With AC4: Blackflag being announced, a lot of what I read is optimism that it will be better than 3 and how everyone hated it. I personally liked it. It was a nice change of pace from the others. Conner for me was great, kinda liked him more than Ezio even (say what you want). The time period was awesome and I'm not even American. Only thing I didn't enjoy were the Desmond parts but I look past it. So am I the only one? I wish they would've continued with Conner like they did Ezio, even if it was one more game.

Yes you are the only one in the whole world.

NEVER.

Well since you're the only person who liked AC3, I guess I hate it now?

Thanks guy :(

:(

The only thing that bothers me is how some are just talking about how the series is totally dead to them, so played out, etc.

I get that it was a bit disappointing, but like ME 3, I have to remind people "hey, it wasn't all bad". There was fun to be had here and certainly fun left in the series. I love the changes being proposed for IV so I'm still very much interested.

To me, III was just too linear and too hand holdy. It also didn't properly utilize the frontier which was far more fun to move around in than the cities, which were quite boring in their structure.

Yep. You're the only one and now you must die.

With that title, you're going to get a ton of sarcastic comments.

On topic, I liked it. But a lot of the missions were poorly made and the game was disappointing.

Yes.

As far as the game was concerned, it should have been so much better. It did somethings right, but overall was more bad than good.

I don't understand why people get so hung up on ''Am I the only one?''. Obviously he's not literally asking if he's the only one in the whole damn world who likes AC3. ''Am I the only one?'' is just a bit of casual hyperbole to ascertain if they have the minority opinion. It's not very different than when someone says they're ''starving'' when chances are high they're not literally starving.

So annoying in this forum. You say that and you're guaranteed that's 75% of the responses. They're all so clever!

I enjoyed AC3 more than Revelations (like most people afaik). It was a completely adequate game. Personally AC has sorta become my annual guilty pleasure franchise. It's not awesome, but it's good and it always seems to launch at just the right time of the year.

I bought AC3 and I ended being disappointed with myself more than anything else.

I had played (and hated) the first two AC games, I'm not sure why I thought 3 would make me feel any different. I guess I learned an important lesson either way.

@yummylee: It's the internet equivalent of using using "nice" as an adjective in an article or an essay. Try harder is all we ask.

Can anyone tell me how the combat has changed from AC2 to AC3? Any improvements over the three titles? Or is it still just hold-R1-press-square?

to me, my stance on it is that its the ending of those games that causes the disconnect for people, as its the thing they leave you with and what players remember, and in which those 2 cases of AC3 and ME3, both those games endings were terrible, it made you feel everything you have been doing for both those series was for nothing, which when ur game is the third act in the trilogy, the expectation i would think, is that its the grand feelgood payoff game, not a grand fuck you, to your players. and now that people had that grand fuck you from the ending, their motivation to continue playing those franchises are gone,

(i think assassins creed still gets away with this since the overall grand fuck you happened in the desmond storyline, connor's story i thought ended well, and Mass effect got back some fans with the extended cut and moreso the citadel dlc)

in short i think the ending causes people to form a generalization that the 3rd act game was overall terrible when those games actually did have moments. (the twist in the beginning of AC3, the history villians of ac3, the conclusion of the genophage and the quarian/geth story in ME3)

AC3 multiplayer is superb, it's too bad the playerbase is garbage and doesn't play creatively at all; but the same could be said for virtually any multiplayer game these days (Starcraft 2 comes to mind); still I have like a 95% winning rate through 430ish sessions playing the most "random" mode in Wanted with non orthodox builds. I have an exceptional amount of fondness for the developers since they continue to make an extremely good multiplayer product and will likely continue to purchase AC games just for an annual monthly sojourn.

The single player is fine; looks fantastic, Haytham is a great character; Connor is bland. Nolan North's voice work is much better than in previous AC games, though I do miss Cam Clarke. It's certainly much better than Revelations.

I liked it! At this point I'd rather go back to AC3 hunting than FarCry 3. But they're just different, I guess.

Yeah I get that about ME3.

I don't in AC. I mean I realize some people care about the sci-fi story but I have less and less and by the beginning of III I was trying to rush past it as much as possible. I would like the series more if it never existed and only found it well done in AC II, where the puzzles were very compelling. Desmond as a character has never been.

well then if you realized that some people care about the modern day story, then whats not to get? :P

i cared about both aspects of AC' storyline, so to when in AC3 when after all the buildup (which imo unlike mass effect, AC's modern day story was all about build up/intrigue, thats arguably the biggest thing that story had going for it,) that game i think more directly than mass effect, says "haha fuck you!" at the very end of the game,

i think this series shouldnt have never introduced the "those who came before race", either that or they should have ended that arc, and then make the next set of games just be the assassins vs the templars, i think there is a very grounded story that they could have told in the next arc of games.

also u might very well get ur wish next gen to get games with no stupid modern day story, as i believe in the multiplayer story of AC3 (which they do treat as canon), they introduce the fact that abstergo is selling the animus as a consumer product in the vein of like a console, so anyone can jack in and relieve their past = infinite justification for history based assassin creed games.

I enjoyed AC3, it wasn't super amazing or anything but I had fun. I think it's really a case of high expectations and it's no wonder since it was hyped up a lot. A real sequel to AC2, the conclusion of Desmond's story, new main character, TREES! etc.

What's not to get is why anyone cares about Desmond. I hear some people say they want a sci-fi set AC so bad and stuff... I don't it. I just have heard it so I acknowledge it's a thing I guess, though I'll never understand it (especially in a world where we get bascially no games set in interesting historical settings and tons of sci-fi crap).

And you're right about me feeling good about how AC IV seems to be minimizing the sci-fi stuff. It could be done with all the parts of that I actually did like (like puzzles) without a Desmond character.

You anger me. I want to explain and list how much AC3 sucks but its suckage is too powerful for me to approach. I feel exhausted just thinking about such a task.

But really, you enjoyed it and that's all that matters, good on you man.

i dunno where you've read people cared about desmond, the ultimate fate of that character in 3 is fucking stupid, but the other places i read i had the impression no one really cared about desmond.

the stuff ive read and imo, the stuff people cared about relating to the modern day story was just the intrigue of it all, it had that "oh whats gonna happen next" vibe to me with each tease they drop into the game,but they leave things in such a stupid position at the end of 3....

and looking back at the previews for ac4, seems they are not minimizing the scifi stuff, only allusion they have give was that this game will obviously not have desmond miles and that you are playing as a dude that works for abstergo thats tasked with going back into the memories of desmond to check out this pirate assassin guy , and you will be interacting with characters from the modern day storyline

but considering this is technically probably the revelations team working on this game, the modern stuff will most likely be minimal as thats how it was in revelations. so yea this will end up being the assassins creed game you can get behind

I just wasn't made to care about Connor or the revolution at any point, and the Desmond shit went totally off the rails. The game was tryng to do too many things.

I enjoyed the ship combat stuff though and I'm looking forward to Black Flag, but not really looking at it as an AC game. Hopefully the game after that will be a return to a more traditional AC (proper cities).

The basic countering system has actually been even more simplified. Now when you go into combat you don't even have to hold the trigger. All you need to do is press a single button to counter.

That being said the combat is definitely more varied than in previous AC games. There is a wider variety of enemies that require more than just the standard, simple counter and even beyond that I felt like there were more options at my disposal which made it fun to experiment and simply made it more fun to fight enemy soldiers.

Ass 3 was probably my favourite of the series. They improved almost every part of the controls making the game a lot more fun to play than the other games. I liked the story but it may seem stupid to someone actually familiar with the history. I was not so I enjoyed it a lot. The game just felt better than the others. It is deeply flawed though. It takes far too long for the game to get going and that time period probably feels longer if your not enjoying the story. Also, all the side stuff felt was cool but unnecessary. There should have been a reason to do those but the game is so easy you don't really need upgrades. So I liked it.

@kazona said:

Cool, thanks.

I haven't finished it yet (don't get enough time to play it) but I'm enjoying it so far. I enjoy playing in the Frontier, and actually find the Desmond sections to be a welcome change of pace.

I had a ton of fun up until the last 3 sequences.

Nope. I feel that people are way too hard on it, and it's not even close to the trainwreck everybody makes it out to be.

I thought it was good, not great but good.

Pretty much every moment in that game felt like it was made by with the game equivalent of premature ejaculation. The game didn't take the time to build itself up and, story wise, and was just stuffed with unnecessary fluff.

I liked it, but it's my least favorite of the AC series (console entries anyway). It's just buggy as all hell, way too many poorly designed/frustrating missions, the menus are awful (why in god's name did they replace the radial weapon menu with this sluggish thing, for one thing) and it's just incredibly incoherent. It really does feel like 5 different teams created 5 different parts of the game without talking to eachother and then they threw it all together. Also the ending to the Desmond story is AWFUL.

It wasn't my favorite of the series, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Felt less interested in the side missions this time around though. Connor didn't feel as strong of a personality to me.

Nope it was the best entry in a slightly overrated series. People who say otherwise are simply crazy.

I think its not the best in the series, but I do love the series! I don't understand the hate for AC3 or Revelations, especially since Revelations has the best actual plot, with Desmond's story being the least stupid its been since AC1. AC3, the Desmond aspect is completely awful. The changes to AC3 are good, some don't work out though, like view points being useless, combat being a bit worse then other games, and free running and climbing being less important. I do like a lot of things the game did though.

I think it's the best one. I really can't see how people would think otherwise, it expands upon and improves basically everything and I really can't think of a solid argument for why the game is bad. I mean sure if it's not you're thing but I personally can't understand how it's worse in any way. It was a brilliant game that I took my time 100%ing. It looked great, played great, was set in a super interesting time period (being from Canada, all this stuff was new to me because we don't learn ANYTHING about American history up here) and it was neat to see how they fit the Assassin's into the founding of America.

Ugh god I just love that game.

I find this comment interesting since this was exactly my problem with a lot of the game. They took what should have been a really cool time period for this stuff and didn't really engage with it at all, which made the game completely boring. I really came away with the feeling that the devs didn't do enough research about the time period and what the Revolution was all about and instead went for what Wikipedia says is important:

"Hey, Lexington and Concord sound important. Better have that in there. Oh! But don't forget to put in the Paul Revere stuff before that! And didn't Benjamin Franklin say something about 'hanging together'? Better throw that quote in without any context at all!"

ACIII felt like a "greatest hits" album of the Revolution that managed to get all the important events in while simultaneously completely missing what made those events actually, you know, important. They have a snow level in Valley Forge, but miss the part where the entire army nearly starved and 2,500 dudes froze to death in the worst winter in a century. They have the Marquis de Lafayette, but forget to explain that diplomacy to secure French aid was kinda important to actually winning the war (In fact, I kept expecting to go to France at some point during the game, since it was so critical and there was lots of cross-pollination of ideas going on. Remember, the French Revolution started before the American Constitution was even adopted). In ACII, I felt like I was playing an important role in shaping history. In ACIII, I was watching stuff happen, not playing an active part like in ACII. Then again, I went into that game knowing next to nothing about Renaissance Italy, so maybe Italians felt the same way about ACII as I do about ACIII (and maybe most Americans aren't as upset as I am by the treatment either. Our educational system is kinda shitty here.)

That is interesting. See I wouldn't really know any of what was important or not because I was never taught it, and what you say about Italians could very well be true. I wonder what Israelis think of AC1 as well.

But as with any AC game, I realize that the history is only a backdrop and the main story is about the Assassins and the main character of that game. This one was no different. I am willing to forgive them for leaving out such things (regardless of if I knew it or not) because really, that isn't the focus of the game. Connor's development and where he hid the information Desmond seeked was the goal. Everything along the way to that goal was a customized storyline built around that timeline and I felt it was very entertaining and interesting.

I'm sure there is also the opposite side to your argument too - if they included too much of the events of the American Revolution, people could have possibly condemned Ubisoft Montreal for not taking creative risks, being predictable, and having no imagination.

You are not alone. Sure Desmond's ending was bleak and Connor had a couple poorly written moments, but I really found the humanism of the homestead, the father-son dynamic, the stealth missions, and the Naval stuff kept me engaged.

AC3 feels like it tried the most new things of the series, and it succeeded in many of them. Ezio is a nice, lothario, revenge for my family, have sex with the pretty ladies kinda character. Connor was something new, and watching his story unravel the racial and political foundations of America was a joy.

AC3 was amazing. People really cant get over that final chase (which I beat in one try before the game was patched)

I found the wilderness very relaxing. Other than that, I think I was generally disappointed in the execution of things. I thought the time period and premise had a lot of potential for Connor's story, but everything fell really flat. Connor would have been one of my favourite characters in gaming except the story dragged him down a notch. I can't stop thinking how AC3 could have been a masterpiece in storytelling if it had better pacing, used the characters more wisely, had a stronger emotional arc near the end... and so on. It's just a total bummer.

Never cared for Desmond though. He should have always been the insertion point into the narrative for the player and never more than that.

I am least familiar with American history so I never had that feeling you got from the story. I would agree is that it was poorly told. None of the relationships between Connor and the historical figures were established very well, which makes him feel out of place. The story could have used more fictional characters to tell the story.

I think the "In ACIII, I was watching stuff happen, not playing an active part like in ACII." is the whole point of Connor's arc. He is idealistic but in the end he realized he hasn't changed a thing for the better, rather, everything just moved on. I love how poetic it is, and the setting is just sooooo perfect for that. But then again, horribly failed in execution as I stated above above.

Having finally gotten around to playing the game, this pretty much sums up my feelings on it. The game constantly throws new features at you, without taking any time to properly explain them or let you explore them, before throwing even more at you. Go deliver some mail, go do some free climbing, here's how you hunt, build up your little town, now you're a ship captain! I think it would have been a much better experience if they had taken a step back and just decided to focus on one of the big features, rather than trying to cram in as much as possible.

And while I've never been a fan of the sci-fi elements, the historical setting didn't make a lot of sense in this one either, to the point where I'm sure they had to retool the story at one point during the development because they couldn't make the Americans the bad guys without mass outrage.

It's not a bad game, but it was a bit of a mess and incredibly disappointing after the past few.

Well other then seeing Jerusalem which was pretty cool I don't remember much about that game.
Maybe I should play it again...

@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.

I agree to that as well. Having way too many features for its own good, and having to introduce them to the player butchered the pacing of the story. The tutorial is too long (5 to 6 hours? come on) and makes the meat of the story, Connor, compensate for it. I have never played a game where I was already emotionally exhausted and bored to hell before I could even get to the main character's story. That is fucking insane.

To be honest, the ship stuff should just be left out. Other than the wow-factor and the need to say "hey our game has an exciting new feature", it is basically meaningless to the whole package. The town stuff was decent though.

There can only be one!

Didn't mind Connor that much. Ezio was way more awesome though.

As for the game, I actually thought it was alright. The side-mechanics themselves were a bit convoluted however, the economy was screwed up and a lot of stuff was never properly explained mechanics wise.

It was alright.