Is it me or when play has Connor, you're playing a great game that looks fantastic and hits all the right notes, but when you roll with Desmond, oh god. The framerate stutters, the missions are completely horrible and everything feels half-baked. It's been like that since AC2. Do Ubi Montreal lower their standards for the modern parts of the game or what? I just don't get it.

I don't think it's necessarily that they lowered their standards, but I think it's a little different when you try to take a formula that has been established to fit in timelines where combat consisted largely of melee weapons and up-close fighting and put it in modern times when, for all intents and purposes, enemies and guards and what have you should have guns and other things that can down a man wearing mere street clothes in one shot. And with architecture as it is right now, with buildings that are taller than they've ever been, many of which have relatively uninteresting and uniform facades, it's tougher to make a larger-scale environment in these modern scenarios.

As these aren't really the focus of the game, it would probably take way too much time, effort and disc-space to make convincing modern-day open-world areas that have a lot of people and guards who carry guns (or at least should). So they likely make them linear and directed missions with more scripting and less people overall because that's easier to pull off and be convincing.

These, of course, don't really apply to the Desmond sections of Assassin's Creed: Revelations, which were a weird departure and really could have provided a much more satisfying gameplay experience, but I was really going into those to delve more into his backstory, so I thought they were an okay enough way to convey that.

And I don't know if my experience is out of the norm, but the framerate can get pretty dodgy when I'm playing Connor, as well. Then again, good or consistent framerate has never been a strength of the Assassin's Creed series, so that's par for the course at this point.

^Good answer. Still, I think they could have made better ''unarmed'' stealth segments for the modern missions. They did Splinter Cell, after all.

I agree. Revelations was the worst for the Desmond stuff. Remember the first person puzzle stuff? Awful. I haven't finished all of AC 3 yet so I can't comment on whether or not the Desmond parts were bad or not. I did like the part with you climbing that skyscraper. Looked pretty cool anyways.

The guys in the quick look mention a different team handled those sections in 3 and just from looking at them in the quick look it does seem obvious, some half way point between the difference of the human revolution boss fights and seamlessness. Ubi always has had multiple teams on the AC franchise but it's never really caught my eye before, if anything it's allowed them to make a game as big as AC within the year timeframe and have it be more than the sum of it's time allotted (better than a 1 year dev time game, basically). The only thing that was limited was maybe 'true' surprise in the games, as they were just really well done iterations in the things from the past games.

It doesn't seem like they will be doing a desmond centered sequel any time soon now that supposedly that story is 'done'. The team seems to like doing 'other' areas of the game, and doesn't seem conducive to making that gameplay fit into modern or future times which is what the obvious desmond part should be. That or they just don't have any stellar ideas for that sort of a game, because if it wasn't incredible it would easily be kinda a lack luster send off for a whole really rad franchise. They seem to wanna stay in the alternate fiction works they've been doing, it's easier to craft a world based on history than to re-craft a modern/future world and fit in troupes of the Creed everywhere (what are modern hay bails?). Once they killed off uh... the kisten bell character for kinda no reason other than a 'tweeest' and then didn't expound on the reasons in the revolutions game I felt kinda done with that shit since it seemed very obvious they don't care to tell the story in our heads we all have for desmond. Which is fine, don't make something your fans want or something that's 'obvious' and in peoples minds when you hit the fact that you actually don't have any real way to deliver it well enough.

I guess the closest thing we could get to that sort of game is Watch Dogs, and thankfully that game looks to have some really rad potential.

I feel like the outsourced development of the AC games are partly yo blame. When so many moving parts are swirling on tandem to churn these games out, it's not surprising that quality isn't consistent.

There's a few parts in AC3 where Desmond has some really great segments. Revelations was horrible for Desmond. I didn't mind his role in AC1, because he couldn't really do a whole lot. AC2 and Brotherhood are alright. He gets his climb and combat on.

@DJJoeJoe said:

Once they killed off uh... the kisten bell character for kinda no reason other than a 'tweeest' and then didn't expound on the reasons in the revolutions game I felt kinda done with that shit since it seemed very obvious they don't care to tell the story in our heads we all have for desmond. Which is fine, don't make something your fans want or something that's 'obvious' and in peoples minds when you hit the fact that you actually don't have any real way to deliver it well enough.

Well, in the DLC...

I would have hoped that eventually there would be an Assassins Creed game that would be 100% Desmond. He would have learnt the ways of the assassin from all of his past game and then he would have to traverse New York City or some other big city, looking to assassinate the templars, which then ends the franchise.

Looks like that will never happen.

The Desmond segments are actually being experienced by another Assassin in the future but due to the Inception effect of using the Animus to see a guy in the Animus, it gets all glitchy. The framerate and bugs are a Templar plot to sabotage the Assassins.