Comments on: Thoughts: Assassin’s Creed 4 – Black Flag.

By: Thoughts: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey | The Scientific Gamer

Thoughts: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey | The Scientific Gamer — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 11:01:12 +0000

[…] there’s very few that I’d recommend as unreservedly good either. Except for the mould-breaking Black Flag, up until last year all mainline Assassin’s Creed titles were effectively the same game because […]

By: chris

chris — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 16:36:40 +0000

I felt that it was alittle redundant. They should of added diversity
To the ships, the ship captains faces etc, the game play when battling them,
Different guns 15 pounders 20 pounders etc different types
Of forts. Most of all I felt a major let down when you couldt use kenwsys fleet
In the gameplay itself. They could of built off of that. Ill give you an example if they
Could have tweaked the lord of the rings foe system it would have improved the game.

By: Filip Galetic

Filip Galetic — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 15:42:52 +0000

I couldn’t bear myself to finish the first one on PC for the last 4 years. Finally this year I got PS3 and a copy of AC: Revelations with a free copy of AC1 with it and I must say the faults of the first one are much more manageable on Playstation. I plan to play Revelations next but I wonder if starting with that will ruin some parts of 2 and Brotherhood if I ever come back to them? Or it will be kinda like watching Pulp Fiction where chronological reordering gives another feel to the whole story.

By: Darren

Darren — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 14:45:00 +0000

@Hentzau:

I’m not at all opposed to the Animus, just the need for the framing device to tell it’s own story.

If I were to reboot the franchise, I would still have the Animus, but it would be part of some kind of research program. There’d be no kidnapping or over-arching conspiracy. Instead, each of the actual games would be stand-alone, with the researchers delving into different characters purely out of curiosity or to see a particular historical character’s “story” to completion. You could still do some ongoing things in the “present” side of things–memories bleeding over, maybe the team discovers a lost treasure and decides to go on their own adventure, whatever–but the player wouldn’t be shackled into an overarching narrative that drags things out.

I don’t know a single person who actually gave a rat’s ass about Desmond, and I think we’d all have been much happier had he been less important to any kind of plot. Maybe had he been more of a side character (there primarily to allow for the useful Animus framing, which excuses a lot of gameplay mechanics and narrative conceits) he could have been given more of a personality rather than being the franchise’s bland de facto hero.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 13:31:47 +0000

I genuinely think that without the Animus setup we’d still be playing Ezio games. Videogames as a medium are astonishingly bad at letting go of successful, established characters and properties that are proven to make money.The Animus overplot makes it easier to justify skipping forward and backward in time when for any other series it’d be a massive shakeup of the status quo; however, that doesn’t excuse it being utter bollocks.

By: Ninja Foodstuff

Ninja Foodstuff — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 13:29:18 +0000

Also I have to say they’ve done a splendid job with the ipad app. Nice to be able to just completely turn off the hud and refer to the map on the ipad.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 13:23:15 +0000

Yeah, like I say wind and waves do come into it but in much more of a gamey “can’t make it too easy for them to steer their ships otherwise they’ll ace every single combat” kind of way. You furl/unfurl sails to speed up and slow down and turn faster/slower and it happens in about a second. Ships can turn on the spot. Cannons reload in seconds and damage is a pure function of how many cannonballs hit rather than clever positioning or raking broadsides or whatever. What they’ve made is fun — which is why I don’t make an issue of it in the review — but there’s absolutely nothing realistic about it at all.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 13:16:40 +0000

Oh man, now I feel responsible. Stick with it! It gets better, I promise.

By: Ninja Foodstuff

Ninja Foodstuff — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 12:44:10 +0000

oh good god, they’ve made me replay the effing awful abstergo sequence at the beginning twice because of lousy checkpointing.

By: Darren

Darren — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 13:37:17 +0000

I think it was that Ubisoft wanted a franchise and nobody was creative enough to think that a narrative franchise (as opposed to something like the Mario games) could exist without a metanarrative and still keep people hooked.