The Gaming Den

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:

Well now that's just nuts.

Assassins Creed, and it's actual predecessors, the Sands of Time series have the following.
1) Excellent graphics and basic engine tech for their eras.
2) Excellent obstacle navigation game play which has only improved, and sometimes MASSIVELY with each title.
3) Excellent exploration game play, which got massively better in the switch to sand box.
4) Some excellent sand box game play (in the creed series) on par, or possibly better than, the next best in the genre.
5) Beautifully written in excuses for do-overs and save games.
6) Fantastic immersion
7) One of the very best 3rd person combat engines I have ever encountered anywhere period and it only gets better, more elaborate and more intuitive with every title.
8) Very workable stealth (from creed onwards) that only gets better and more fun with each title.

Now the ONE area they have been "spotty" is... engaging story lines.

Sands Of Time was all round fantastic in that regard, then each prince of Persia got worse up until that forgettable post creed knock off they did to cash in on the crappy movie (which itself had worse writing and was a worse piece of stand alone fiction than the original game!)

Assassins Creed 1 had a... poor story and that made the game play in turn seem relatively bleak and unengaging. It had hints at a fascinating something and the big reveals at the end were really great stuff.

Now you MIGHT excuse 1 as being a bunch of dull but over all beneficial foreshadowing. Though I don't because in the end 2 acts like you should be as engaged and fascinated by Altair as you are Ezio and that's just not the case.

And you MIGHT excuse 1 as being basically a "proof of concept" of the basic tech and game play elements that are still the foundation of the series today. And as such they squeezed in a rather admirable quality of story for what amounted to a tech demo and a hard sell on doing something more creative and interesting with their Prince Of Persia tech to their financial backers.

But really you don't HAVE to excuse it. Because they fixed that. And as of 2 onwards the story has been fascinating engaging and involving. Really beautifully put together stuff with what must be hundreds of hours worth of researched references and little details that are genuinely fantastic.

In the end Assassins Creed is still pretty much basically just a console combat action sandbox. But it is probably the best one ever and certainly one of the best game series on the market, especially for PC. Other console action sandboxes, like Skyrim, should look at Creed as an example they should strive to either emulate, outdo, or differentiate themselves from (in a good way, not the way you are doing it Skyrim, bad Bethusda!).

If you think otherwise... what the hell is wrong with you?

Assassin's Creed has a technologically impressive movement system. It was really easy to take that for granted in terms of gameplay fun, though, because...
1) You will grab the stupidest fucking thing you can.
2) Your character will not turn around for the life of him, he will just keep running into that same god damn wall the camera isn't even pointing at anymore.
3) Their idea for fun obstacle courses was shambling slowly left and right on bricks up towers. Now, there were better moments, but for every fun obstacle course you had there was a tower that you climbed by shuffling mindlessly from one brick to the next in a bunch of time-consuming tedium.

What they did was impressive the first time, and then the second and subsequent titles I merely found myself annoyed because the parts that weren't fun the first time either multiplied in number or became more noticeable as my wow-factor evaporated with repetition of their gimmick.

Assassin's Creed is a shitty sandbox. It is a fun game, but a terrible god damn sandbox. Enjoying AC's sandbox is the same kind of enjoyment one gets from collecting achievements. Yes, it's pretty much proven to be psychologically addictive, but it's still stupid as hell. The things you could do in this sandbox:
1) Complete predefined mostly linear missions which operated in some subset of the sandbox.
2) Collect things. In places. GOTTA CATCH 'EM ALL.
3) There's a place. Buy it shit. GOTTA CATCH 'EM ALL.

They did not utilize their sandbox well. It never felt like you were playing with the sand, just walking around and looking at the shit someone else had already built. In their defense, most sandbox games are like that, but as far as sandboxiness goes they didn't do a whole lot to set themself above and beyond except "oh look, perdy."

Their combat system tilts off in fun factor really quickly, because any given fight isn't significantly different from the last fight you had. They are pretty and fun to watch, but it peaks early and goes downhill from there, with little blips of interest as they drop new things into your lap, or add in new enemy types. But those don't really do enough to salvage the fact that nothing's really changing and there's no real room to mix things up.

I enjoyed the time I've spent in each immensely, but that amount of time wasn't enough to finish any of them because they are really static and playing the rest won't be any different than doing what I've already done.

tl;dr The AC series is really fucking fun. It's also really fucking repetitive, so the lifetime on that fun is medium-small.

The limitations of the movement system are interesting, but especially interesting because it seems to be improving notably with every title. On ever point you mentioned it keeps getting better. By brotherhood it has gotten VERY smooth.

Mind you I play these things on PC and as you know PC gamers often have MUCH less issue with "control difficulty" and especially "camera angle" because we have a far superior set of control devices. Assassins Creed while being primarily a console title always has excellent PC porting in that regard (again, Skyyyyyyrriiiiim!! No really mouse 1 is actually specifically 1 of the enter keys sometimes. I have to mouse to OK some commands and press keys for others and sometimes enter and sometimes side ways to select menu items and... Skyyyyyrriiiiim!)

On the other point though.

If it is such a shitty sand box... point out a better sand box game.

I dare you to even try.

The limitations you mentioned are basically just a flat out description of console action sand box games. Off the top of my head the only one I can think of that was any more "sandboxy", off the top of my head, MIGHT have been San Andreas. MAYBE. And that only really lasts until the Assassins Creed series gets back it's province map and starts having car chases. (real ones, not those horse cart and tank bullshit bits).

How do you like the combat system at all? It's like playing guitar hero on easy mode and there's only one button.

The combat system is offensively bad, and it's incredibly easy to have no risk presented to you even against the toughest enemies. You are actively punished for attacking (it's the only way you are ever put at risk) and defending is still a more effective offense because it allows you to counter, which is a 1-hit kill on all mooks and sets you up to murder anybody else.

The combat system is kind of core in a game about killing people, and assassin's creed falls flat on its face. Every. Single. Time.

The roaming in the game is great, but holy fucking shit tits there's never a reason to actually run from anything. The combat system is so broken it takes longer to run away than it does to impale every guard who follows you before sitting on a bench (and thus becoming invisible).

Again, the multiplayer in Bhood only highlights how fucking terrible the single player is. It's full of exciting chases, great stealth and plenty of mindfuck strategies. You can win without killing anybody in it and you can win without trying to hide, it depends on how you want to play and it is so good it makes me sad that single player isn't even a tenth as fun.

Fuck those cutscenes too. AC1 cutscenes were so boring and so frequent that you hardly felt like you were playing a game. Everything in the game that wasn't an assassination (there were only 9) was shitty. You could add up the time of all the cutscenes that you CAN'T SKIP and it's more time than you spent assassinating people. In a game about assassinating people.

See, sands of time was fucking awesome because it knew where its strong point was (parkour/murder/parkour murder) and made the game about that. Assassin's creed didn't know what the fuck it was doing.

"Maybe they want a movie" It said, stringing together shitty cutscene after shitty cutscene (that are unskippable because fuck you, you're going to listen to us be preachy and annoying and have a bad plot).

"Maybe they want some sort of GTA Jerusalem" It whimpered, making you have to ride around on horses to get places (until you mercifully learn to teleport, but even then you have to ride horses just to reach the fun) and adding a sandbox.

"Maybe they want to climb shit," it mewled, now visibly trembling, making freakishly large towers that you can climb by taking down a button and the analog stick.

"Maybe they want to stab things," it squeaked, clearly confused at why people still weren't having fun. So it decided to make a combat system, one that is so bad it hurts.

Then, on its deathbed, it thought "maybe they want to assassinate things," and made the only fun parts of the game.


tl;dr: It was advanced for its time, but pretty graphics and a good concept don't make a game fun. You know what's fun? Good gameplay. You know what matters in a fucking game? Good gameplay. You know what people play games for? Good gameplay. Assassin's Creed failed to deliver the only thing it needed to.

It also committed the cardinal sin of unskippable cutscenes and decided they were so good they'd put them fucking everywhere, which admittedly made the bad gameplay at least feel like a break from the cutscenes.



Edit: Whoa, I missed that you said the "big reveal" at the end was impressive. God, are you stupid or something? It's such common trite I was hoping the guy wouldn't be a fucking templar because that would be awesome. I had friends in the room when I finished it (I generally always did when I played, it's a pretty game and really, really boring if you don't have anyone to talk to during it) and we were cracking the fuck up the entire time. The only good reveal they have is with all the writing all over the place, and it's just a cliffhanger for sequels.

I didn't buy 2 (friend did, what a tard, but I played it a few times to see if it got better) and only bought Bhood for the multiplayer because I heard it was awesome and I'm glad I did. Same friend who bought 2 couldn't even finish 3, it was that fucking bad. He said he couldn't find the motivation to play the single player. It's sad when my friend who likes shitty games can't even finish that shitty game. Come to think of it, he didn't finish 1 either because "I saw the ending already so I don't need to play anymore."

Whoa, it's almost like playing that game was a chore. Oh wait, that's because it was.

I have no opinion about the assassin's creed game because I have never played it. But I did like this:



-Username17

The only way to play Assbro is multiplayer, but if you do single you should have somebody watch you do it.

PL wrote:Mind you I play these things on PC and as you know PC gamers often have MUCH less issue with "control difficulty" and especially "camera angle" because we have a far superior set of control devices.

My experience was kind of the the opposite; the ability to control the camera has been better than the ability to direct the character, so you will suddenly steer one direction, the camera will respond well, but the character has some momentum and proximity to a forward object that causes him to do something else instead. And I noticed it getting worse as I played the later games, not better, but that may just be growing irritation making a lesser amount of it more obvious.

P.S. Default AC2 mouse issues were fucking horrid. Dear god that was fucking terrible. "Just how much acceleration can we put in this thing?"

As for better sandbox games, the GTA's do a decent job. Things are relatively less linear, and the things you can do in the sandbox are generally more satisfying. The Elder Scrolls are more satisfying from a sandbox perspective. Big open space is not sufficient for a sandbox. That's just called "open level design," possibly "EXTREME EDITION." And AC2 does that, and then does fairly closed level design during the missions, which are usually just a closed track in their open level. But a sandbox game has a plethora of options for ways to play in that sandbox, and AC doesn't really do that. There is no compelling reason to do anything in the game twice, because it's not going to be meaningfully different the second time through.

It's a really, really big world without a lot of options you'll care about.

I really want to hear why/how PL enjoyed the combat system in AC at all.

It's just incredibly bad, so incredibly, unbelievably, fantastically bad and insulting. It's not like there's anything your opponents can do, there's no "fuck your counter" attack that exists, there's just countering. I think the final boss may have been immune to it or something like that (I drink to forget the final part of AC), but even templars go down like chumps when you slap attack during their swing (this is what it takes to perform a counter).

As for the multiple maneuvers and attacks you can use in combat, they give you a dodge after they give you the counter. The dodge is like the counter, except you don't kill the guy who swings at you and you can get hurt doing it. Design decisions like that make the combat system absolute trash. They also give you that fucktarded power swing, which is like a normal swing except slower (you might get hit, if the enemy decides to attack) and it can knock people around if they try to block it. Too bad you should never attack.

They give you a bunch of different weapons (protip: use one of the two weapons that allow you to counter), none of which matter at all because every combat is you standing still until a dipshit swings a sword at you and you kill him using one of the counter animations that got boring after the third time.

It's actually really funny; remember the assassination in the military compound? I stealth-murdered the guy, changed to my sword and then stood in the same place until everyone who was out to get me was dead. It was just a pile of corpses and a bored assassin, waiting for the next idiot to step up to the plate to get murdered.

In Assbro at least they stop with the bullshit and let you 1 shot mooks by holding down a button to draw your fucking gun. Of course, still not as effective as countering because you're left open to attack during it.

How can you enjoy that system at all? Don't say you can ignore it either, the entire end of the game is just combat, combat, combat.

Some people, myself included, do in fact find hammering attack and watching people die to be vastly entertaining. I'm not going to pretend there's any sort of complexity to Assassin's Creed 1 combat (got it working, I'm up to memory 3 now), but I like it anyhow.

Some people are only entertained by combat systems that involve difficulty and a range of tactical choices to pick from, and they should play a game that has those things, i.e. not Assassin's Creed. There's a large number of games that cater to your tastes, this is not one of them and that's fine.

I do, however, have some complaints about it:

1) FUCKING CUTSCENES. No one, no one on the entire goddamn internet that I've seen, actually thinks they were good. Even people who are rabid supporters of story in games, even people who like AC's story, hate the cutscenes. I've stabbed you in the throat! You get one fucking dramatic paragraph and then you goddamn die! That is how this is supposed to work!

2) Riding between cities. Specifically, anywhere there isn't anything interesting to do between the cities. It wouldn't be such a big deal if you could simply ride at a full gallop until you felt like stopping to shank some dudes, but for some reason riding quickly gets you set upon by soldiers and thus forces you to stop and dispatch a couple of random guys. Doing that without a Parkour section to break things up gets old by the fifth repetition.

3) The controls are much less problematic than the last time I got it working, in that it no longer uses a weird fake fullscreen where I can click on the taskbar and minimize the window by accident, but the bit where making High Profile a toggle also makes Deflect a toggle is incredibly irritating because one of those should be a toggle and the other should be a hold down.

4) Desmond. I'm playing this game to play an Assassin who jumps around and murders people, and every scene with Desmond is time where I am not doing that.

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:The only way to play Assbro is multiplayer, but if you do single you should have somebody watch you do it.

I chatted with a chick online that wanted to watch me play assbro by myself. And asked me several times on later occasions. I politely declined every time.

name_here wrote:Some people, myself included, do in fact find hammering attack and watching people die to be vastly entertaining. I'm not going to pretend there's any sort of complexity to Assassin's Creed 1 combat (got it working, I'm up to memory 3 now), but I like it anyhow.

Some people are only entertained by combat systems that involve difficulty and a range of tactical choices to pick from, and they should play a game that has those things, i.e. not Assassin's Creed. There's a large number of games that cater to your tastes, this is not one of them and that's fine.

I do, however, have some complaints about it:

1) FUCKING CUTSCENES. No one, no one on the entire goddamn internet that I've seen, actually thinks they were good. Even people who are rabid supporters of story in games, even people who like AC's story, hate the cutscenes. I've stabbed you in the throat! You get one fucking dramatic paragraph and then you goddamn die! That is how this is supposed to work!

2) Riding between cities. Specifically, anywhere there isn't anything interesting to do between the cities. It wouldn't be such a big deal if you could simply ride at a full gallop until you felt like stopping to shank some dudes, but for some reason riding quickly gets you set upon by soldiers and thus forces you to stop and dispatch a couple of random guys. Doing that without a Parkour section to break things up gets old by the fifth repetition.

3) The controls are much less problematic than the last time I got it working, in that it no longer uses a weird fake fullscreen where I can click on the taskbar and minimize the window by accident, but the bit where making High Profile a toggle also makes Deflect a toggle is incredibly irritating because one of those should be a toggle and the other should be a hold down.

4) Desmond. I'm playing this game to play an Assassin who jumps around and murders people, and every scene with Desmond is time where I am not doing that.

In AC 2, cutscenes get skippable, the dying monologues are replaced by a line or two at the most (One...Ezio says "Why? WHY?" and gets the answer "Were you expecting a confession?" )Desmond gets to be more of a person (can't really play as him until Brotherhood, Revelations actually explains what's up with him), riding between cities is replaced by going to the caravan and paying a nominal sum, the huge fuck-ton of flags go away and get replaced by a hundred feathers (with a decent reward for fifty), and you can use blunt weapons and actually kill people bare-handed.

Brotherhood lets you carry two-handed weapons and gives you a crossbow.

For shits and giggles, a bit of the Assassin's Creed Brotherhood kills: CRUNCH. SPLACK.

Anyone else looking forward to the 1.1 update for Terraria on December 1st?

Avora wrote:Anyone else looking forward to the 1.1 update for Terraria on December 1st?

Drill baby drill!

I'm looking forward to the placeable mechanisms and monster spawners. You can now move lava to the surface using pumps instead of repeated trips with buckets.

I may finally be tempted to play multiplayer.

Avora wrote:I'm looking forward to the placeable mechanisms and monster spawners. You can now move lava to the surface using pumps instead of repeated trips with buckets.

Well, I just used lava/water spawner glitches + giant tanks (my lava tank was made of wood, which I always thought was hilarious), but yes, having a good legit way to get lava up will be nice.

Dear Name here,

If you enjoy hammering attack and watching people die AC wasn't even good at that. Enemies block a lot if you attack. Sure, they eventually die because they won't get an attack in edgewise, but it's so slow. Faster (and prettier) combats come from countering every single attack, because it launches into a mini cutscene of you impaling/slicing/punting the guy who attacked. Throw in some normal attacks (this makes your opponents look semi-competent) and you have a very pretty looking combat engine.

However, as somebody who thinks a game about stealth and combat should have good combat and rewards for using stealth, the combat system is stupid. You can murder an entire army and still not have lost a bit of health. It doesn't even require thought or any skill aside from consciousness.

Love,
Pseudo

P.S. Fuck those cutscenes.

Pseudo, you really need to stop PhoneLobstering.

I don't know if you were around for PhoneLobster's huge rants on how much Mass Effect sucks. I recall it being a multi-post affair, much like what you're doing now. Calling people stupid and accusing them of horrible taste if they do anything with said game but burn the disc and mail the recording to the makers to say "THIS IS WHAT I THINK OF YOUR FLESH-TURD OF THE GAME", etc. You're doing this:



I hear and understand your criticisms of Assassin's Creed. I even recognize their validity on some points. Yes, the first game was repetitive. The long death-confessions sucked. Altair had almost the same emotional range as a mannequin.

They do not, however, destroy the game experience for me. I like the series, I like how Assassin's Creed 2 took out the repetitive info-gathering missions, made the interface look and work better, and actually allowed for interaction with the game world, even if it was just by buying shit and standing in a physical group of people to blend in rather than hitting a button to do the monk-walk. I'm looking forward to AC 3 next year (damn Resident Evil naming schemes).

You really just need to grow up get past the "Lol I think that game sucks so anyone who likes it must suck too" and recognize people who like different things than you can be intelligent and reasonable people.

I don't know, if Pseudo is really just trolling PL by doing exactly what PL does to every game that anyone else has ever liked to the one game PL decided he liked, then I think it's just epic and deserved trolling.

Assassin's Creed and it's sequels aren't any better than Oblivion/Skyrim/Mass Effect/ect. So if PL were consistent, he would hate Assassin's Creed exactly as much as those games.

I suppose AC (for me) represents the biggest flaw in games nowadays: they forgot to make the game fun.

I haven't bought one of those big-budget games since Assbro (which was a year ago) because developers seem to have forgotten pretty graphics and big areas do not equate to a fun game. This is coming from somebody who fucking loves video games about shooting things, stabbing things, finding things, sneaking by things and solving puzzles.

They managed to make one of my favorite recreational activities boring and the damn game was well received. Hell, even my friend who can't finish Assbro and didn't finish AC 1 says they are good games even though he didn't have enough fun to finish them. I just feel like that shit is poisonous and needs to be stopped.

I have found myself playing a lot of free-to-play games as of late due to my problem with modern big-budget games. League of Legends has caught my fancy, though you usually get one insufferable prick per team (in a team-based game this is a problem unless you have loser nerdy friends), and can be pretty fun if the stars line up just right.


Edit: Also ranting about things you hate is fun. Come on, isn't this the Gaming Den?

Oh, sure, you can hate on it. It can be really therapeutic. You're just going overboard on the "If you like this you suck as a person" side of things, plus you're getting repetitive.

Yes, you hate the combat. And the unskippable cutscenes on 1. And the combat. And the cutscenes. And your friends hated it too, or couldn't play to finish it. We get it. Find something new (or at least interesting) to carp about and/or move onto a different game.

--------------
Personally, I'll do big-budget games on my own terms--by getting them used from Gamestop. If I do buy something new, it's a series I trust to not disappoint, or came on the recommendation of a few people whose opinions I know line up with mine fairly well.

But older games were somehow better on the consistent fun. That's why I don't play most FPS's. I like Bioshock, but that's because it's possible to kill things by doing something other than shooting it. Battlefield and Call of Duty just don't do it for me.

Maxus wrote:Oh, sure, you can hate on it. It can be really therapeutic. You're just going overboard on the "If you like this you suck as a person" side of things, plus you're getting repetitive.

Yes, you hate the combat. And the unskippable cutscenes on 1. And the combat. And the cutscenes. And your friends hated it too, or couldn't play to finish it. We get it. Find something new (or at least interesting) to carp about and/or move onto a different game.

1) You'll notice that unlike PL, he never actually said that you suck as a person if you like the game. That's actually just PL you are quoting.

2) Still less repetitive than PL talking about how much he hates Skyrim.

In all fairness I have yet to see anyone raise any strong points in favor of liking Skyrim or Mass Effect.

Essentially the "counter-argument" remains. "Well OK so everything does suck BUT I still like the game so fuck you!". I mean you can very nearly find that argument word for word in regards to Mass Effect on this thread.

I know fan boys will never forgive me for hating on certain games. Especially when I do it in detail, and at length and worst of all in ways they KNOW are right and cannot provide a counter argument for. It hurts their feelings a lot.

And sure I may call them stupid, after all they just told me they "Still enjoy" a game they admit is objectively crap. But lets not kid ourselves for a second.

Because that's not the bit that has their panties in a twist to this day.

I think the part where you are confused is that you need to replace fanbois with PL, and PL with someone else.

Because no one here but you is actually advocating that any particular games are very good.

So far, we have two mediocres for Skyrim, and then you talking about how Assassin's Creed is the greatest game that has ever existed.

Assassin's Creed's magnificence is so transcendent to you that you know for a fact you would like Skyrim despite all it's flaws if it only had flight, and you know this is true because of how much you like Assassin's Creed, a game without flight.

So when someone points out all the ways Assassin's Creed is terrible, and you don't argue with any of them, but tell us that you like it anyway, what are we supposed to think?

PL, still projecting his own stupidity onto everyone else, and then whining, since 2005.

EDIT: By the way, phrases like "in all fairness" have connotations. Learn them. Then only use them when it fits.

When someone says "In all fairness to my opponents, I am double right, and they are extra double major wrong," they, by which I mean you, look like a tool.

Now in this case, no one here actually thinks that Skyrim or Mass Effect is actually a very good game, so you are further arguing against a strawman, but making yourself sound like a tool while you do it is even less productive.

I think Skyrim is mechanically done very poorly, but if you enjoy wandering around in a world and can avoid all the mechanical screw-ups, it's pretty good. Oh, and you have to be a caster, because the melee system resembles drunk jousting. So I guess this is a vote in favour?

PL wrote:I know fan boys will never forgive me for hating on certain games. Especially when I do it in detail, and at length and worst of all in ways they KNOW are right and cannot provide a counter argument for. It hurts their feelings a lot.

I think you are sporting a massive persecution complex. We are not part of a fanboy conspiracy to hate on you extra hard for dissing a game. We thought some of your complaints were stupid, said so, and eventually discussion got to the point where you started injecting the word fanboy and equivalents of "if you like Skyrim so much, why don't you marry it?"

Now, I don't actually care what you think of Skyrim, or what you think I think of Skyrim, or about AC at all. I think those conversations have reached the end of their potential. But drop the "you disagree with me? FANBOY!!!111!11!" shit. That's really obnoxious.

Ikeren wrote:I think Skyrim is mechanically done very poorly, but if you enjoy wandering around in a world and can avoid all the mechanical screw-ups, it's pretty good. Oh, and you have to be a caster, because the melee system resembles drunk jousting. So I guess this is a vote in favour?

Wait, what? This post genuinely confuses me. I suspect you and I are seeing 'mechanically' as two completely different things here. What'd you mean exactly? I would also say melee is easier to do than casting, and all in all probably also more satisfying. Spending the majority of my time as a mage backpedalling has never felt very... heroic. Do you mean the controls/animations are unresponsive/sluggish? Cause, yeah. The animation times are pretty long. I can see that.