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Franchises: Assassin's Creed

Started by bgmnts, January 16, 2021, 05:16:29 PM

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bgmnts

Disclaimer: This is a forum and not a personal blog, so I'll try to be as laconic as possible. Due to my overwhelming negativity regarding media, especially Disney/Marvel/gaming etc, I'll save the preamble on what these games represent and the negative aspects best I can. I'm just going to be positive, look at these games individually, see what good and bad is in them and rate them accordingly. Apologies if this is shit.


Assassin's Creed – Really loved this when it came out, a proper stealth game with innovative mechanics and made in the old style; levels, linear-ish, missions, story based etc. No vast open world to wander around here, just open levels. Hiding in plain sight and blending in was incredibly fun and unique at the time and it is something they kept throughout most of the games, but it felt at it's best in this one, in my opinion. The jumps between Altair and Desmond I felt worked well in reinforcing what the crux of the whole franchise is and the modern-day struggle of Templar vs Assassin (it turns into complete nonsense very quickly after this). After a while you forget your player character is in a machine watching all this and must escape, so time hopping works. Whopper of a sequel tease ending as well. A

II – Easily the best in the entire series, I hope most would agree. Fun loving, carefree scamp Ezio Auditore is a much more engaging character than the sullen Altair of the first game. He goes through an actual character arc, which is something you do not really see a lot of in these games. This is also the game where the actual story of Templar vs Assassin and the idea of these two groups fighting throughout, and shaping, history gets developed properly. The ancillary stuff like finding the ancient memories and solving those puzzles I found eerie and sinister. The idea that all these events of the past have been linked with these two opposing groups is maybe a bit cliché but I like that stuff. The overarching plot hasn't turned to utter bollocks so far, at least until the end when the ancient gods or some shit are introduced. The game is a big open world this time but nowhere near as big as it will become later, so it's not overwhelming, and Renaissance Italy is a joy to run around and stab people in. A*
Brotherhood & Revelations – Nothing really of note here; I think they introduce the concept of having your own gang and there is a dodgy tower defence minigame. C, I guess.

III – Unfortunately sandwiched between two vastly superior and more memorable games in II and IV, this is rather forgettable to me beyond the Kojima style protagonist bait-and-switch at the beginning, which I found quite interesting as it is the genesis of the idea that the Templars are not token baddies and actually have a relatable goal, that of bringing Order to the world. This becomes more prevalent later, but Haytham Kenway is seen as a relatable protagonist/antagonist in the prologue and later when you face off. The main protagonist is, however, very fucking dull, as again he is sandwiched between the Italian fuckboy and the Taff pirate, so he gets lost in the shuffle. I know he is half native American his name is Conor. Finally, in my memory, this game is the first to really hammer home the "oh look, there is a famous person in history!" shoehorning, which became insufferable to me really. Not a good one. C.

IV: Black Flag – The second best in the series for me. The first game to really showcase what seafaring can bring to these huge open worlds, and it really does it well. Playing as a Welsh pirate was new and, again, Edward Kenway had a fairly good character arc, something I do not remember the previous protagonist having. He starts off as a bit of a selfish glory hound and then becomes a selfless Assassin, it's pretty standard but it works. I will say, though, beyond the purpose of the naval traversal, the Caribbean setting does little for me. I feel that the best parts of AC are when you are hopping from building to building and peeking around corners. It suits an urban environment a lot more than sparse, rural shanties, which I remember this entry having a lot of. Overall, though, brilliant. A.

bgmnts

Unity – have just started the first hour or so and am really, really enjoying it so far. It is MUCH superior to its successor. I love the setting both in terms of story and gameplay and I think, other than ancient Rome (how has that not been a full game yet?), that this is a perfect setting for Assassin's Creed. I am playing it on Xbox One so I am unsure if this game has been improved upon or revamped as I am expecting game breaking glitches and shit graphics, but it looks and plays brilliantly. The traversal in here, which I suppose should be an important factor on which to judge any of these, is SO smooth it is actually a pleasure to hold R and A together for the majority of time moving. Cannot rate as early days but so far, great game.

Syndicate – Utter dogshit, I must say. Picked it up again after a year or so of burnout and my god I was not even halfway through everything. The first I've played in the series that really took the piss in terms of being bloated with pointless content for the sake of content. The thing is though, as I'll say with Odyssey later on, when it is part of the actual living, breathing world and you come upon events or activities to do naturally, it is fun! Sadly, it's all very formulaic and you have to climb a tower and reveal all the activities and all that shite. To be fair to Ubisoft (ugh) even Rockstar have a problem with this: They create a huge, living, breathing gorgeous world, but missions are structured in a way that means the story progression and the open world do not blend in seamlessly. But yeah, jumping onto a moving train or boat on the Thames and stealing or sabotaging is extremely fun, it just does not happen as organically as it should, in my opinion. The combat is hideously shit, mash X to play out a series of incredibly fast, dodgy looking animations to kill your opponent, pressing A to stun them when their guard is up and B to counter, that's it. Graphically, it looks shite for me, it looks worse than Unity somehow, lots of rough edges and ugly character models. Except for Darwin and Dickens, they look fine. The first game to introduce a female and male protagonist (something Ubisoft have a VERY odd attitude towards) and they are very stock characters. Jacob Frye is more brash, carefree and combat oriented (apparently) and Evie Frye is more studious, sensible and stealth oriented (apparently). They have different sets of missions but when it comes down to it, they have the exact same skill tree except Jacob has three unique combat upgrades and Evie three unique stealth upgrades. I enjoyed playing as Evie more as the combat is such a slog, I want to stealth as much as I can. Traversal feels terribly slow and fussy; I constantly found myself jumping down a ledge I didn't want to or climbing up a wrong bit of building or just stopping at a waist high object I wish I could just roll over smoothly. A warm pile of steampunk shit. D

Origins – Hard to really know what to think about this game really, as while it completely changed and improved the combat style, it took me a while to get used to it – hitpoints and button mashing were so alien at the time - and at the time I was adamant it was shit and not Assassin's Creed. On reflection, however, I think this kind of combat done well is better than traditional AC combat done shit. It introduce so many new mechanics like the aforementioned combat system, which plays more like an action game with hotkeyed attacks and skills, it introduced the birds eye view mechanic where you could switch to your eagle and reveal enemies, items and treasure. I much prefer this system of revealing the map and I don't know why they persist with having to climb something and "synchronise" to show map activities and stuff. Furthermore, the revamping of the combat system does create a lot more choice in how to approach targets, there are a lot of opportunities for both sneaky stealth stuff or running in with a two handed death rod and caving the cunt's head in and running away.
The story is decent for me; hero's son is killed by bad bastards (proto-Templars I suppose) and that's his main motivation to murder this hierarchy of villains. Do tasks, reveal animal themed baddy, kill animal themed baddy, rinse and repeat. Then, it starts to go all Assassin-y and the ORIGIN of the Assassin's order is shown. There are naval battles shoehorned in but I didn't really bother with that unless mandatory, it didn't work as well as Black Flag for me.

Odyssey – the big beast of AC games. Absolutely massive world which to sprint around in and slit Athenian and Spartan throats. Contrary to what I hate about these games, I ended up loving this and pumping a good 80 hours into it. A large part of this was the in Mercenary mechanic and the Cultist mechanic. You kill your Cultist (the main antagonists of the game) targets by gaining clues as to who they are and then you can mostly take them out however you please. There are several branches of the cult, each related to a certain setting or function, i.e there are naval oriented cultists and warrior related cultists etc. You can pretty much kill all of them however you please, it's brilliant. Whilst that is happening, a never-ending series of mercenaries appear out of nowhere and will hunt you down, depending on how much trouble you are causing. This is the best part of the game for me as it happens so organically it can happen at any time and it is exhilarating getting into a fight with one or several of them, or, more likely, pegging it to stealth them or level up and fight them another day. On top of that, the game takes place during the Peloponnesian War and the Greek landmass is carved into various regions, allied to Athens or Sparta, and this changes frequently throughout the game, in large part to certain activities like infiltrating forts, killing high ranking soldiers and burning supplies. The weakening of a region comes to a head with a big scrap against whoever side you choose to fight. This doesn't have a huge impact on the game as far as I remember but it does grant you rewards, which you'll need to get better equipment. This leads into the big problem with this and Origins, the level of grinding. The level of grinding needed to just even upgrade your equipment several levels behind your skill level is ludicrous. This is sadly designed this way to milk you of real-life money to upgrade your equipment faster. Why a game company would deliberately try to make your experience as dull as possible to milk a bit of extra cash from you is a level of corporate greed I struggle to understand on a human level, but I am trying to be positive so that's all I'll say on the matter. It does, however, have a big impact on the game so I'll give this one a nice round B.

Rogue and Valhalla I have not played yet but I will get around to them when they are heavily reduced in price and on sale. How would you lot rate them?

So, there you are. I apologise for the length of this, if you even managed it. I just thought I'd try and contribute something positive and relatively constructive, for once, in my limited, inimitable way.

What are your thoughts on these games or the franchise as a whole? What is your favourite? Do you disagree with anything here or have I misremembered something vital?

Chedney Honks

Cheers, mate. My favourite is Odyssey because it's the most mindless to just roam around and kill innocents in a beautiful environment. Once you kill a couple, there's a kind of exponential growth of people wetting their pants and running for the law which gives you more Greek cunts to slaughter. It's a game which really brings out the fucking psychopathic murderer which is about 0.5mm below the surface of my psyche. I love it. Kicking people off a cliff and stabbing people in the back of the throat for no reason. Crawl along through some bushes and creep up on an old man and then yiiBOOOOSTAAHHH. Toss his body in the Med. Fucking worthless cunt.

Marner and Me

I have played, 2, 3, Black Flag, I started the French one my dog knocked over my ps4 and fucked it entirely, and I have played London.

I remember enjoying 2,3 and Black Flag. London did seem a slog as there is no real difference between the two characters. Only issue I find with the game in general is you try and be stealthy in a mission and end up with 15 guards on you.

Lemming

Odyssey is my favourite too, utterly mindless gameplay where you sort of slip into a trance state and do things on autopilot, but it keeps you entertained for hours. It's sort of like a dream, just an endless collage of vaguely related scenes with no real overarching meaning.

I like the story and sidequests too because they're so wildly inconsistent in tone and mood, and Kassandra (and I assume Alexios, if you play as him) is an absolute lunatic who either severely underreacts or astonishingly overreacts to everything. In one quest she'll be sardonically mocking everything in a too-cool-to-care way, while five minutes later in the very next quest she'll be screaming and crying and threatening to cut people's throats, to the point where you just absolutely cannot get a handle on the character you're playing at all, which adds to the game's weird dream-like quality.

The mercenaries system was interesting but they have a habit of spawning when you're already engaged in a boss fight, and making it unwinnable by swarming you. In the end it's just an annoyance as you have to open the map and hit "Pay All Bounties" every hour or so.

Never understood the universal praise for AC2, it just dragged for me. I did think Ezio was just an annoying knobhead rather than a charming knobhead, though, so maybe that's part of it. And the only thing I vividly remember is using the flying machine/glider/whatever to go over the city, which was cool.

Thursday

Have a weird relationship with Assassin's Creed games, because I always used to just enjoy them when my own opinions on games were less fully formed, and hadn't played as many games. Then it became kind of popular to hate them, and I felt slightly defensive of them even though my own enthusiasm for the series was waning. They're still just nice simple games to play, doesn't need to be a hardcore experience.

Unity was the one that became derided for some huge bugs, but I didn't play it until later and they'd been patched, so my experience with the game was pretty good, but franchise fatigue had truly set in and I was having doubts about whether I wanted to keep playing the game. But then they announced Syndicate and I thought "Ahh fuck, I do really want to walk around Victorian London." And I did enjoy doing that, but the game did start to feel like a slog. It's not bad, just a bit boring and it was hard to say whether it was the game or just me. So I thought "okay, now I really am done with the series"

But then they took a year out to re-invent things and shakes things up, so now I had to give Origins a go...

I was enjoying it, the combat was different at least, but the overall loop of the game wasn't really that drastically different, but it was feeling fresh enough. I was intrigued enough to at least mainline the story... but it doesn't let you do that because main story missions have some level gaiting. Enemies suddenly become much much much harder to beat because they're one level higher than you. "Okay fine I'll do a few side quests." I thought. But then I reached a bit where the next main story mission was 3 levels above what I currently was, which would mean a lot of grinding weak side content. And I noticed the new microtransaction menu had something where you could pay to get boosted 3 levels and I thought "fuck this" and stopped playing.

Now, everyone insists they're brilliant again, even though nothing actually seems to have changed that much. And all the journalists reporting on how awful the abuse at Ubisoft is, predictably gave Valhalla 9's and 10's. So now I think "Fuck Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed. Shit game for cunts."


bgmnts

Quote from: Thursday on January 16, 2021, 06:14:49 PM
I was enjoying it, the combat was different at least, but the overall loop of the game wasn't really that drastically different, but it was feeling fresh enough. I was intrigued enough to at least mainline the story... but it doesn't let you do that because main story missions have some level gaiting. Enemies suddenly become much much much harder to beat because they're one level higher than you. "Okay fine I'll do a few side quests." I thought. But then I reached a bit where the next main story mission was 3 levels above what I currently was, which would mean a lot of grinding weak side content. And I noticed the new microtransaction menu had something where you could pay to get boosted 3 levels and I thought "fuck this" and stopped playing.

Now, everyone insists they're brilliant again, even though nothing actually seems to have changed that much. And all the journalists reporting on how awful the abuse at Ubisoft is, predictably gave Valhalla 9's and 10's. So now I think "Fuck Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed. Shit game for cunts."

Yes you are right, the level scaling of enemies is stupid in Origins. It shatters the immersion too, when enemies can stand getting stealth attacked with a stab in the kidney, taking off only half their hitpoints.

In fact, are there any actual stealth games around now? As Chedney says, these games do bring out the psycho murderer in you because there is no consequence to killing everyone. I know some games have pacifist runs like Deus Ex but I cant remember the last time I played a stealth game that wasn't "kill everything you see from the shadows".

Thursday

There was a new Amnesia game recently.

bgmnts

Oh yeah fair enough, I've always seen them as survival horror games but I suppose there is a major element of stealth that wasn't in older survival horror.

Thursday

It's true though, most games now do the thing of "play your own way" where there's no real punishment for not doing things stealthily, because a lot of people don't really like stealth. Or the incentive is to kill as stealthily as possible, rather than just survive . I do miss the old Metal Gear Solid attitude where it's not instant fail stealth, but you won't survive if you go everywhere guns blazing.

Egyptian Feast

I'm nearly at the end of a 100+ hour Odyssey and, despite some of the irritating aspects mentioned above, I've enjoyed every minute and reckon it's my favourite of the series so far (the only ones I haven't played are the first one and Unity). The story has gone a bit batshit with the Atlantis stuff (
Spoiler alert
a 2500 year old Kassandra in an ill-fitting suit has just appeared to Layla and then died, leaving a body that looked around 70
[close]
), but I expect that from Assassins Creed ever since the bollocks end to 2.

It's made me laugh more than any previous instalment. It doesn't take itself half as seriously as some of the earlier games and there are some genuinely funny missions (a daft Tales of Ancient Greece DLC mission 'A Very Very Bad Day' was one of the highlights of the game for me). I've enjoyed how unashamedly bawdy it is - I've taken almost every romantic option in dialogue and have ended up attending orgies with goats, tested a primitive dildo that left me barely able to stand afterwards and abandoned my (unexpected) ugly baby and controversial forced hetero love interest to sail around Greece and take multiple lovers, some of whom I had to kill afterwards. I'll miss Kassandra, Barnabas and their crew of lesbian mercenaries when I'm done with it.

Rogue is pretty good, by the way. It's basically a retread of Black Flag but further North, so the water hurts to swim about in. If you enjoyed the earlier game, it is literally more of the same but with a bigger map and more land. I remember little about the story but the charmless protagonist has a wonderfully shite Oirish accent and I had great fun taking the piss out of him. He starts of sort of working with the Assassins but decides they're cunts and goes centrist.

Pink Gregory

There was a change in the traversal mechanics from 2 to 3, where it became far more streamlined, that I just never got on with, so I dropped the series there.

That and I enjoyed playing with every UI element turned off, and 3 had those QTE wolf attacks that were tied to a random UI element so that was delightful.

Connor was an awful protagonist though.  Charisma free, goes from a child to an adult through a monologue in a basement.  The two spinoffs (Freedom Cry and Liberation) seem to have a much better go with the subject matter. 

beanheadmcginty

I 100 percented Origins over Christmas. Took me 104 hours in the space of a week. I'll definitely have to give Odyssey a try if it's more of the same as I just wanted to keep going. So glad they got rid of the precision jumping required in the earlier games.

Thursday

Quote from: Egyptian Feast on January 17, 2021, 02:56:52 AM

Rogue is pretty good, by the way. It's basically a retread of Black Flag but further North, so the water hurts to swim about in. If you enjoyed the earlier game, it is literally more of the same but with a bigger map and more land. I remember little about the story but the charmless protagonist has a wonderfully shite Oirish accent and I had great fun taking the piss out of him. He starts of sort of working with the Assassins but decides they're cunts and goes centrist.

Ahh yes Rogue, where they decide "Ahh, maybe it's more complex than Assassin's Good Templars Bad!" and they get to this by just having the Assassin's at the time send your man on a a mission to collect an artifact that destroys an entire city when he picks it up.

falafel

The only time I can ever remember bursting out laughing in a game (rather than just chuckling) was a few months ago in Odyssey when, after trying for six or seven goes to duel a bounty hunter to the death, I snuck up on him and booted him off a wall to try and shave some health off, and he instantly carked it. A+++, bonus points for making the previous thirty minutes of grinding feel like the long leadup to a punchline rather than a pointless grind. That kick is pure magic, the rumours are true.

bgmnts

Quote from: Egyptian Feast on January 17, 2021, 02:56:52 AM
I'm nearly at the end of a 100+ hour Odyssey and, despite some of the irritating aspects mentioned above, I've enjoyed every minute and reckon it's my favourite of the series so far (the only ones I haven't played are the first one and Unity). The story has gone a bit batshit with the Atlantis stuff (
Spoiler alert
a 2500 year old Kassandra in an ill-fitting suit has just appeared to Layla and then died, leaving a body that looked around 70
[close]
), but I expect that from Assassins Creed ever since the bollocks end to 2.

It's made me laugh more than any previous instalment. It doesn't take itself half as seriously as some of the earlier games and there are some genuinely funny missions (a daft Tales of Ancient Greece DLC mission 'A Very Very Bad Day' was one of the highlights of the game for me). I've enjoyed how unashamedly bawdy it is - I've taken almost every romantic option in dialogue and have ended up attending orgies with goats, tested a primitive dildo that left me barely able to stand afterwards and abandoned my (unexpected) ugly baby and controversial forced hetero love interest to sail around Greece and take multiple lovers, some of whom I had to kill afterwards. I'll miss Kassandra, Barnabas and their crew of lesbian mercenaries when I'm done with it.

Rogue is pretty good, by the way. It's basically a retread of Black Flag but further North, so the water hurts to swim about in. If you enjoyed the earlier game, it is literally more of the same but with a bigger map and more land. I remember little about the story but the charmless protagonist has a wonderfully shite Oirish accent and I had great fun taking the piss out of him. He starts of sort of working with the Assassins but decides they're cunts and goes centrist.

I recentlt bought the Atlantis DLC on sale, are they any good? It looks like a fair bit of story, 30gb worth of downloads, so I'm intrigued.

Egyptian Feast

I haven't really started the Atlantis DLC properly yet (I only got the final golden apple to seal up the portal from a scrap with Medusa last night), planning to finish up the main story and kill the remainder of the cult before I go on with it. If it's anything like the other two DLC packages, it should be worthwhile though
Spoiler alert
I'm slightly disappointed it looks like I won't actually be visiting Atlantis myself
[close]
.

Quote from: falafel on January 17, 2021, 11:04:48 AM
The only time I can ever remember bursting out laughing in a game (rather than just chuckling) was a few months ago in Odyssey when, after trying for six or seven goes to duel a bounty hunter to the death, I snuck up on him and booted him off a wall to try and shave some health off, and he instantly carked it. A+++, bonus points for making the previous thirty minutes of grinding feel like the long leadup to a punchline rather than a pointless grind. That kick is pure magic, the rumours are true.

The Sparta kick is comedy gold. I spent far too long running around forts trying to attract people to high places so I could boot or shield bash them into oblivion. It's great when you're listening to music and it times perfectly with a drumbeat or bass drop - 'Change' by Sparks made a fucking hilarious accompaniment.

Lemming

The Atlantis DLC is ok. It gives the game an actual big final boss fight and ties up the present-day story (as if anyone's following that) so it's kind of necessary for the game to feel complete. You also get three new world maps to dick about in. I thought the first one
Spoiler alert
Elysium
[close]
was alright but a bit slow and repetitive, the second
Spoiler alert
Hades or Hell or whatever
[close]
was decent, and the third one
Spoiler alert
Atlantis
[close]
was probably the best.

The Crumb

I remember being a annoyed with IV. My character was supposed to be a pirate and assassin, but seemed to prefer being a stalker. It reached a demented peak when you had to stalk someone in your fucking boat.

BritishHobo

I need to pick Origins up again. It hadn't clicked for me yet, but I'm still very early in (hour one or two). I enjoyed Syndicate, but the franchise definitely needed shaking up. In one sense it felt like a nice return to the simpler times of the first game, where you did get to just sneak around and slowly bump people off on the way to your target- but obviously it suffered with the repetition that comes with that. I'm a bit intimidated by how massive and different Origins and Odyssey seem to be.

I'm still smarting from being suckered in by the overarching future plotline, which they spun out too much and then dropped.

Thursday

Yeah even though the characters were shite, I'm one of the few people that liked the idea of the overarching future plotline. It could have worked out well if the series had an end date in sight and the last game in the series was all future stuff with Desmond. I assume that was the original idea, but they didn't really know where to go with it, and by that point they had such a successful franchise they had to just drop it because it had nowhere to go.

Noodle Lizard

I'm a defender too, but it's very difficult sometimes.

I like Black Flag, much more than III at least, but I must've started it three times over the years and never gotten further than about 25% into the story. There wasn't really much incentive to continue as the missions themselves were quite boring and I started not to care about getting upgrades for my ship (which basically just seemed to mean you stood a chance against bigger ones, which isn't particularly rewarding in and of itself). But having a game where you can just sail around singing sea shanties and occasionally merking a whale or pillaging a ship is good enough for me.

I still haven't played the first one, Rogue, Unity or Valhalla. Syndicate is the last of the "old style" AC games, and I like it a lot. I'm not fully on-board with the new approach, although I can appreciate where it's good (I also haven't finished any of them - I keep giving up on Origins, and I rage-quit Odyssey after losing a savegame). I recently picked up the Ezio collection for cheap and started AC2 again for the first time in ten years or so, I'll see what I reckon. I play mostly for the atmosphere, settings and kind of easy badassery - Origins and Odyssey are just too big and unvaried compared to more "modern" cities like those in Renaissance Italy or even Victorian London.

Jerzy Bondov

Quote from: Thursday on January 18, 2021, 01:43:00 PM
Yeah even though the characters were shite, I'm one of the few people that liked the idea of the overarching future plotline. It could have worked out well if the series had an end date in sight and the last game in the series was all future stuff with Desmond. I assume that was the original idea, but they didn't really know where to go with it, and by that point they had such a successful franchise they had to just drop it because it had nowhere to go.
Yeah I was excited for the idea of a present day game but then they totally fucked the Desmond story in III. Incomprehensible.

Timothy

I've played Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla and Syndicate. The only one I finished was Oddysey. I absolutely loved that game. So many fun moments while playing stealth, just fighting or having massive fights at sea.

Valhalla was okay but way too repetitive. Origins wasn't really my cup of tea. I tried Syndicate after Oddysey and it felt too outdated to enjoy it.

Do you reckon I would enjoy Black Flag? I loved the sea battles in Oddysey.

I.D. Smith

Hello, I have a small question for any Creed-heads in here about the series, please.

I got Assassin's Creed 1 way back in 2007, and completed it around the time. Although I enjoyed it, I wasn't that fussed in carrying on with the sequels that came after. Despite this, over the years I've still managed to accrue all the main titles in the series on various formats, from AC:2 right up to Odyssey[nb]As Christmas gifts, free games on Xbox Live, and drunken sale purchases from the PS Store[/nb]. Since I have them all, and with the recent lockdown giving me more free time stuck at home, I decided to pick up the games again from AC:2, and it's meant I've actually got quite into the series, and the overarching story involving Desmond.

So far I've done AC:2, Brotherhood and Revelations, and I'm now onto AC:3. All well and good, but for various reasons I'm actually itching to jump ahead to the later ones right now: specifically Origins, Odyssey and then the new one, Valhalla. This is partly because I want to play them while they could still be considered "modern" games, with relatively up-to-date graphics.[nb]Another reason is the most recent 3 are the games that my Dad's played, and he's always been urging me to play them because he loved them so much, and wants to talk to me about them. Ordinarily I would just play them when I get round to them, but what with Covid, my Dad reaching OAP status, and the recent unexpected passing of a friend, it's all kind of brought home how finite life is and how it can end at a single moment. It probably sounds daft, but often the way me and my Dad connect is by talking about games that we've both played, and I worry the sheer number of games to get through to get to the ones he's played might mean I don't make it in time, if you get my meaning.[/nb]

I am somewhat aware that Desmond's story
Spoiler alert
ends in Assassin's Creed 3
[close]
from what was mentioned in the previous posts above, but my question is if there is still any form of a continuous narrative through the games after AC:3, all the way up to the recent one Valhalla, that I would be spoiling a bit by jumping ahead to Origins and carrying on from there? Or are the post-AC:3 games almost like standalone titles that you can just dip in and out of in any random order without spoiling anything or baffling yourself with lost/unconnected plot threads?

As an aside I am struggling with 3 a bit and part of it, as mentioned earlier, is down to Connor and his rather dull, over-serious generic action hero character. I actually quite enjoyed the snippy British character you start the game as, not realising that the game would shortly switch to playing as po-faced Connor for what seems like is going to be the rest of the game. I'll soldier on, but I already have one eye[nb]Like a pirate with an eye patch, aaarrrrrrr[/nb] on the next game, Black Flag.

TL;DR: I've played AC:1, AC:2, Brotherhood and Revelations, and I'm now on AC:3, and I plan on to keep playing it and the subsequent sequels in order, but I also want to concurrently start Origins and then Odyssey and Valhalla while they're still relatively fresh. Would doing this spoil any overarching story for the games before Origins, or are the games between AC:3 and Origins basically standalone titles that you can dip in and out of, without really spoiling any long running story?

beanheadmcginty

The only modern day bit in Origins is this girl who's got an animus in a cave and you can look at her laptop, which has got various files on it you can read. They don't affect your progress though, so don't read them (I didn't, not for fear of spoilers, I just can't be fucked to read documents in games)

Egyptian Feast

You're not missing out on much if you jump ahead. In Black Flag and Rogue, you're an Abstergo employee (possibly Layla from Origins etc., I wasn't paying much attention). When you exit the Animus you go into first person and wander around the office, finding stuff out and doing the odd task, but you're a blank slate of a character and nothing particularly important is revealed as far as I recall. I can't remember what was going on in the real world in Syndicate, so it can't have been that special.

I'm still playing Odyssey and still loving every minute. I'm halfway through the Atlantis DLC
Spoiler alert
trying to patch up the mess I created in Hades after I killed that three headed prick Cerberus. I had to laugh at Brasidas, who has never forgiven me for disagreeing with him one fucking time, turning out to be a baby-killing bastard. I damned the cunt to permanent Hell and he agreed with me, lol.
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Quote from: I.D. Smith on January 28, 2021, 02:59:30 PM
As an aside I am struggling with 3 a bit and part of it, as mentioned earlier, is down to Connor and his rather dull, over-serious generic action hero character. I actually quite enjoyed the snippy British character you start the game as, not realising that the game would shortly switch to playing as po-faced Connor for what seems like is going to be the rest of the game.

Sorry, you're stuck with the drippy cunt to the end and he doesn't get any better. Worst protagonist in the series, easily. Would be interested in hearing if anyone disagrees with that. I can't think of anyone close. At least you can have a laugh at the Irish pirate's shit accent.

Egyptian Feast

Quote from: Timothy on January 20, 2021, 10:31:38 AM
Do you reckon I would enjoy Black Flag? I loved the sea battles in Oddysey.

I reckon so. I don't know what it would be like going back to it after Odyssey, but I loved it so much at the time I wished they'd turn it into a separate franchise without all that Juno bollocks.

bgmnts

Yeah I can't really help with the overarching future/present day plot. It's incoherence in its purest form.

Has a video game franchise shit the bed as quickly as AC did? By the end of the second game you're scratching your head and you have this ancient race of beings and you're like hang on can't I just go into the past and take part in the eternal struggle between two ideologies please?

Nope, get that Isu gruel down you.