Favorite aspect: Multiplayer

Least Favorite aspect: Bad assassin missions (CHARLES LEE, Robert de Sable, and so on)

Oddly AC4 is actually not that great on the multiplayer front so far, I mean to a novice you probably won't notice the difference but they did kind of make my favorite mode terrible (Wanted). That said the remaining modes are still functional/actually better and Wolfpack continues to improve. The singleplayer is just so damn amazing relative to every other AC, even AC2 and Brotherhood pale by comparison, the problems that AC3 had just aren't here; but it still has the bizarre charm that all the peripheral stuff did in AC3. 9 men's morris is still impossible despite ostensibly being tic tac toe, Fanorona is still fun, and so on. I suspect they'll eventually fix AC4's multiplayer so it'll be probably second in the series behind AC3 while the singleplayer is one of the best games of the year and even the generation.

I love this game, but hated the other ones. AC II I found especially terrible.

I'm guessing the reason for this is just because.......I have no idea. I mean, the game doesn't really feel anything like AC II to me, so that's something, but maybe it's the more open world nature? (Even if the world is still fucking full of " do you wish to travel to ___? " screens).

If I had to change one thing, I'd defintely make the character progression not end so soon, and make the world truly open world.

@steadyingmeat: Full character/ship progression takes ~25-30 hours, that seems fine to me, technically it even takes longer since you get yet another ship mechanic upon destroying the 4(5) legendary ships. You don't get the best guns until you do all the naval contracts as well, and those are quite significant since they kill fatties/captains in one shot.

As much as people like to rag on it, I thought the "tower defense" gimmick in Assassin's Creed: Revelations was pretty fun.

@fredchuckdave: For some reason, my first reply was just blank when I posted it and I don't really wanna type it all out again. D:

Basically, the ship stuff definitely makes up for the disappointing Edward progression for me, but I would have still definitely liked to have more meaningful upgrades for him. Particularity health.

I was blown away on how gorgeous the game looked, then I had the first "tail this guy but don't get too close or too far or too close YOU'RE TOO FAR, YOU'RE TOO CLOSE desync" mission and I gave up. Why is this series stuffed to the brim with tediousness? Why can't they just leave all the good parts? For fucks sake, it's been 6 games and they still repeat the same mistakes over and over.

This topic has me moments from buying it. I too have not enjoyed previous AC games...well, to be fair, I only played AC2, to the part where you travel to another town...? it's been a while. I couldn't get a handle on the combat, got bored really fast with the mechanics of blending in etc.

BUT, each gameplay video I see of this makes me feel like it's not really an AC game? It looks more like an historical Saints Row, all guns blazing and raiding shit? Am I wrong, because of all the launch games, this is the one I'm closest to buying, but as I'm going all-digital, I am weighing every purchase SO carefully now, which is actually a great aspect of the digital age, asking 'do I REALLY need to play this?' Hence why I have not dropped anything on Lego Marvel or NfS Rivals, the only other games I have interest in.

So....why did you buy AC4 if you didn't enjoy the other 3 games? I don't quite get that.

@goranp: Great blog btw, you've virtually made my mind up about the game. Feels weird jumping in to IV, but I think this might be the one for me.

I'm in full agreement. This is probably the best game in the series. They haven't changed a lot at all, mechanically, since 2, but the reduced emphasis on land-based missions, more infrequent combat and abundance of stealth areas make it much less of a hassle. Also combat is really easy to cheese with smoke bombs and berserk darts, if you're so inclined. I love the pirate theme and sailing around doesn't really get old. There ARE too many tailing/eavesdrop missions still, but they're generally very easy and forgiving, and checkpoints are never far off. I'd say if the game looks appealing and you're in for the pirate stuff, it's totally worth getting as it satisfies on that front.

The story/characterization is also the best it's been yet. Edward is up there with Ezio for me, but all the secondary characters are really well drawn and the voice acting is great. I love James Kidd, Ed Thatch and all the other pirates. There's an air of inevitability, men struggling against their growing irrelevance, that reminds me of the somber overtones of the end of the Wild West era in Red Dead.

It's a great goddamn game.

@fredchuckdave: What have they done to Wanted to make it terrible? I've only played IV's multiplayer for maybe an hour or two but it seemed the same to me.

@natetodamax: There are presently no escape sequences, so if you're doing well ( or poorly really, sometimes the dude in 6th or 7th or just joined might get 4 pursuers for some reason) you might have 4-6 (!) pursuers and the only way to get rid of them is to stun them. Basically it makes everyone play like it was the early ACB days when no one had any clue how to play; it's by far the worst rendition of Wanted, coming after 3 which was the best. You can run and run and run with no penalty other than score, and score isn't sufficient to make people stop if they're still able to kill you. In AC3 I could deal with 3-4 pursuers and did with regularity, in fact having more pursuers means its easier to kill your target since they'll always come to you, but you did need some way to get rid of them and that was chase/escapes (after you stun 1 or 2/kill your target its time to run, if you're conscious of where to run to you can get away and get points from it in the other games, in this all you can do is keep running). In AC4 you're lucky if you can deal with 2. This doesn't really affect DM so DM away if you like, but that gets a little old/doesn't fully explore the maps. Even though I just had 2 excellent DMs against extremely good players I'm still not super excited about playing it again and again and again, big thing with AC3 is just straight up variety, Wanted was good, DM was good, simple DM was good.

The reason there are no escape sequences is to try to fix Assassinate I gather and/or try to make people play more stealthy in Wanted though its having the opposite effect there. Assassinate is better but it was already a busted mode because of the players, you can't get rid of those players very easily since they're the only ones that play it. I mean there aren't 150 people with over 20k scores on the Assassinate leaderboard so that's definitely an improvement.

@fredchuckdave: Ah, okay. I definitely noticed that nothing was happening during a chase (no meter or any other indication) and that is disappointing. I'll have to play around with it more.