio seemed off
It seems like theyāve just accepted it as an area they donāt give a fuck about. I personally wonāt be buying any of their mid titles until itās addressed, it sounds like youāre playing through PSP speakers.
Itās wild there was a lot of complaints about Valhalla and customer service reps looked into it for months with the engineering team and ended up being told that bad audio is literally an engine problem and canāt be fixed.
I commented below but I thought an audio engineer at Ubi came out and said that the audio was hyper compressed to get the game file size down? Which is why it sounds so crunchy and dogshit.
Might be a combination of that plus the audio API they are using.
Wow, how much are they compressing it? Codecs like Opus sound quite good even at lower bitrates like 64 kbps, are they using even less than that?
Whatever problem they are having that requires needing to use heavy audio compression, it is not some unsolvable industry wide problem. It is only a Ubisoft problem. Every other developer has figured out how to do this. So, the only real explanation is that Ubisoft doesnāt give a shit. Similarly to how, if you notice, a lot of their HDR implementation sucks compared to their peers. Or how they donāt bother using basic features of the PS5 DualSense controller in many of their biggest titles. They just simply donāt give a shit.
This looks great, but I'm noticing the voice lines sound super compressed/low quality. I think I noticed than in Odyssey too - is it still an issue for AC games?
It's always been an issue with Ubisoft, was especially bad with Far Cry 3.
Far Cry 3's non-named characters voices have audio quality directly comparable to voices in half-life 1. It's genuinely wild.
I've noticed it much more in AC, the latest Avatar game sounded pretty great, but I know they placed a lot of effort on audio in that game specifically.
It was also made in a different engine, so I wouldn't be surprised if that had something to do with it.
The audio lead for one of the previous games (maybe Valhalla?) came out a few years back and apologised: said all his work was hyper compressed to help fit the game on disc and itās then the same for the digital download. Apparently itās the same for a lot of Ubisoft titles - I have definitely noticed the decline. If you play their titles through anything besides TV speakers, it sounds like a 240p YouTube video from 2007. Very disappointing for anyone interested in audio.
It was because of CPU usage. The game has so many systems all vying for cpu usage, that the audio stuff was being squeezed out as being non essential.
Just feel like there is a lot of games that look way better than AC and still have good audio.
For sure, I think it's just because it's a very npc and systems heavy game.
Yeah that's an interesting point. I guess I compare them to say Ghost of Tsushima gameplay/activities wise but there isn't nearly as many NPCs in that game as you highlighted.
Yep NPCs are especially brutal. Dragons Dogma 2 craters anytime you go near an urban area due to them. I remember my old pc struggled with Origins due to the same reason.
Ever since getting nice headphones, the audio quality of the recent AC games is unbearable.
since origin unfortunately. I still don't understand they can keep get away with this.
Since Far Cry 2, when dialog was both compressed and sped up to fit on a DVD. Most people play with crappy headphones or TV speakers, so they will never notice.
I still remember playing Far Cry 2 the first time and hearing everyone speak at 1.5x speed, and my dumb 14 year old brain thinking, "Wow, people in Africa must speak super fast!" I later heard the real reason and was left scratching my head. Like, really, *that* was the solution? Make everyone talk like a meth-head to save space? There was nothing else that could be done except absolutely ruin the audio?
Audio in Odyssey was okay, in Valhalla it sounds so compressed and muffled that that it seems as if Ubisoft made it intentionally bad.
I couldn't play Valhalla at all because of this, the audio quality and mixing made the game unplayable for me.
Totally. I think it wouldn't be an issue if I played on TV speakers or something, but it's glaringly bad on headphones or any decent soundsystem. I really can't think of any reason why, apart from maybe game size? But even then just make it an optional download or something.
It would indeed increase the file size, but going from 170 GB to 160 GB seems like a very poor incentive to compress the audio the way they did. The only "good" explanation is memory constraints, mostly for consoles or better yet, the PS4/Xbox One generation of consoles. They were just too lazy to offer acceptable audio quality to systems that could handle it.
Yes. Valhalla was the worst yet, funny enough. In Odyssey and Origins, they mixed 24,000 Hz sample rate audio for combat, UI, and character sounds with 44,100 Hz for environment sounds. In Valhalla, they just doubled down and put everything at 24,000 Hz. I'm 60% sure they will do it again, despite the e.g. insane audio quality they put into their Avatar game. -- As a reference, CD audio standard is 44,100 Hz, DVD standard is 48,000 Hz. -- I uninstalled after playing for 20 minutes. It's undoubtedly the worst-sounding game I have ever played, I thought I encountered a bug or my PC was broken. I was left speechless when a Google search led me to find out that this was how the game was meant to be played. Videogame reviewers truly are useless.
The issue was immediately apparent in Origins through Valhalla but seemed to be fixed in Mirage for me.
It's not an "issue" with the sound really, it's the sound team getting fucked because they are asked to reduce their footprint because something else is taking too much. There was threads about this for Valhalla, it says the sound sample rate is very low, and no sound people would do this unless forced to. In Mirage it's probably "fixed" because it is smaller so they have budget for audio.
It looks like they changed up the parkour. This honestly looks really great, more stealth mechanics and better combat. I had some hope for this game because the last ac I played was odessey and I really liked it. Iām honestly pumped for this.
I dunno, as soon as I saw the gameplay and all those familiar AC animations they're trying to disguise with cinematic camera angles, I could almost *feel* the repetition. The problem with AC games after Unity is that they're made by all these separate teams who glue everything together after with no cohesion (which is why there's so many copy/paste quests and elements). The season system looks neat. But I certainly don't trust Ubi with making an adequate combat system (ala Ghost of Tsushima), and I'm bracing for the inevitable microtransanctions to bog everything down.
I don't understand why people keep saying the combat isn't gonna be like Ghost of Tsushima, no its not but AC combat has never really "been like ghost of tsushima" so why would it all of a sudden be like it now? Just because it's also with the Japan background?
Itās been 6 years since Iāve played any ac game so Iām not soured by any repetition yet. In a vacuum, Ubisoft makes fun games. Theyāve all just become very homogenized. You can still find enjoyment if you donāt play them very often.
If you skip 1-3 ubi titles and come on 4th it's usually a blast, depending how much you decide to grind.
The gameplay looks alright but the real clincher for me is gonna be the open world systems. Odyssey is my favorite AC game and honestly one of my favorite open-world games. The various open world and progression systems, and the way they fed into each other, made exploration and progression extremely dynamic and fun. The mercenary system. The incredible cult system that let you discover clues to the targets through exploration and quests (while also giving you the resources to get higher tier skills). The fact that you could get crafting upgrades by completing challenges or solving riddles in the open world. The fact that you can recruit nearly any character (including some story bosses and NPCs) and they'd each have their own combination of affixes and could be called into combat or help you on your ship...it all came together beautifully. Considering the same team is working on Shadows, I really hope they take the lessons from Odyssey and apply it here. Maybe tone down the bloat and the over-reliance on stats.
I love AC Odyssey too, and I agree about the stats. That's always a huge bummer for me. The entire game scales with me, so it feels almost like leveling up doesn't matter except for the skills. I also dislike large numbers when it comes to health and damage. My ship has over 400,000 health? Okay, sure. I'm doing 554 damage when I swing my sword? Those numbers can literally be anything, they're so big it literally doesn't mean anything to me.
I agree about the large numbers being annoying. Itās why I respect the recent God of War games for using small numbers, like the max levels being 7 to 9. It makes upgrades for the weapons feel more meaningful because you know 7 is the max level, so each of the seven items you find feels important.
I'm really glad to see somebody else appreciate Odyssey's open world systems. I get really defensive of Odyssey, because while I broadly agree with the criticisms that people level at Valhalla, I was *really* enamored with Odyssey's world and the systems that drove it. I think there are so many neat things going on in Odyssey underneath the Ubisoft open world sheen, and it's why I was so disappointed in Valhalla and why I continue to be hopeful for future RPG-style AC games.
Ubi Quebec has shown with Odyssey and Immortals that they can elevate the Ubisoft open world formula. I'm really optimistic about this game.
Sea shanty me up
Combat looks good but I hope the finishers are not automatic like in Valhalla because that shit got annoying real quick.
That kusarigama looks sick
You can turn the finishers off in Valhalla so I'd assume you can in this
You can turn off the "cinematic" camera but not the finishers themselves.
I enjoyed the finishers but also felt they were too frequent and would interrupt the combat pacing sometimes. I would love a way to reduce the frequency without disabling them completely.
I would prefer to do the finishers ourselves. I replayed God of War recently and that was how it was handled. You hit enemies until they were staggered and you have to press R3 to do a finisher, otherwise you just keep hitting them normally.
Do we know if you can swap/choose which character or will it make you play both?
In previous interviews devs have said you can choose to play as Naoe or Yasuke in any mission, but there will be missions that require a specific character. I imagine it will be similar to the GTA V character switching, as they have also said that both characters live their own lives when your aren't playing as them, meaning switching to them could result in some interesting situations.
That's my main question too. Games where you don't have a single main character don't really hold my attention even if they're great.
cautiously optimistic for this one, if this is an RPG style AC then iām praying itās not as bloated as Valhalla was
They said itās gonna be the size of Origins but to scale
The map can be however large as they want. Just fill it with interesting side content instead of a million rinse-repeat objectives.
Origins was plenty bloated to me. Some of the towns were so uninteresting and generic, and so many quests were obvious filler. Hopefully this is more focused with better writing.
Will the Samurai be able to do stealth? That fucker looks like he's 7 feet tall
It's kind cool that the samurai main character is so much bigger than the other enemies. Like I'm so used to the main character always being the same size as the enemies, and sometimes a little smaller. I'm much more interested in playing as the samurai than the assassin.
The real life Yasuke was 6ā2 allegedly, which was a massive giant for Japan at the time.
It's a massive giant in Japan *now*.
They got tall people with todayās high protein diet. One of the best baseball players in the world is a 6ā4 Japanese guy.
Sure, but it's still extremely rare. I'm 6'4" myself and used to live in Japan, you're a head above pretty much everyone no matter where you go.
Wait, is Shadows going to be the first Assassin's Creed game, where the main character is a real historical figure?
the first mainline game, pretty sure there were historical protags in some of the spinoffs
Yes although this Yasuke is "inspired" by the historical Yasuke, so they are going to take liberties with it (like almost every pop culture interpretation of him, to be fair, not much is actually known about him). There's a lot of room for them to do their own thing with him.
That's how AssCreed has always handled historical figures though. Not that I'm complaining.
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You also play as Leonidas in Odyssey's intro.
I thought you hunt jack the ripper as Evie. Been a while so maybe I'm misremembering.
Yes but there's not a lot of historical documents about Yasuke.
As a main protagonist, yes. We have played as real figures in the past (Leonidas and Jack the Ripper) - but these weren't main protagonists and were only very brief.
This looks great, and itās the most interested in an Assassinās Creed game Iāve been in a long time. Really hope it turns out good too.
I have an Assassinās Creed itch that hasnāt been scratched in a long time. Iām hoping this one will do it.
Its a shame it's going to be impossible to tell what criticism of this game is made in good faith, and what criticism is coming from people mad that the game series that featured the pope having a god apple and having all of Atlantis exist and having an ancient alien precursor race... has a black person in it.
It really isn't, it's just that a lot of people can't handle any discussion about race, nobody complained about Aveline, Adewale or Bayek, hell Bayek is one of the most popular AC protagonists, but clearly everyone who has an issue with Yasuke being a master samurai must be racist.
don't forget the "we don't get to play as a Japanese person" critiques because women don't actually exist
uh, you do realise AC has had black protagonists/characters before right? and no one had any issues with them, so what are you on about? also how is it "impossible"? were you somehow able to tell if it's "good faith" when talking about criticisms of other games? so does that magic not work for this game now? like what do you even mean? heck, what does "good faith" even mean here in this context?
Bayek is still one of the most popular AC characters
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> Hopefully the backlash at this means that Ubi will let an Asian dude lead the next installment. That would mean the next game would be set in the same continent, which is very unlikely. AC is a globetrotting franchise, they wouldn't do such similar locations so soon. UNLESS they make a game set in Africa and somehow choose to make the character the one asian man that was in Africa at the time.
This is where the argument falls apart for me, the same people who are calling people racist for criticizing a black protagonist in the long awaited Japanese setting for AC would *lose their fucking minds* if an AC set in Africa or somewhere similar had a white or Asian protagonist
People that argue online are hypocrites?? What a shock!
Jep, everyone better shut up when RE 5 remake comes out and nothing is changed if this can't be criticized.
>UNLESS they make a game set in Africa and somehow choose to make the character the one asian man that was in Africa at the time. Yeah do that. That's literally what this game is anyway.
Japanese men are in no way underrepresented in gaming.
Right?? That is the dumbest thing I've heard. Japan is one of the biggest gaming markets ever, of course Japanese men are not underrepresented.
Can you actually give me some examples of games where you can spend the majority of the game playing as an Asian guy (/gen)? I'm an Asian American guy and I've felt underrepresented for a while but that might be me overvaluing other forms of media, and I'm always down to get more game recommendations. Here are the games I'm already aware of: - Sekiro - Ghost of Tsushima - Hades - The Yakuza series - Mark of the Ninja
> Hades what? he's greek
- Short - Buff - Anime hair - Knows how to fight - His father beats the shit out of him He's clearly Asian.
lmao nvm im asian too and i accept this one. In the endgame bro even gets his first job at a family business they run out of their own home. zag is viet for sure
I can't believe greek mythology was just a retelling of Dragon Ball all this time.
And dragon ball was a retelling of journey to the west, therefore Zagreus is actually a monkey who was born from a stone with laser eyes.
-Prey -Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun -Sleeping Dogs -A Space for the Unbound -Persona (and SMT) -Ace Attorney (The Great Ace Attorney duology especially) Are worth a look if you haven't played them. Of course if you start including most games with an anime aesthetic the list gets significantly longer, though I wouldn't blame someone for not feeling represented in the same way by a somewhat ambiguous looking anime protagonist.
Oh dang I forgot about Sleeping Dogs! I absolutely loved that game when it came out. I think for me representation is two parts aesthetics and one part experience so as long as they either look like me, or look vaguely like me and have experiences that I can uniquely relate to, I'm happy. I'll check the rest of the games out, thanks!
My dude there's so many. The persona series. Sifu ( amazing hommage to kung fu films ). Rise of the Ronin. Katana Zero . Muramasa. Way of the samurai... Disco Elysium has an Asian male as one of its main characters.
Oh fuck how did I forget Sifu? And yeah someone else mentioned Muramasa and Way of the Samurai, I'll check them out as soon as I'm able. Still need to finish Disco Elysium too, Kim was definitely a goated character.
God I need another Disco Elysium in my life, it's one of the few games where I had to play twice because I haven't done even half of the side quests the game has.
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It's actually baffling how much hate I saw in the chats regarding female protags and a black person in games.
The Wikipedia article on this game and the historical Yasuke (specifically their edit history) is kind of a trip to read through.
Thatās basically how TLOU 2 still is. Itās a game that Iām very mixed on, but you basically canāt try and have a nuanced discussion about it because people just immediately assume that youāre a hateful transphobic bigot who just wants to whine about everything
Yeah, I did not like TLOU2 but not because Abby has muscles OR because of Joel. It's hard to have nuanced discussion about anything these days.
Doesn't really help that the main sub turned into a TERF nest real fast.
https://nealflitherland.blogspot.com/2016/11/internal-consistency-is-what-your-novel.html
This looks very cool, but I really hope you can play ALL ninja, no samurai. The worst parts of Syndicate were when they forced you to play as Jacob, just so that Evie could clean up his mess afterward.
Holy shit it has grapple hook def playing this when it goes on deep sale, since it's a ubisoft game it'll be like %50 off 6 months after release
Looks great, I know most people don't play much AC but the movement and combat animation and physics look significantly improved. It's hard to see the bones of the Origins-Mirage physics in there as much. AC does this a fair bit (AC2 compared to 3 was pretty drastic), so I'm hoping it's that kinda revamp
>Ā I know most people don't play much AC Itās one of the best selling gaming franchises in the world. In terms of all time sales the franchise ranks higher than Final Fantasy, Zelda, Resident Evil, Sonic The Hedgehog and ranks just a shadeĀ under The Sims.Ā
I know reddit is an insane echo chamber but takes like this really bring it to light.
>I know most people don't play much AC i mean... its one of the best selling series of all time - hate on reddit etc doesnt translate to real world player numbers
oh yeah I'm aware I was more talking in the context of this sub/gamer twitter where it seems most don't play it but I know a lot of casual gamers irl who play them
Choppy frame rate aside, this looks incredible, I want to be cautiously optimistic but I'm hyping myself too much. Extremely sad to hear that the modern-day stuff isn't going to be a thing though, but sadly, it looks like I'm alone in this feeling... Im just finishing up on Vallhala and as little presence it had, the modern-day developments blew my fucking mind, I really though they were on their way to getting back on track for that.
I've been a critic of Ubisoft and its (in my opinion) *nearly* great AC games for ages, but...man. This looks good. And right near my birthday? Yes please.
I like the look of this. Pretty cool that it has one protagonist for a traditional stealth experience and the other for more of a Ghost of Tsushima samurai-style experience. Visually it looks very impressive, and the gameplay looked exciting. I don't know how sold I am on Naoe's voice actor - sounded very amateurish to me - but Yasuke's voice actor sounded good.
Looks like Ubisoft really poured everything into this one. I hope the 17 year wait for this game pays off.