Assassin's Creed Mirage [split topic]

[bgmnts]

Assassins Creed Mirage.

Thought due to the setting it would go back to its roots as a more stealth oriented game and bin all the stuff that was tedious and shite about the past few entries, but I press the right shoulder button and my protagonist does a crap punch and I died a little inside. Then I see tons of random things to collect and I know it's going to bombard me with that shit and try to make me buy all their microtransactions.

Ah well.

[madhair60]

mate don't buy assassins creeds

[bgmnts]

Can't help it anymore.

[Pink Gregory]

It is noticeable with how little hype they're welcomed now.

[seepage]

it's on BBC News' front page

[Noodle Lizard]

AC: Valhalla was one of the worst games I've ever played. I think I played it for about five hours and it was still tutorialing me and throwing up constant notifications and shit all over the map. Surely the point of an ubiquitous, endless franchise like this is that you should be able to basically plug-and-play rather than constantly having to re-learn mechanics that have been altered for the worse. I hoped the popularity of Elden Ring last year might have inspired developers to cool it with all of that, but perhaps we have yet to see the results.

Couldn't be less inspired by the setting of this one, just feels like we've done it already. Maybe I'll come back to it once they do one in 1980s Sheffield.

[Toki]

I've just started Black Flag and enjoyed it. Does it steeply decline in quality after 15 minutes?

[Noodle Lizard]

I've just started Black Flag and enjoyed it. Does it steeply decline in quality after 15 minutes?

I wouldn't say so, but it's all very samey and you've pretty much seen everything you're going to see within the first few hours (although there are a couple of fun secrets out on the water). Unless you're really into the plot or the characters, there's no real need to finish it.

[Thursday]

I find the "Hooray back to basics Assassin's Creed!!!" stuff weird because that got boring as fuck. That's why they moved to making them open world RPG's. And yeah that got boring too, but going back what was boring before, doesn't really feel a great solution. Also Valhalla's premise of "What if we set our parkour assassin game in all of England in a time when there was only a couple of tall buildings. It should take 80 hours just to do the main story" was a strange one.

I like them though in spite of them being utterly mid. Switch your brain off gameplay and historical virtual tourism. They're nice.

[bgmnts]

It did get boring but I feel that was more to do with the relentless release of title after title. It's never ending with these cunts but I would have loved to have played a return to roots stealthy, hiding-in-plain-sight Assassins Creed game rather than the boring-open world box tick exercises with utter crap combat shite Creeds we get now.

Feels almost personal at this point.

[Thursday]

They were always collect-a-thons with maps packed with shite though. It's stealth has always been very basic. It never stopped doing "whistle in the bushes to make an incredibly stupid guard come over."

[bgmnts]

I think Assassins Creed 2 had the feathers and that but the collectible stuff never bothered me, you can leave that. It was the massive increase in scope and emptiness and the level of grinding (microtransactions) and the that killed it for me, as well as the combat.

Playing AC 1-4 and then Origins-Mirage are totally different experiences, at least for me.

[Mobius]

why's the main character one of the boring gits from Valhalla.

personally I enjoyed Odyssey. not sure why they've thrown the baby out with the bath water here

graphics and parkour bits look crap on this new one. hope they've finally dropped the aspergo have to go back in time and control a 21st century twat occasionally bits

[oggyraiding]

Spoiler for Valhalla/potentially Mirage.

Spoiler alert

Basim is the current incarnation of the god Loki. I think. At the end of Valhalla he tricked the modern day woman into getting trapped inside a viking god machine so he can go free and do shenanigans in modern day. How does Mirage address the Loki thing? Does anyone care? Nobody knows.

[close]

[Thursday]

Spoiler for Valhalla/potentially Mirage.

Spoiler alert

Basim is the current incarnation of the god Loki. I think. At the end of Valhalla he tricked the modern day woman into getting trapped inside a viking god machine so he can go free and do shenanigans in modern day. How does Mirage address the Loki thing? Does anyone care? Nobody knows.

[close]

Spoiler alert

Even though it's complete nonsense it's one the things I like about the games. Seeing where they go with this story about precursor gods... making Greek and Norse mythological Gods actually really. It's not like I'm expecting a good or satisfying story, but it's sort of fascinating to see where they take it and how outlandish it gets. So I am curious to see how they handle this, because yeah they're going for a back to basics thing, but they've also picked a character who has a mental backstory that'll be quite odd for returning players... or indeed anyone not in the small percentage of people that actually finished Valhalla. It was originally intended to be even more DLC for Valhalla until they decided to make it it's own thing.

[close]

[Mecha Rodney]

I enjoyed Odyssey, very beautiful world and good to see representation of ANCIENT in media.

[Mobius]

yeah it looked really pretty, lovely blue oceans. sailing your boat around and exploring the islands. i had a shield that was a medusa head and it was sick. there was some fun npcs as well, it had a bit of a lighthearted feel, all the greek love and poetry.

i gave valhalla quite a few goes because odyssey but set in england with vikings sounded great, but christ it was boring. viking longboat raids, going to france and all that stuff. should have been great.

[Thursday]

Kassandra was such a great character. She can kick me off a cliff any day.

[madhair60]

Black Flag best. Loved the boat stuff. Also pirates are fun. Collecting sea shanties. Daft.

[The Crumb]

2 was the peak for me, it was a still novel concept at the time, it was great fun just caning round the cities and there was a respectable amount going on with the gameplay at the time of release.

Black Flag was almost great, but to me the Assassin stuff clashed with the pirate stuff too much in the main story. Too much stalking, not enough pillaging. Boat based tailing missions were a low.

Odyssey was a great lockdown game. An ace world to explore,top setting for characters and monsters to fight. Probably too much of it, but the ridiculous sprawl was part of the charm when you're stuck indoors 23 hours a day.

Ghost of Tsushima was basically Japan Assassin's creed and was at the same level of fairly enjoyable.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Black Flag's my favourite. Great setting and a good balance of scale/fun things to do. Odyssey my next favourite (mostly for the environment). Avoided Valhalla, the setting didn't look appealing at all.

[Thursday]

Avoided Valhalla, the setting didn't look appealing at all.

Don't know how you could say that...

[El Unicornio, mang]

Slightly less enchanting than modern day Grimsby

[Pink Gregory]

Slightly less enchanting than modern day Grimsby

Can't even climb the Dock Tower, what is point

[BritishHobo]

Is this out? Fuck. Been genuinely quite excited for this because I really do just want to creep around and stab fuck out of people in the back when everyone else isn't looking. Been very happy that they've finally decided to return to that.

AC Odyssey was bizarre in that it felt like such an incredible, enormous, very detailed recreation of Ancient Greece, fast and full of so many beautiful historical locations, packed to the absolute gills with well-researched content from history and mythology, and yet I couldn't give a single fucking shit. Running past a tirelessly-recreated Parthenon and thinking I could not possibly care less about anything I was seeing. Might as well be in an ice world in a Mario game. DULL MATE.

[bgmnts]

Is this out? Fuck. Been genuinely quite excited for this because I really do just want to creep around and stab fuck out of people in the back when everyone else isn't looking.

Very hard to do for me. Any kill, seen or not seen (in my experience so far) raises your notoriety meter and then you get these horrid cunts you cant one hit stealth (because fuck you they have metallic necks I dunno fuck you) and they pop up EVERYWHERE, making doing some of that endless busywork a real chore.

And I find myself in the same boat with the lovely recreated Baghdad, in the golden age of Islam, all mysticism and scientific advancement and culture and that, and everything has sort of been reduced to a Civ Rev encyclopedia. And they're not even couched in the context of the animus operator giving you a colourful description.

[Thursday]

I mean I'm the one guy that likes Odyssey and even Valhalla more so my opinion can probably be disregarded, but not massive enthralled with this so far. It's like they've stripped back your combat options to place more emphasis and need to do stealth, without doing anything to make stealth more compelling. I was hardly calling for them to bring back the old style notoriety meter and having to rip posters down to lower it.

Also you've got a big ring city area with only a couple of central gateways, meaning you've got got run all the way round, or you climb over the walls, which have guards posted on them, and suddenly you've got 10 guards chasing to kill, because you wanted to get to your location more efficiently.

Feels like there's lots of big restricted areas (that still have normal NPC's going about their business) in the way of any efficient path you'd want to take to your quest marker.

Also it's got that very old Assassin's Creed thing where sometimes guards just... attack you for walking too close to them even you haven't done anything wrong? Very strange.

There's a weird input issue I'm having as well where you really have to press attack quite hard or Basim won't do anything but light attack is "press RB" and heavy attack is "hold RB" and that makes it surprisingly difficult not to do a heavy attack when you want to do a light attack. I don't understand why it's this way.

And this is just personal bias, but it's not a very compelling setting to me at all, and they're not doing anything to sell me on it either.

Feels like I'm being reminded of all the reasons I got fed up of Assassin's Creed. It's alright though.

[PlanktonSideburns]

it's on BBC News' front page

Is there a mission where you balance rocks on a beach while your wife shops or something

[bgmnts]

Underdeveloped yet overconvoluted and baffling gash in terms of the Basim plot. The copy and paste main plot of freeing Baghdad from The Order was underdeveloped as well.

Don't buy this full price, if at all. Wait til maybe 50% off.

[bgmnts]

Been dunk'd

Pretty much spot on. His point about the traversal and the engine is correct, it has always felt off. I had a think back and I think Assassins Creed Unity was peak parkour. It looks gorgeous, the animation was fluid and the movement was intuitive and free flowing, but not jittery like in these newer ones. If only it didn't have that glitchfuck release ah well.