I just recently started to become a fan of Assassins Creed. I've had a love-hate relationship with it. I started to play AC II but the beginning took too long, and I lost interest. But then I decide to play AC: Brotherhood. Brotherhood has a much faster start than Assassins Creed II, I understand that because they had to introduce Ezio in II. Now I'm playing Assassins Creed III and I have to say this is a very, very slow start. Assassins Creed II had a slow start, but it was not this slow. I'm about four hours in and I haven't gotten to do any side missions or find any collectibles, which leads to the worst part of the first part of the game: Linearity. The beginning is far too linear for an Assassins Creed game, you don't even get to go free roam until about an hour in, and even THEN you can't do anything exciting for another couple hours. I'm around the end of sequence three and I haven't gotten out of this linear setup. I think Brotherhood set me up for this, it was such a wide open, activity filled world which took me over 24 hours to complete all the missions. Getting such a linear start in Assassins Creed III really felt stale and boring after my time in Brotherhood. But being linear doesn't mean its ALL bad, a couple of beginning levels were excellent, especially the one where you have to free the indian slaves. From what I heard, sequence five is where the game steps up out of this linearity. For me sequence five can't come fast enough. Now I should probably ask a question so this long writing can be put in a fourm rather than a blog. So, Which Assassins Creed do you think has the best beginning?

One of the many problems AC3 has. Thankfully for you, they have fixed some of them through patches.

I would say Brotherhood has the best start. Its also the best game overall.

I don't really see it as a problem. It is really linear and slow, sure.... But I was interested. And then, when the game finally begun, I understood the purpose of the long introduction and it made me care a lot more about the story and characters.

You have your opinion, but you have to know that Assassins Creed is a game with a straordinary story, and if you like AC you have to like learn the story, the AC II and the AC III have a INTRODUCTION, and I loved it, a slow introduction for we understand all the history, Assassins Creed is not a game just to you have fun and start playing, even having a amazing system of fight, parkour, and all the things of the game... but anyway, for me Assassins Creed III is with the best introduction

Thanks to the fact of we play with Haytham and after discotver that he is a templar....

You have your opinion, but you have to know that Assassins Creed is a game with a straordinary story, and if you like AC you have to like learn the story, the AC II and the AC III have a INTRODUCTION, and I loved it, a slow introduction for we understand all the history, Assassins Creed is not a game just to you have fun and start playing, even having a amazing system of fight, parkour, and all the things of the game... but anyway, for me Assassins Creed III is with the best introduction -----------------------------------------------------SPOILER---------------------------------------------- thanks to the fact of we play with Haytham and after discover that he is a templar....

@ewok00p: This post is almost like it'd written it myself, you basically took the words out of my mouth. In addition I've also found myself really frustrated by the binary failstates that the guys talked about on the Bombcast a few weeks ago. I went into this game straight off of Dishonored, which let me handle any situation how I wanted; getting instant mission failure because you got detected or didn't do something exactly as scripted, and a bunch of bonus objectives you only have 1 very easily missed shot at before having to restart, are really jarring after playing that.

Frankly I still think AC 1 is by far the best and the game's have got progressively worse since then. 3 is a travesty and you're totally right about the beginning, it's like you're constantly asking yourself "When is this tutorial going to end?"

@JohnstonThistle: AC1 is not a good game, even Revelations is vastly superior; there's interesting elements and the setting is nice but that doesn't solve all of the huge issues with it. AC3 starts slow but just play some Nine Men's Morris and get destroyed then ponder the meaning of life as you play Fanorona. Alternatively go out and do some hunting for no apparent reason or explore the enormous frontier or go out on your ship and sail the seven seas.

@Fredchuckdave: I feel like, if you fell in love with that game on release it becomes hard to separate that feeling from the reality of it being an incredibly basic game. I have a friend who swears blind it's the best, collected every flag and did everything you could. I can't even finish it post II, it feels like a tech demo.

The pacing -in terms of both narrative and game mechanics- in AC3 is really not good. I'm a big fan of the series and AC3 still seems like a good game so far, but they've really lost sight of what they're trying to do here.

I feel like I've been saying this for about 3 games now, but they really need to stop adding on unnecessary fat to the gameplay and concentrate on getting the basics right. I don't need 30 different tools when I know I can still just run straight into a full battalion of enemies and win easily. Some of the missions are still fun if you force yourself to get the Full Synch objectives, but mostly they just feel like a fight against the still-kinda-clumsy controls.

Also lol at how your colleagues from the beginning of the game turn from actual characters into pantomime villians as soon as the (totally obvious) reveal happens.

The problem with the long start of AC3 for me was that I actually grew to like Haytham a hell of a lot more than I did Connor. The pacing is slow at first, and then uneven the rest of the way (I'm only on sequence 10, btw). There's some good stuff here, but the whole package comes off as needing an extra six months of gestation and refinement. Throughout, it feels like the dev team was ready to be done with the series and move on.

The game is very unlike the AC2 series, with less stealth and more linearity. The weapons make virtually no difference in combat, unlike some of the earlier games. The health system is dumbed way down, as is the armor system (nonexistent, really). And there is a lot of fat that doesn't connect with the rest of the game. It's all fun, in one way or another, but sometimes it feels like I'm playing a collection of minigames rather than a coherent whole.

@Jimbo said:

Also lol at how your colleagues from the beginning of the game turn from actual characters into pantomime villians as soon as the (totally obvious) reveal happens.

This, absolutely. It makes me wonder if there was some conflict on the writing team about the direction of the game, giving us this very odd moment when everyone decided to be moustache-twirlingly evil. I didn't mind the "twist", but the game handled it badly. Also, if you're going to have a "twist" like that, don't have your characters saying, essentially, "Hey! Wow! Isn't that a great twist in the story!" immediately after. Lame.

@haggis said:

It's all fun, in one way or another, but sometimes it feels like I'm playing a collection of minigames rather than a coherent whole.

That's exactly how it feels.

Reading this is weird, since if there's one thing I unanimously loved about AC3, it was the first 6 sequences, when you get to know Haytham and Connor.

@Jimbo said:

Also lol at how your colleagues from the beginning of the game turn from actual characters into pantomime villians as soon as the (totally obvious) reveal happens.

I don't agree. Only Kenway, Pitcairn (who is kinda underdeveloped during the prologue) and Johnson are portrayed as morally gray and well-intentioned - and it pretty much stays that way when you see them from Connor's perspective (and Johnson has a good justification for acting like a dick before his assassination). Hickey is a repulsive drunk, Church is a coward who outright says that he's only a doctor because he can charge whatever the fuck he wants for medical care and Lee is only interested in Haytham's approval.

There;s just so much fat in the storytelling, especially in the beginning. I really liked the setting, the plot, and the character, but man, they are wasting time on the wrong parts of the story.

I don't know, I really liked the beginning. I must be weird. I really loved the setting (UK/forest) and the new environments. Playing around with the other kids and setting traps etc was fun. It felt different compared to other games that focus on fast pace and EXPLOSIONS. That said, it sure has its problems and I too liked Haytham more than Connor.