ahgunsillyo

I'm interested to see how they pull off the voices with the multiple races. I'm not typically a fan of silent protagonists, even if they're given responses in text form; it tends to make them a little more detached and less believable in their world, at least to me. I'd certainly like to have a choice of voices like they do in Saints Row, but you're right that the sheer amount of dialogue that would have be recorded is kind of a limiting factor on that end. We'll see how it goes, I guess. I'm excited for Inquisition.

@xyzygy: I agree about jumping over things that you didn't want to jump over. It took me a stupid amount of time to figure out how to hop down to a lower platform as opposed to doing a full jump outward off of the ledge. You used to be able to run off the edge by just holding RT/R1 and not holding down A/X when you went off the ledge, but they simplified it so you don't need to hold A/X while running at all unless you want to vault over a small ledge or you really want to make that unsafe jump off of a high platform. Unless I'm dumb and completely mistaken, it doesn't explain to you anywhere in the game (or, at least in the lengthy, LENGTHY tutorial) that you can do a small hop down to a lower platform by holding RT/R1 and B/Circle while running off the edge.

I'm glad they seem to be improving things with Black Flag. I agree that the ship parts look pretty cool, especially the seamless transition between controlling Edward and captaining the ship, as well as the fact that it's basically a vehicle in an open-world game now as opposed to an isolated gameplay sequence. I also like that the cannons can be aimed manually instead of having to turn the ship and line up the boat. I know that the latter is how it actually works, but it also felt a little clunkier than it perhaps needed to be in ACIII.

However, I'm actually pretty burnt out on Assassin's Creed for a little bit, which is something I really wish I would never have to say. I think I'll wait until it's a little cheaper and get it for the new consoles. Hopefully, the frame rate will be be better on the PS4 and the XONE/XBONE/XB1/whatever the abbreviation is. Considering how much the frame rate in ACIII liked to chug and all the advancements they're making toward a more seamless gameplay experience in Black Flag, there's a good chance it might run like garbage on the current systems.

@xyzygy: *For starters, there are spoilers in this response. If you care about the story of Assassin's Creed III and haven't played it yet, please go ahead and skip this lengthy bit of rambling*

*Also, I apologize if any or all of what I wrote down here is inaccurate; it's been a while since I played through the game, and I'm just trying to recall a bunch of stuff about the game from memory. Feel free to tell me if I remembered something wrong if you really want to. Thanks in advance*

Daniel Cross is the blonde Templar agent who hounds Desmond throughout the game on his missions to retrieve the power sources for the temple. At the end of the game, he goes crazy and starts speaking Russian; this is a result of the Bleeding Effect from his extended periods in the Animus reliving the life of Nikolai Orelov, Cross's ancestor who serves as the other main character in the graphic novels. Subject 16 is a man by the name of Clay Kaczmarek, and yes, his story did end in Revelations.

I have to say that I did not really end up liking Connor very much. He didn't have much of a personality to speak of; he was basically just trusting of most of his allies until they weren't really allies with him anymore, and then he just hated them. For good reason, I guess; I kind of ended up hating everybody by the end of the game. George Washington was just kind of a milquetoast and an ineffective leader (who had the voice of Travis Touchdown, which really took me out of it) and Haytham just ended up annoying me with all his "witty" insults to his son. By the end of the game, Connor didn't really have any allies, and he basically just told everyone on both sides to "Get out of my way or I'll kill you." The only characters I really liked were Achilles and the other residents of the Homestead, but again, those are as separate and completely skippable from the main storyline as the trading and economy, which is a real shame.

I think one of the main problems that I had with the story is that Connor's story just wasn't much of an "Assassins vs. Templars" story. Yes, Connor was technically an "Assassin," but he didn't really abide by the code (or "Creed," I guess, if you will) that was established by the previous games. Now, you could say that that detachment from the previous Assassin Brotherhood was because of the difference in time and location, but regardless, Connor was the only real Assassin running around. Whenever you recruited a new person into your Brotherhood, they'd say something along the lines of "Huh? Templa-what? I don't know what you're babblin' about, mister, but you saved my life, so I'll help you out!" and further interactions with them really didn't give off that they knew much more, if any, about the Assassins or Templars than they did initially. Moreover, it didn't really seem like the Templars in ACIII really had much of a game-plan, either (at least when compared to the previous games' Templars). They weren't racing to get a First Civilization artifact like the Apple of Eden or anything. They kind of just wanted to gain power, and that's it. You could say that that's what the aim of the Templars always was, but at the same time, there was no quest for a mythical artifact or any supernatural element to it, so what makes them different from just another power-hungry gang?

And it's funny, because Connor's quest for vengeance is pretty much a completely misguided one from the start. He thinks that Charles Lee is the one who burns down his village, and goes through most of the game swearing vengeance on him for what he did. However, Connor learns late in the game that the person who burned down his village wasn't actually Charles Lee, but in fact George Washington! If you read the codex entries, though, Shaun tells you that it was Washington RIGHT AFTER HIS VILLAGE IS BURNED DOWN (which made me go through the game feeling like Connor's quest for vengeance was immensely flawed). Though he knows this, he still vows to end Charles Lee and the rest of the Templars, his reasons pretty much being because "they're bad people." It kind of just made the story feel really broken for me.

And even though George Washington was actually the man who burned down his village, and even though Connor swore that they were done with each other, he was apparently still okay enough with him to play a nice game of bocce together.

I liked the trees as well. A lot of my fun in the game consisted of just running around and collecting things and doing side stuff in the Frontier. Traversing the natural environments was a huge improvement in this game, and it felt really fluid and natural. However, considering that majority of the missions and storyline takes place in the cities, that kind of lessens its awesomeness, as you don't have a lot of natural environments to climb and be awesome in in those locations.

I also have to say that I personally had problems with the controls and how they changed them in ACIII as well. I personally came to really like the idea of each face button representing a different body part (Y/Triangle for head, X and B/Square and Circle for arms, A/X for legs) and how the controls worked. This may seem really silly, but one of my favorite things to do in the previous Assassin's Creed games was to jump off rooftops with reckless abandon and then just hold down the B/Circle button and hold the left stick in various directions, which gave you 360-degree control of your grabbing arm, in hopes I would be close enough to grab the side of the nearest building. With the way they revamped the controls and made it a lot "safer" and less likely to accidentally jump off buildings, I don't recall it being possible to do that anymore. The lack of that particular bit of random fun is a bit irrelevant, though, since the architecture in the cities weren't really conducive to that kind of activity anyway. Which is not fun.

Also, I just remembered how overly complex and utterly skippable the Fast Travel system is. Like the trading, navigating the Underground to unlock the Fast Travel points is WAY too complicated and time-consuming for its rewards. Now, I found some parts of the underground kind of fun and creative, but after you traverse the Underground once during the lengthy, lengthy tutorial portion of the game, there is no mention of it ever again and I completely forgot about it until after I was done with the main campaign.

So yeah. There's another really long rant about what else really bugged me about Assassin's Creed III. Thanks for reading.

@xyzygy said:

If you'll permit me, I'd like to try. I enjoyed a lot of my time with the game, and I wouldn't say it's a terrible or bad game (overall, I'd actually say it's probably pretty good, or at least fairly enjoyable for the most part), but I personally found a lot about Assassin's Creed III to be profoundly disappointing. I apologize in advance for the potentially long-winded and rambling nature of the ensuing response.

One of the big changes to the structure of the game that was the most disappointing to me was the economy system. In the previous games in which you played as Ezio, the economy as it related to you revolved around buying up shops that gave you income. This was a fairly simple and easy-to-understand system: Buy a shop, get money, buy more shops, get more money. The money is then earned automatically, with the only thing you really needing to manage being to remember to withdraw your money from the bank when it reaches its cap. In ACIII, this system is replaced by a rather complicated trading and crafting system that ties into practically every other system in the game. You can trade materials and items to the various locations around the game map to get more money and materials, but in order to do so, you need to make sure that you have both enough materials and good convoys/transports, which can be bought or crafted, but in order to craft good items, you need to make sure that the people in your Homestead are leveled enough to do so, which you can do by completing Homestead missions. You also need to make sure that your trading routes are as clear as possible, which you can do by doing naval missions and sending your Assassin recruits out on various missions. Once you do all that, you then have to manage and keep track of all of your convoys, including what they're carrying, where they're going, and what they're going to buy and sell at each destination. Each trip takes a different amount of time, requiring you to keep track of multiple different countdowns and go to specific trading posts throughout the map in order to be efficient with your trading. As you can probably tell, this is magnitudes more complex than it was before, and it isn't exactly more user-friendly or fun to do.

However, the complex economy system would be worth taking the time to understand and take advantage of if the rewards were... well, worthwhile. In the previous games, you could buy not only upgrades to your weapons and item capacity, but various pieces of armor that gave you both cosmetic changes and benefits to your defense and health. In ACIII, while you can still buy better weapons, a lot of the good weapons and item capacity upgrades are crafted, which requires those extra few steps of making sure you have all the components you need to craft them, and that your craftspeople are leveled enough to craft them. Not only that, but they completely did away with the armor system, meaning there are no health upgrades, nor are there progressive cosmetic upgrades to Connor's look aside from story-driven costume changes. If you don't have cool armor to buy, and like in the previous games, you can probably still get through the game with your default weapons (I personally liked using the Assassin's Tomahawk because of how it looked, despite the fact that it was actually an inferior weapon to some of the other tomahawks in the game), there's not very much reason to go through all the trouble to get more money, which makes a lot of those intertwined trading systems not really all that worth doing.

The economy system was actually made less fun or worth engaging with by the fact that the game could often be a buggy mess. There were two seemingly small bugs that I CONSTANTLY encountered that actually annoyed and frustrated me a lot more than bigger, potentially game-breaking ones. For some odd reason, there was always a glitch that prevented me from properly accessing my Homestead's inventory in EVERY trading post except for the Homestead, meaning that if I wanted to craft and trade to other places, I actually had to go all the way back to the Homestead in order to do so. This made the whole system an even bigger hassle, as I had to stop whatever I was doing and back all the way out to the Homestead instead of just ducking into the nearest shop. The other significant bug I encountered involved the dual holsters that you can craft. For some unknown reason, regardless of what pistol I wanted to put in my second holster, the game would replace that gun with the Pitcairn-Putnam pistol whenever I loaded into a different area. This gun holds three bullets at a time instead of four, which completely defeated a lot of my drive to get better pistols than that. After all, why would I go through all the trouble to a good gun if the game is just going to replace one of the two I'm holding with an inferior model? I also encountered weird glitches like textures not loading, leaving odd rainbow-colored pixelated blocks in their place, but these were at least temporary and could even be slightly amusing sometimes. The two glitches I mentioned were persistent and annoying, and they broke the game for me a lot more than the weird graphical and performance issues that would pop up from time to time.

I also found that despite having more locations and spanning larger areas than the previous games, climbing and traversing in Assassin's Creed III didn't really feel as fun as running and jumping around Italy as Ezio. The American cities just lacked a verticality and scope that was present in Renaissance-era Italy, and scaling elaborate churches and ornate buildings was more fun than climbing up drab, flat-faced three-story shops in Boston. The wilderness area made up a bit for the blandness of the urban architecture, but even then there were some repetitive elements to that, as there were only one or two different "big tree" models, which caused a strange sense of deja vu as I climbed the same exact giant tree in multiple locations. For a game series that is known for its climbing and traversal mechanics, I spent a disheartening amount of time running on the ground.

However, one of my biggest problems in the game had to do with how the story was handled and how they treated some of the characters. In particular, I was immensely disappointed with how the game treated the character of Daniel Cross. For those who don't know, Daniel Cross is the main modern-day character of Cameron Stewart and Karl Kerschl's awesome graphic novel, Assassin's Creed: The Fall, as well as its follow-up, Assassin's Creed: The Chain. In both of these stories, Cross is absolutely key to the state of both the Assassins and the Templars; not only did he infiltrate the Assassin Order and kill the leader of the Assassins, which led to the the Order scattering and being on the run from Abstergo, but he also retrieved the information tying Desmond Miles to the prophecy given to Ezio in ACII, which led to Desmond's capture and setting up the first game. In ACIII, however, Daniel Cross is portrayed as a generic, brutish (and honestly, a bit ineffective) thug that appeared to be slightly insane. They mention in passing that he is losing his mind because of too much time in the Animus, but they don't even delve into his role in the current state of the Assassins OR what Desmond went through in the first couple games. Even worse, he doesn't even get any sort of proper send-off in the end at all. You chase him and run him through with your blade. That's it. Not even any cutscene or dialogue of him dying. Just on to the next thing. It's really quite disrespectful to both the character and those who spent a lot of time and effort carefully crafting his backstory to just make him look like a chump throughout the entire game and have him leave without so much as a whimper. Which, if you think about it, is also kind of what happens to Desmond at the end of the game. His end happens so quickly and without much dramatic buildup or lead-up that his death at the end of the game doesn't really feel earned, especially considering that he has basically been the main character of the series for the past five games.

I had a few more problems with the game, but I figure that I've written more than enough already. I realize this is an incredibly long response, and I apologize if I tended to ramble a bit in places, but hopefully it can give you a sense of why Assassin's Creed III can be or was a very disappointing (or even bad) game to some people.

@markm said:

Whoa, wait a minute. Are you trying to say that there's a problem with games having difficult final sequences/last levels like games on the NES? To that, I say that you seem to be one of the reasons why games tend to be a lot easier now than they used to be. Normally, I'd give someone a lot more benefit of the doubt, but you don't seem to be enjoying your time with the game, and you don't seem to have had enjoyed your time with the game up to this point. So... why are you still playing? If you've viewed your gameplay experience to be "a chore" and you know that the ending is "so bad" and therefore have nothing to look forward to, what's the point of playing? I mean, I get that you probably spent money on the game, but if you hate it and "hate everything" because of it, why don't you spend some of your precious time playing a game you actually enjoy?

But if you were looking for some tips in terms of strategy, I'd say pick a well-balanced group. Since you'll be bum-rushed by a bunch of Banshees near the end, I'd take Liara or someone else who has Biotic powers that are effective against Barriers and Armor, and use well-coordinated attacks and power combos. Also, keep moving around and don't just stay holed up in one area, as that's an easy way to get overwhelmed by enemies that will approach you from all sides. It's tough, sure, but the odds aren't insurmountable. "Use more skill," as the saying goes, I guess.

If Ryan really meant that much to you, then do what you feel that you need to do. You should also think, though, that there are other ways to commemorate the man that don't potentially result in explaining to everybody in your life, both present and future, what it means and why another man's name (who is, for all intents and purposes, a stranger, at least to them) is permanently written on your forearm.

Another idea that wouldn't take away from your intent is to simply get Ryan's tattoo that said "MOM" in binary. That way, you still honor the man without having his name tattooed on your arm, and if anybody asks, just tell them it says "MOM" in binary and they'll say "Aww, that's sweet" or "Hey, that's clever." That way, it carries multiple meanings that are easier to explain to others. I can't speak for everyone, but I feel like the reason people are a bit skeptical about this idea is that you're thinking of getting a tattoo on your arm of the name of a man with whom you don't have a close personal relationship. That's not meant to offend you or anything, and I hope I didn't, but there just are other options. You're young. Think about how you'll feel about having Ryan's name on your arm when you're married, or when you're a grandpa or something.

But again, if you feel really that strongly about it, and he inspired you THAT much, and you feel that this is the best way you can honor the man, then who are we to tell you any different?

@ragtagdjinn said:

The Quick Look for the first Wipeout game is still one of my all-time favorite Quick Looks. I laughed arguably the hardest I've ever laughed during a Quick Look while watching this one. So many good laughs. Thank you, Ryan, for all the laughs and good times that you've brought forth in both your work and play. May you be able to laugh at and be joyful about all things, especially busted and crazy video games, wherever you find yourself now. Your place on both this earth and the video game industry will be impossible to fill.

That's some pretty awesome stuff, Brewmaster Andy. So much respect to you for doing that.

I'm still not able to fully comprehend this. I'm shocked and saddened by this news. It's awesome to see the impact that Ryan had on the video game industry and the community that follows and surrounds it, and neither will be the same without him. His voice, wit, and undying enthusiasm for all things video games entertained me to no end and further fueled my passion for the medium day in and day out, and I will miss hearing him announce that it's Tuesday, and that I'm listening to the Giant Bombcast.

My deepest and most heartfelt condolences go out to the rest of the Giant Bomb staff, as well as his family, friends, and loved ones. Goodnight, sweet prince. We will miss you.

X-COM: Enemy Unknown and FEZ. Maybe Far Cry 3 and Antichamber as well.