Lit Apropos of Nothing - ACKBAR IN CAPITALS - The Lit Forum Social Thread, v2.0.15

It's not about knifing everything you see, it's about a shock-and-awe campaign of public executions that increase the profile of the Assassins as an order.

It's said outright in the game.

Though, granted, they dialed that back in the following centuries.

Even so, the series has never about MGS-esque stealth. Or even Tenchu-esque stealth, for that matter. Unless it happens in ACIV (which I've still not got around to) I don't think there's even a crouch button.

 

That looks pretty cool, but apparently it's got "use of alcohol" in it and I don't know if I'm ready for that.

 

Even Brotherhood with its investments and assassin contracts and Gotta Catch 'Em All side quests (there were those in I and II too but they didn't feel as burdensome, could be that I have played too many games in row) is already starting to be too chaotic for me. The main quest-line advances slowly. Apparently it gets more and more so in the future.

 

The slog of Brotherhood is what killed 80% of my enthusiasm for keeping up with the franchise at all. I still want to play Relevation since I'm already 2/3 of the way through Ezio's story, but after that I'm sticking to the ones with numbers in the title.

 

Jello hates both of you.

If you disliked the slog of Brotherhood, Revelations will only frustrate you more. It's even shorter than Brotherhood is, so they pad it out with even more sidequests, including a weak tower defense minigame that happens whenever you're too high-profile. ACIII is the worst of the lot for this, though, since the side-quests bog down the main story for the first three hours or so before they finally let you loose on the colonies. I enjoyed ACIV a lot not because it didn't have sidequests, but because those sidequests are largely more fun than the main story missions (which are pure formula by this point).

 

The side-quest junk in Brotherhood bored me. Revelations I found better.

AC3... I disliked how big it was personally. I know that's usually seen as a selling point, but I just found it boring having to run around so much.

And then AC4 was all about naval battles, and I just felt it'd jumped the shark.

 

Actually I wound up liking Revelations, as I never had to do the den defense game except that one intro instance. I kept my profile down---not too difficult---and locked down my dens, and I was fine. No more assassin training necessary after that, either.

 

On the whole I'm agnostic on side quests--some I'll burn through rapaciously, some I'll just ignore altogether. What drove me nuts about Brotherhood was that its main draw for me was getting to spend the whole game in one big fully-realized Rome, only to keep bumping into invisible walls until I was like 2/3 of the way through the story. I like side missions as a way to break up the story and explore, but it seemed reluctant to let me do either of those.

 

Does anything of import happen in the AC4 plot, Jello?

Spoiler

The little that I tried to read on the wiki made it sound like the answer is... no.

Which upsets me, as the whole First Civilisation and Juno stuff was the part of the story that kept me interested, but the stuff I read about AC4 made it sound as if they'd done a soft-reboot and largely abandoned that side of the story...?

I was bummed enough when Desmond died and the little that I have played of 4 made it feel as if the new "character" wasn't important, only the Desmond Cloud? If something cool like, say, Desmond "possessing" the character in AC4 and being "reborn" (a bit like Subject 16 tried on Desmond, I think I remember...?) then that'll be good enough to make me finish the story. But... depends if it's worth all the boring quests or not.

 

Yeah, the walls are my one pet peeve about Brotherhood bu the rest of the game is so awesome that it overcomes the fact that the game takes a couple sequences to open up and holds out a few areas too long.

The walls are gone after Brotherhood, though. All Constantinople is open to you once you get there in Revelations and it's awesome. Same in ACIII.

 

Watch_Dogs? Colossal waste of time.

 

The final product looked pretty phoned in.

 

The original trailer seemed to imply there was a group of white hat hacker activists battling a conspiracy involving megacorporations - instead, it's a loner on a standard revenge quest against boring enemies.

The joke is that at one point, a group of white hat hacker activists actually ask your character for a small favor in order to become WATCH_DOGS (yes, they actually use the phrase) on the network that controls the city. Your character refuses, because he's not interested (despite seeing endless parades of the abuses of the system). It's like the designers are actually taunting you that there was a better game. Or maybe, that was a hidden protest against a management-level decision to change the game to its current form.

 

I'm so glad I didn't buy that game sight unseen.

 

Ugh the British accents are super-distracting.

 

Maybe it's a bug in Animus.

 

British accents : history : : cockroaches : restaurant basements

 

In good Hollywood tradition, the Animus was clearly programmed by the Templars with the belief that British accents should be applied to all enemies of Abstergo Industries.