This is my first time playing an Assassin's Creed game. I wanted to check out the series and thought I should start with what I remember hearing was the weak entry. So far I'm actually enjoying it! I'm only about 5 hours in so we'll see how long it lasts but I'm having a blast running around Paris. The vertical world design is great and spidermanning your way around to evade guards is fun. This game is also very beautiful, still.

Over the last year I've also put about 8 hours into Horizon and about 18 into Witcher 3 and while the missions and writing in both seem very good, neither has grabbed me enough to stop me getting bored when going from Point A to Point B. For me the huge maps in both games actually end up damaging them. Horizon is better because the on foot movement is tighter and traversal is a bit more varied but my time with the Witcher 3 so far involved a lot of passive horse riding past swamps. It is great when you get to your destination and watch a nice cutscene but that's not enough for me. The basic traversal in Assassins Creed: Unity is making me keep going with it when I've dropped the others (for now).

Other recent games have fared better. The wonderful traversal is the main draw of Breath of the Wild and perhaps I did Witcher 3 and Horizon a disservice by playing them after Zelda. Another game that isn't really open world but still held my interest is Yakuza 0. I think it avoids boring traversal by making the playable space small but very dense. There are tons of great missions and you can very quickly go between them.

I'm going to keep going with Unity and eventually play Origins and see what I think of the apparent changes that game makes to the series. I do plan to go back to Horizon and Witcher because I'm hoping they will click, but I wanted to shoutout Unity because it did so from the start.

I really did dig Origins...oh wait, you're talking about Unity? Oddly enough, that is the one AC game I never touched, aside from the mobile things. I heard so many bad things about the bugs when it first came out that I never bothered to pick it up. Maybe I'll give it a whirl if you recommend it, but it'd be hard going back to the older games after all the changes that Origin made.

Unity gets put down a lot, mostly by people that have never actually played it. A lot of the technical issues are sadly true, and the AI in the game isn't the best alongside one of the worse storylines to "grace" the series, but a lot of the gameplay changes were really solid and Paris was a really beautiful city to explore. Maybe on PC it ran better but on my base PS4, even a year after release with a dozen or so patches under it's belt I was still experiencing a lot of performance issues that made playing certain parts of an otherwise really fun game a bummer. The input lag was my main concern as it made lockpicking really difficult.

I have played every AC game to date, with the exception of Syndicate, and as much as people praise Origins I'm with Vinny in that it no longer really feels like an AC game. This might be Ubisofts plan to somehow merge all their properties into one big game or something, but the changes to the combat aren't particularly great and while I'm usually a sucker for all the loot stuff in games I don't really think it fits all that great in the Assassins Creed universe. Egypt while beautiful is unfortunately very flat, and AC was always a very vertical game. Most importantly because of the leveling system, weapon damage, and weirdly stiff combat engine, the power fantasy you experienced in past entries is gone as you scuttle and dodge about instead of executing awesome counters and gruesome finishers. You no longer get that awesome feeling of being surrounded by 10 guards and stylishly deflecting and countering all their advances. The combat just feels flat, as does most of the game to be honest.

All that said, you can have a lot of fun with Unity. Yah the story is pretty bad and the gameplay can hiccup at times, but the world they built is stunning and the changes to the parkour system finally gave players some degree of control in how your character traverses the environment. Despite popular opinion it's far from the dumpster fire it has been labeled with. I would easily place it above AC3 which I think to this day is the worst entry in the franchise.

I like Unity; been playing through it on-and-off for the last year with French audio and English subtitles. Really adds authenticity. I'm up to Sequence 10, and there have been some very, very interesting moments, like helping Marie Tussaud retrieve some severed heads, stopping a "giant" terrorizing the townsfolk, hunting a Spring-heeled Jack figure who's poisoning drinking fountains to create this false demonic persona.

The combat is maybe the worst in the series, and it's still syrupy and iffy on PS4 Pro post-patches. Arno is an okay protagonist, but probably even less interesting than Kenway. Bit better than Connor. Haytham and Ezio are my favorite playable characters in the series. I'm a fan of AC III -- no one ever explains in detail why it's 'bad' and I disagree with that -- but it would've been so much better if Haytham was the main character throughout.

I will say, to me, yours is somewhat of an odd comparison. Unity's not as well-written or fun to play in terms of combat/polish as those other games, and it just cannot withstand the scrutiny as much. It should really be compared with other Ubi open-world games in my opinion, and it struggles there too, but not as obviously. It is a disappointment, as was AC III in general, but neither suck at all. The settings of both are rich and iconic enough to make their mark well; so much detail is put into these worlds, it is often painful to see them discarded so easily, but it was such a buggy train-wreck at launch.

Edit: fast traveling in Witcher 3 removed a lot of the horse fatigue I felt at times. I know some people hate doing it, but it saves hours.

Unity, in a few years, will be one of the games that will be considered to have aged extremly well. I've been lurking on the AC Subreddit for a while and I sometimes wish I could have this sort of positivity and general enthusiasm. Origins showed me that Ubisoft still can knock it out of the park, they certainly created something grand with AC and I'm glad that the road they took has lead to one of the best games of the last year for sure.

Personally, I did enjoy Unity quite a lot but I've also found the other games you have mentioned great. I'm a liker of things, so to speak.

Unity, even if some people may find the story or even the setting not-so-great, still has a unique personality and can stand on its own feet while being appreciated by fans of the franchise for years to come. Only because it had technical problems back when it was released shouldn't mean that the game isn't good now.

I've never finished it however, might as well look into replaying it at some point.

Boy, this actually makes me really excited to get to Unity (which I've never touched, and my distrust of anything universally hated had me wondering if it might actually be okay). Also, as guilty as I feel doing this, I want to sort of piggieback off of this thread rather than necro my own from a few days ago, which sunk like a stone.

https://www.giantbomb.com/assassins-creed-revelations/3030-34975/forums/i-need-some-advice-about-this-game-1817884/#1

I found Unity to be extremely boring, and I disliked essentially every character in the game. I have played through every game in the series excepting Rogue, Syndicate, and Origins, and Unity rivaled III as the worst game in the series by far. The only good thing I can say about it is that I did enjoy the additional options you were given during the bigger set pieces, where you could complete side tasks to make different things aid you during the mission. That felt like a bit of a throw back to the original game. I got to a point in the game about half way through, where I decided to just main line the story, which I never do, and i didn't bother with completing the collectables either. I'm glad you are enjoying it, but I think you will find other games in the series much better if you continue on.

I played it years after release and remember enjoying it as well. A lot of the jank was fixed. As with all AC games, the historical tourism of looking at Paris during the French Revolution is top notch. As for your comparisons to Horizon and Witcher 3, I agree that the on foot traversal of Unity is better (it's AC's strongest feature), however the story and combat are better in those other games. Opinions, you know? Maybe it's the freshness of Unity being your first AC game and that's why you're hot on it. It's in the bottom half of AC games for me. I still liked it though.

I don't think Unity is anywhere as good as The Witcher 3 personally (that is one of the best open world games to date to me, and just one of my favorite games [in the top three open world games]), and I don't think, even now, I like it as much as Horizon. That all said, Unity took a turn for the better when I played it last. I played it in the middle of last year after I, for the first time, enjoyed playing AC3 when I went through it after it became free on Gold. I thought 'if I enjoyed what I considered the worst AC game, maybe I should try my second least favorite'. I reinstalled Unity on the One and though I didn't end up going through its story again, I enjoyed it a lot more and was very impressed with it.

I've heard people say it has been updated since its launch, and if that's the case, then that's great because it turned out really well. I like the customization they have in it which never really made a return in the games in the same way. I had some fun doing a bunch of side missions, which I was surprised to find out there were many I didn't do. I was/am convinced they either updated the game to insert content, or I didn't take my time with the game at all and just ran through the story. I originally thought the game was a huge bore, and the story and characters were also dull. I liked what I played of it the last time I played though. I was also surprised at how well it ran frame rate wise and just how good it looks.

I just started this, and I have to say, I'm pleasantly surprised. It's likely due to how negative the reaction was to it, and my expectations were super low but yeah, I'm enjoying it so far. Not nearly as much as the Witcher 3 but that's apples and oranges for me anyway.

I will say, I'm not loving the combat changes thus far, and boy, Alex was not kidding about the icon barf. And not just sheer volume alone, but volume of things that I just have no idea what they are. I'm enjoying the setting though and it actually looks pretty nice on the Juan.

I'll just use this thread to drop this useless comment because I don't have the energy to make a thread about it, but: I played Assassin's Creed the week it came out, in fact specifically rented it from a Hollywood Video and took my console over to a friend's because he had a 60-inch TV in his basement, and we marveled at the spectacle for about seven hours and barely completed any actual missions. Then I played Assassin's Creed II for about eight hours when it was a free PS+ game and dropped it completely.

Last week I played Freedom Cry as I was trying to cruise through a backlog of some of my shorter games I never played, and I got about 30+% through the story according to the save file before I just deleted it in disgust. I know this thread is discussing Unity and Origins so maybe these things were addressed but I suspect notsomuch - that game controls like garbage! I hate the combat, I hate the traversal, I hated the simple act of doing anything other than standing still and looking at the pretty things.

I wish I could get it but I'm firmly in the Dan camp after that experience; I'm glad people get joy out of this series and it's been successful enough to keep people gainfully employed and challenge the games industry to find ways to do what this series does "well", but my god do I just not see it.

Yeah unity is pretty great, for about 8 hours. But it gets pretty old pretty fast. The story gets really confusing really fast and I just could not be bothered with it. It looks great though and it's probably worth the asking price just to see Paris during the revolution. It just lacks narrative direction and it also does not help that it is constantly trying to push microtransactions.

Unity is one of the last 'traditional' Assassins Creed games, and pretty quickly tips it's hand at the game play loop, nothing inherently wrong with it, besides the fact your needed to harness the entire energy of the sun to run it well.

Unity? More power to ya duder. I was pretty into my early time with Unity before it quickly became a bit of a miserable slog.

Starting a franchise with 9-10 main line games by playing the worst one sure is... a way to go about it.

It's so weird... I was just thinking of posting about how well Unity has held up. I never really experienced any bugs back on release aside from the occasional slow down, which has been remedied even further after patches and playing on the Pro using boost mode.

It's still visually the most impressive AC, from the amazing crowds, beautiful world, or even the cloth physics on the costumes, which has sadly been removed from recent entries. Using too much CPU power I assume. But man it looks good. As much as I loved Origins and Syndicate, I still have a soft spot for Unity.

@bdead: that's a bummer to hear! Especially coming off of Rogue, which had me pretty enthralled throughout, despite some narrative missteps, but already kind of had me feeling like I was going to lose it if they didn't change something up soon (I realize that Rogue is, from what I understand, way more like AC4 than Unity). Ah well, I got it for like 9 bucks so, if I get even just 8 or 9 hours I'll consider it well worth the price.

I wanted to like this game, and I looked past the technical issues which were mostly goofy but...damn does this game utterly waste it's setting it's crazy. Yes Paris is gorgeous but that's hard to fuck up (it's one of those places on Earth designed to just be ultra pretty.) The social and political intrigue seemed to be as muted and basic as possible for this vague personal plot that is just............nothing. The story felt like it was missing a huge leg but instead you just go ahead and fight the final boss and then chill with Napoleon and oh I guess that whole Revolution thing worked out. The backdrop of the French Rev just sort of...happened for the most part and then the personal story was just...bad.

Gameplay wise it was fresh for the time I suppose, but Syndicate and Origins have just sonned any and all positives from it so much that it is hard to look at it in too positive a light besides "it's cool you can run around revolutionary Paris" at this point (which to be fair is a huge plus in these games...as dated as AC2 is now running around Florence is always pretty dope.) That being said this all comes from someone who has played more or less the whole series and played all these games mentioned as they were released or within a year or so. Witcher 3's world and each and every story told in it just totally blew me away though, it was just endlessly gorgeous and enthralling - inspiring even.

Oh and while AC3 is kind of eh overall at least it leaned into and had fun with the American Revolution, and the whole Homestead quests/storyline was so charming and fun. I wish more (Assassin's Creed) games did more stuff like that. [P.S. AC4 is a stronger game overall but damn does it reuse missions designs and even ones that are bad]

They're all probably way better than people give them credit for.

I could see how somebody could really like Unity. It's not a time period often portrayed in games and there were some interesting parts to the game. I put in maybe 5-8 hours into it and while I did like what I was seeing with the time period, it was the whole original AC formula that just really tired me out. It's the same reason why I just couldn't get into Syndicate after awhile. Getting into an AC game pre-Origins is like going down a massive rabbit hole of overwhelming number of things to do and it's on repeat for the next 40+ hours.

Now Origins definitely doesn't change this much, but I think it ironed out some of the old formula of AC while adding stuff from other Ubisoft titles to make things more interesting and palatable. I don't think that you will like Origins simply because the map is huge and going from point A to Point B can take a bit of time, similarly to Witcher 3. The world though is just so awesome... I'm not even that much of an Ancient Egypt fan yet I feel like being one just from how cool it is being in that period and location. Also, I just generally like the fact that the game allows you to take your time with the world and really explore every nook and corner without the main narrative getting in the way and making you feel like you should be trucking through to the ending, plus you're always rewarded for going off the path. This is also pretty similar to Horizon where the main attraction for me at least is in exploring the world rather than acting out my freedom to do whatever I want like in GTA or being engrossed in a fantasy story/ies like in the Witcher 3.

I hated playing Unity, it always felt like the game was trying to predict what I wanted to do then it did it and it was extraordinarily frustrating, because it was wrong. Always.

The game is still okay, although I'm not enjoying it as much as I liked Rogue, weirdly. Also, the story is utter nonsense. It feels like whomever wrote it was locked in a room and forced to watch the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies for 48 hours, and then apply it to Assassin's Creed or something.

First, this exactly. I think the AC games get a lot of flack for various reasons, some valid others not so much. There were a couple entries that were weaker, but overall, they're quite good games.

If I remember right, there were things technically broken when Unity first came out. (Please correct me someone if I am wrong) Those things were resolved and going back now probably very much improves the game. I also didn't play it at release, and had a good time with the game. Though I am also in the court that most AC games are good, and the harsh criticism is sometimes a bit harsh (minus AC3).