I really can't understand all the hate for this game, with people saying it's the worst in the series. I mean it improves most stuff from the earlier games, Connor's story is pretty good, the multiplayer is still fun and has a cool idea behind it. I played through on PS3 and had almost no bugs or glitches. Yeah Desmond's story was kind of stupid, but they have been stupid throughout the series, the real good story has always been that of the featured assassin. AC2 and Brotherhood are usually said to the best before 3 came out and neither of their desmond stories are good. In 2 Desmond barely does anything except realizing that he has parkour skills now, and in Brotherhood he still does nothing then gets possessed and kills Lucy, these aren't strong story lines at all. The modern day stuff is just a vehicle to deliver the historical stuff.

So besides the ending, what makes this game so hated? I loved it and thought it was a true sequel that totally delivered.

They hate freedom and apple pie.

I suspect the issue is that Ubisoft's attempt to "annualized" AC has damaged the brand and causing the negative undercurrent. They stretched out the game too long where each step they take that is not answering "What is going on?" spends some good will.

I just think its a vocal minority in this case, been having a solid amount of fun with the game even though its the first game I've bought for the full 60 since Uncharted 3. Also people like to whine about miniscule details, haven't really seen anything particularly gamebreaking on the bug front. The game appears to be the largest in scope in the series and it was made in one year so there's going to be bugs; could be the most impressive game produced by a major studio in one year ever. That said it could have been one of the best games of this generation (or better) if they spent more time developing it.

I really can't understand all the hate for this game, with people saying it's the worst in the series. I mean it improves most stuff from the earlier games, Connor's story is pretty good, the multiplayer is still fun and has a cool idea behind it. I played through on PS3 and had almost no bugs or glitches. Yeah Desmond's story was kind of stupid, but they have been stupid throughout the series, the real good story has always been that of the featured assassin. AC2 and Brotherhood are usually said to the best before 3 came out and neither of their desmond stories are good. In 2 Desmond barely does anything except realizing that he has parkour skills now, and in Brotherhood he still does nothing then gets possessed and kills Lucy, these aren't strong story lines at all. The modern day stuff is just a vehicle to deliver the historical stuff.

So besides the ending, what makes this game so hated? I loved it and thought it was a true sequel that totally delivered.

Because opinions. I personally haven't played Assassins Creed 3 but I guess now you know what I felt when I tried to convince people that Resident Evil 6 is a fantastic game.

I can only speak for myself, as a guy who has loved every other game in the series (Brotherhood is very likely in my top 10 games of all time). I've just about finished it and found doing so a chore, it really bums me out. The setting and characters seem ripe for a great story, but the plodding narrative and dreadful pacing are making that hard to enjoy.

Which in itself would be fine except I'm having no fun playing this Assassin's Creed at all, poor design choices all around with incredibly buggy gameplay makes me want to smash my 360 to bits. Insta-fail stealth missions and sometimes just being unable to progress in a mission period are easily putting this game up there with RE6 as one of my biggest disappointments of the year.

I've been wondering the same thing. It seems like every game in the series has been somewhat polarizing.

As EXTomar said, Ubisoft making Assassin's Creed a yearly release probably has a lot to do with it. Franchise fatigue is finally setting in.

God dammit. I just made a thread on this topic. So that will probably be locked. In case, I'll leave my thoughts here.

I am on sequence 9, or 15 hours in, so I have played this game quite a bit, and I am loving every minute of it. It looks amazing, has a good story, and it's most importantly fun to play thanks to the improved combat and free running. Then there is the newly introduced naval combat that is amazing. Even the collectibles are fun to get, as when you get enough peg-leg trinkets, you are presented with great, little side missions. The rest of the side missions are far better than the previous games in the series as well. The Frontiersman missions really stick out to me. And of course hunting is a nice little diversion as well.

I can see that if you only played the first few hours that you would be disappointed (though I even loved that section of the game (that twist!)), but once you become Connor as an assassin, the game completely opens up and becomes like the previous entries in the series. One bad thing is that the game is quite buggy, and has horrific framerate at times (on PS3 at least), but that never stopped Fallout 3/NV from being amazing games, either.

So again, why all the hate?

(And I know I may sound like some crazy AC fanboy, but I actually do dislike Revelations and ACI. I just cannot understand the hate on this game, though)

People are probably tired of the series.

Personally, I am loving AC3 and I hated the other AC games I had played before it (1 and 2). Make of that what you will.

@Fredchuckdave said:

I just think its a vocal minority in this case, been having a solid amount of fun with the game even though its the first game I've bought for the full 60 since Uncharted 3. Also people like to whine about miniscule details, haven't really seen anything particularly gamebreaking on the bug front. The game appears to be the largest in scope in the series and it was made in one year so there's going to be bugs; could be the most impressive game produced by a major studio in one year ever. That said it could have been one of the best games of this generation (or better) if they spent more time developing it.

It was supposed to have been developed since around when AC2 launched so it actually had a solid 2 1/2 -3 years for dev time.

I enjoy games that don't have a lousy framerate and bugs up the wazoo. Also games that don't have lazy cop-out endings.

For a game that was supposed by be the culmination of Desmond's story & training, AC3 is a serious let-down. Makes Mass Effect 3's "space magic" ending seem like game-of-the-year material.

It's funny because I think playing around in the game world (the hunting, the mini-games, the naval combat) are all fun, but like @jonny126 said above I found playing the main story stuff to be a chore. The game play for the story stuff just didn't grab me, and I found myself restarting parts multiple times of no fault of my own. NPCs would casually stroll away from the area they should be in, or in one case a mechanic in the game (recruiting assassins) completely broke and I have yet to find a way to remedy the problem. I even had to uninstall the game from my HDD because of chugging frame-rate issues. It isn't a terrible game by any means, there is a lot of fun here, but as someone whose experience has been plagued by bugs and also someone who found most of the game play required to progress through the story a bit lame I can't say I would ever play it again. However I can't say someone's wrong for liking the game, and they could have had a much less broken experience than myself.

(Possible Spoilers {I forgot how to do the spoiler tag}) I just want to make it clear, I don't hate the game. I was just incredibly disappointed in it. And when I say that, I don't mean the game mechanics or settings, I mean the story. The story was just bad in my opinion. As I stated in the ending spoiler thread, the game made some good points, it hinted at the grey areas to the Templars and Assassins but it doesn't really do anything with it. The same with Connor and Haythem relationship. They tried building it up and got rid of the whole relationship in one scene that just felt like it came outta left field for me. Not to mention you don't really get to know any historical characters like you did with Leonardo in the previous game. I wanted to get to know George Washington and see his incompetence for myself that the game kept telling you, but you never saw it.

Connor himself as a character is also a letdown. He is the same character throughout the game. There is not really much of a growth to him. I wanted to see him question his own idealism except just have this one-minded view of the world. That never really happens. Unlike Ezio, who you see becomes a pretty different person by the end of his game.

The whole Desmond part was just horrible A) to actually play and B) the story arc was just boring. I didn't really have any horrible bugs, maybe because i only played the story (i totally ignored all the side stuff). I think overall im disappointed in how all the promise of the first two games never continued in 3.

I wouldn't go so far as to say people hate it, but it seems like a lot of people are a bit disappointed. Most of the anger directed toward the game revolves around two things. The first one being the numerous bugs and glitches. Some people have gotten lucky and only had a few, but that doesn't seem to be ringing true for most of us. In the first half of the game I ran into tons of bugs. Let me tell you, it is no fun having to restart a checkpoint over and over because a certain NPC spawned inside of a tree. It is also really discouraging for you to fail full synchronization because of a bug as well. One time Conner got stuck targeting a dead guy, and it was completely impossible for me to turn and face someone else. I completed the mission, but I took more damage than I rightfully should have because the game was incapable of responding to my commands.

The second gripe people have is how poorly many things are explained. A lot of the new side stuff is quickly, and very vaguely gone over. The homestead has a terrible menu to begin with, and the tutorial for it doesn't do a good job of giving you any idea of exactly how it works. The end result being you staring at an ugly, awkward menu and just saying "fuck it." I never bothered to invest any time into it. I knew that I could get some stuff from doing it, but what kind of stuff? Is this how I get the best gear in the game? What will be my reward for investing time into this? I don't know. I don't know why I should do it. And that right there is another problem with the tutorials. They don't tell you why anything is important. Until a couple of hours ago I didn't know why I should bother freeing parts of the cities from the Templars. Turns out, it lowers the tax rate, meaning it would be easier for me to make money by trading with vendors in those areas. If the game said that, then it was very brief and easy to gloss over. The game has a lot of deep systems all playing out in the side content, but they are presented very poorly. All the really do is give the impression that they are cluttering up the game.

You know, now that I think about it, all of this could have been really cool to me. However, the whole system of hunting, crafting, trading, caring about tax rates, etc. is too interconnected, in my opinion. It is too interconnected and convoluted for a system thats only goal at the end of the day is to get money, which you don't need in this game. I enjoy playing the game, but I can't find the motivation to care about these aspects of it. I think it was too ambitious. Cutting out some of the optional stuff, streamlining some things, and working out more bugs would have made this a much better experience.

Again, I don't hate the game. A lot of us do not hate the game. We are just disappointed.

I think a lot of the people hating on it are the kind of people who heard about the Mass Effect 3 ending and immediately started hating on it as well. To make a story short, they hear bad things and think the game is bad. The game is definitely not that buggy. I understand there may be some that have some progress-stopping bugs, but there are a good handful of people I know, including myself, who have had only minor bugs and have had fantastic experiences with the game.

I always make sure to check a persons history, achievements, etc when they post hateful comments, and 9 times out of 10 it's someone who has no history of even playing the game, or is not even three hours into the game.

Assassin's Creed 3 is a great game, as was Mass Effect 3, and if these people want to miss out, so be it. It's just a shame that the hate train rolls on and sucks more people in.

So I've only put in a few hours up until now (just finished playing hide and seek if that gives you any context), but already I'm pretty disappointed by this game. II, Brotherhood, and Revelations all brought up a ton of questions in Desmond's part of the story, and made it super interesting to boot, yet about 4-6 hours in it still hasn't moved forward one iota. Then on the Animus side of things I was stuck playing as some dude who had no personality, with nothing of any interest happening in the story except one twist (which was super ineffective considering they did nothing to build the characters up to me, and completely telegraphed by how frequently they talked around the name of their order), and some of the most boring missions I've experienced in this whole series. I'm sure it will start picking up now that I'm actually playing as the main character, but so far I'm completely unimpressed by a game that I felt was almost a shoe-in for my game of the year pre-release.

I think you're misunderstanding, people aren't hating it, they're just saying it's not as good as some previous games. Connor's story isn't that great, the best parts are his interaction with Haytham, and that starts off promising, but then just goes nowhere. This is talking aobut the main story quests of course. A lot of Connor's story seems to be through non main missoins, like the Homestead stuff. Those were actually pretty decent, and maybe at the same level as the stuff in some of the previous games.

Overall, it's not that it's a bad game, just like Revelations, it's just not as good as we hoped it would be.

I've liked what I have played so far, but I only just got to the first time you get to start really playing as Conner (I think I'm at the start of sequence 6). The only frustrating parts for me were simply me screwing up and whiffing a chance at 100% sync, so I restart. That first ship mission was fun though...had about a sliver of health left at the end because I spent the whole fight trying to get the sync requirements. The Desmond part before that was pretty damn awesome.

Also, the one glitch I've noticed (well, aside from misc. people disappearing oddly at times) is that sometimes, after looting a body, the camera will stick in a fixed position. I think it's due to trying to move the camera while looting? I don't know, but it's happened a few times, and looting another body seems to make it go away. Other than that, I've had no more noticeable glitches. Playing on the 360. The controls are a bit weird compared to previous games but I think I'm getting used to them a bit more - I think countering and not having to hold A to free run were the two things that threw me for loops (and still occasionally do).
 
So far though, the game seems pretty awesome.

You have all these things to do; hunting, side missions, and taking care of the homestead. If you did them all for hours and return to the main story, you'll find that you wasted your time. The lack of an upgrade system is very damaging to this game. Hunting could have been deeper by allowing you to create more, better, armor, or weapons. You play as a Native American, but I sure as hell didn't feel like one. It would have been amazing if those almanac pages Ben Franklin had some invention in them that you can craft, and if you can't craft them let someone from your homestead craft it.

I am enjoying it 40 hours in just moping up the side stuff but man 5 hours of tutorials is not a good way to start the game. I almost stopped playing but pushed through that and having a blast.

I love it a ton. The story is the best yet, especially with their attempt to humanise the Templars. The Naval combat is simply bloody amazing, although I do wish they had put some sort of open ocean to sail around attacking British and pirate ships, but I can understand why that couldn't be possible.

The game is broken as hell though.

It's not worse than the 1st game but it's definitely not a masterpiece.

its just the nature of the internet know.

you either fucking LOVE something or you fucking HATE it.

if you fucking LOVE it you just enjoy the game and play it.

if you fucking HATE!! it you have to make sure you are very vocal and tell everyone on the internet that something in the game didn't quite live up to your massively high expactation and thus is one of the worst games created by man and you need to make everyone one the internet know just how upset and angry you are and how you now hate the developer, the publisher, the deveoplers families and freinds and pets and how if you had it you way you would see them out of work and starving because how the fuck dare they release a game which didn't quite like up to your massive expection.

I really enjoyed the game and didn't have many bugs (and the ones I did have were not game breaking). But I didn't like how they ended Desmond's story, wasn't a good pay off at all. Like others, I enjoyed the game but was upset at how it ended. Also by the way I loved the ME3 ending

I'm enjoying the game - if I had any minor complaints it would be that the story does take a long time to gain traction and there's too many filler side tasks. As for bugs, I've run into a few on 360 - the camera has been an issue on a few missions where I had to restart, and I've had a couple missions that wouldn't load. Weirdest thing I've seen so far was an assassination contract where my target spawned halfway into a building, so I couldn't actually hit him, just see the top of his head.

I don't know, I thought the series has been in a rut since 2 came out, and I was expecting to be pretty disappointed with this, but the story was good enough and the setting was cool enough for me to get right back in it. I really enjoyed this game, I even grabbed the Vita game cause I wanted to keep stabbin' dudes.

The game has a slow start, but once you get past it and start running around liberating the towns and gathering collectibles like a madman, it felt like an Assassin's Creed game for sure.

Vocal minority, seems to the case with a lot of AAA games.

AC3's problems are two fold when it comes to the vocal minority in the fan base and the decent portion of the review spectrum.

First and foremost is the squandered good will they had after AC2. Brotherhood gets announced much to the chagrin of the fans and is an unexpected success. It took the formula and tweaked it just to the right amounts and aside from the narrative which tread water it had better gameplay.

Revelations which again nobody wanted but this time it was an overweight beast of a game that collapsed under its many systems and boring narrative that was only saved by the last 20 minutes.

The systems added in brotherhood and the two important pieces of story information from Desmond's side from the two games should have played out over the course of 3 which would have made it a vastly superior roller coaster of a narrative to have the only relevant moments of the two water treading titles worked in.

AC3 stumbles because it does not explain any of it's mechanics at all. And its chief new mechanic, the homestead stuff is absolutely a tedious confusing mess. In comparison to the perfect balance Brotherhood achieved between buy and upgrading shops and landmarks the homestead is terrible. In fact it drags down the game far worse than any bug or frame rate issue ever could. It presents a road block to the naval and privateer missions which is one of the best side mission activities ever added to a game. Upgrades for the Aquila are prohibitively expensive, and since you do not get monetary rewards from story missions anymore and you get pittance from the Assassin recruit missions you are forced to rely on the hunting/crafting/trading mechanics on the homestead which are poorly explained and just not as interesting as what Ubisoft's B-Team crafted in AC Brotherhood.

Don't get the hate... It's really just more Assassin's Creed. if that's what you like, it's a good helping of that. I've never been a huge fan myself. Played them all, beat most, but never really enjoyed the formula past the first few days with it. But if you're into it, I don't see why you'd dislike this one.

It's buggy. Desmond's story makes no sense (granted, it never has, but it looked like it might at the end of 2, and that was awesome). Connor is a bad protagonist. The story looks like it might get interesting with the Haytham stuff. It doesn't. The free running is now even more automatic. Also, you never do any, you barely go above ground. It does a terrible job of explaining the systems. The guild is far worse than it was in Brotherhood. Ezio's presence is sorely missed. Did I mention it was buggy? There's not much to do in the world beside collect stuff, and the homestead missions which are invariably quite poor. The game about free running makes you want to spend all your time on a boat, because the free running itself disappoints.

I could go on, but there's a lot of reasons. It's not bad, per se, but I suspect history shall remember it much like the first. Reviewed well, seen as a good game, but eventually seen as a poorly executed game with good ideas.

@Bell_End said:

its just the nature of the internet know.

you either fucking LOVE something or you fucking HATE it.

if you fucking LOVE it you just enjoy the game and play it.

I am fucking INDIFFERENT about the AC series and have NO STRONG OPINION one way or the other but NEVERTHELESS feel the need to EXPRESS MY OPINION! RAR!

Am I internetting properly?

@EXTomar said:

I suspect the issue is that Ubisoft's attempt to "annualized" AC has damaged the brand and causing the negative undercurrent. They stretched out the game too long where each step they take that is not answering "What is going on?" spends some good will.

That about covers it for me. I pulled out of the series with the release of Rev. Also, the combat has always rubbed me the wrong way. I, perhaps naively, keep expecting them to fix it. But they don't. Their best fix was Brotherhood's backup assassins. The improvement there being a set of AI buddies to do most of the combat so you don't have to.

If they had devoted all of their resources into 3 in the time since 2, rather than churn out two superfluous extra games in the "Ezio trilogy", maybe 3 would be a better game. Maybe.

The whole thing reeks of rushed timelines and short term cash grabbery. A series run more by the marketing and financial people than the actual developers.

@Ravenlight said:

@Bell_End said:

its just the nature of the internet know.

you either fucking LOVE something or you fucking HATE it.

if you fucking LOVE it you just enjoy the game and play it.

I am fucking INDIFFERENT about the AC series and have NO STRONG OPINION one way or the other but NEVERTHELESS feel the need to EXPRESS MY OPINION! RAR!

Am I internetting properly?

Yes, that is the correct way to internet! :D

I feel like AssCreed is something akin to the video game equivalent of Lost. It started out very promising, with a lot of intriguing questions and promised answers, and then it went on about five years too long with more questions than answers, and the answers you do get are shitty.

What saves it is the fact that the games are still fun and, as someone above said, the stories of the Assassins whose memories you relive are generally engaging.

I love it. Single player is fun, Haytham was interesting and awesome, climbing trees with Connor is surprisingly fun, I'm stabbing dudes, and the multiplayer is still awesome.

Yep, loving it.

Controls are still a little wonky, but, eh.