[Megathread] Assassins Creed 3

[Deleted]

Man, am I dissapointed with this game. 4/10, and that's being generous. I wouldn't feel so annoyed if Desmond's ending hadn't been so poor. After a few tedious hours, I decided to force myself through the game pretty much just to see the culmination of Desmond's storyline. I wish I had quite halfway through. The ending left me feeling depressed, empty and asking "is that it?".

Does anyone else wonder if the writer and developers have been making this up as they go along?

[Deleted]

To fix the AC3 lags we must unite
join the group on facebook
"we DEMAND a patch for Assassins Creed 3 FPS issue"

[Migey]

Because the other AC3 thread a few pages back isnt active, I'll repost my extensive thought on the game to this one.

Don't bother with AC3. It is fucking awful and by far the worst AC to date, and this is after the hollow, money-grabbing husk that was revelations (which in retrospect, wasn't so much bad as pointless and boring). AC3 has a terrible story, with Connors tale being boring and totally lacking in consistency, focus, and emotional weight, and Desmonds being slightly more interesting but culminating in one of the most dissapointing endings since Mass Effect 3 (which by the way it shares striking similarities with). The gameplay has been given a huge overhaul since the Ezio games, largely under the philosphy of ''If it aint broke, break it''. In other words the gameplay is crap. Even more button-mashy then ever and counter-attacking is even easier if you can imagine. In combat and other areas changes seem to have been made completely arbitrarily with no purpose whatsoever, except to make it all shittier. For all that combat is way flashier then ever with more intricate and awesome pre-baked finishing moves, it feels less visceral then ever and you may as well be slicing through paper for all it feels like you're actually sticking sharp metal into human flesh. If just half the time that went into shittifying the combat and creating all the flashy finishers went instead into actually thinking about the game and how not to make it shit the game would probably be an entirely different creation.

Despite the great graphics, the game manages to be shit aesthetically too. Kudos to the devs for making the cities ultra realistic and accurate but I feel like they could have put a bit of effort into diversifying the two main cities and making them kind of interesting. They look exactly the same and are boring anyway. Perhaps the time period is the issue; there isn't much fantastic architecture to jump off of and stuff in colonial America, but even so. Every part of the city looks the same, and while playing there is no way for an onlooker to tell at a glance if you're in Boston or New York. Gone is the amazing and rich visual character of Florence and Venice, or even the interesting and varied locales in the first game or Brotherhood. Even the Frontier, easily the most interesting of the three main locales in AC3, gets very boring very fast.

Back to the mechanics of the game. The game is awash with pointless minigames, most of which lose their allure incredibly fast, such as hunting or the naval missions. And to be fair, the naval missions are one part of the game I can't find it in me to hate on, even if they do get old. They are the one new thing which is actually welcome; interesting, fun, somewhat varied, and amazingly for this game, with tight, intuitive controls and mechanics which are never an issue to use. But thats pretty much the only one; any other minigame you're presented with is either boring, pointless, awkward, any combination of these, and in more then one instance only a one off for one specific mission. A huge amount of effort seems to have been put into the whole trading and crafting thing; you can get local craftsmen to make stuff and trade it, send conveys, get money, etc. The only problem with this is that the only thing you get out of this is money (and maybe occasionally a few practical things like dual holsters for pistols so you can mow down entire groups of NPCs 3 seconds faster), and money is even more useless in this game then it was in Brotherhood and Revelations. In all of these games the only thing to do with money is to use it to make more money, creating an avalanche of money that keeps growing the more you try to get rid of it. There is literally nothing useful you can do with money, except upgrades for your ship which are kinda pointless too, because thats a fairly limited minigame which doesn't stay interesting for too long. You can't even use it to buy upgrades for your weapons or armor. At least in AC2 you would occasionally have to be tactical with your purchases cause you often wouldn't have enough money to buy the entire next set of armor at once, but in AC3 you are exactly as efficient at the start of the game as you will ever be at standing there numbly counterattacking everything that touches you. So in simple terms, all the effort that went into making the intricate trading and crafting systems was wasted because nobody cares and it's boring anyway. If sitting around trading bear skins and moonshine gives you a stiffy then be my guest but the same effect could probably be achieved by playing around in any spreadsheet program with a blue interface.

I feel like banging on about the story and characters some more. It sucks. They suck. Desmonds section are too few and far between and his very linear missions are, while pretty good, not quite interesting enough to make the game worth it. I've already said how shitty the ending of the Demond story is so lets focus on Connor Mcblandpants Kenway. He has no character at all. Minor spoilers ahead, if you hadn't already heard, you play the first fifth or quarter of the game playing as Connor's dad, Haytham, who is far, far more interesting then Connor could ever be. It feels like they tried with Connor to give him some kind of mixture of Altairs silent menace and Ezios charm, depth and charisma, but totally missed both by a few miles, resulting in what looks like a basketball player in a dressgown standing with a distractingly blocky face glaring at stuff and spouting random, nonsensical platitudes about freedom and justice and choice and peace and *yawn*. In Haytham, thankfully, they did manage to capture these elements, with him having a presence, like Altair, and a character and charisma like Ezio, without feeling like he's blank-facedly ripping off either. Unfortunately this section suffers from the same gameplay faults as the rest of the bloody game and is still not sufficiently interesting to carry the game, despite a great twist at the end of his section. The other characters are just bland and badly done. Care is taken to make the Templars seem more human and similar to the Assassins, to introduce some moral ambiguity. However, like with every single ass-creed up to this point, the need to make the Templars sympathetic and also to make sure they remain the bad guys clashes into what, unsuprisingly, ends up just being completely one-dimensional. At first the Templars seem like quite nice guys in their own ways, fighting for what they believe in, but then thats thrown out of the window and they start acting like the gentlemens club of greasy-haired tosspots all trying to outcompete each other to be the biggest dick, with the exception of their leader, who irritatingly, despite being the most interesting of them, isn't even the big bad. And he too does random evil shit for no discernable purpose (or no purpose thats explained properly). So while the Templar speeches about how humanity needs guidance threaten to be interesting occasionally, they instantly undermine themselves as the game tries to remind us that yes, these are the bad guys and has them do something unambiguously assholey. So, thats the characters, what about the story again? Oh yeah, the story. The story... you know I can't remember much distinctive about it all apart from a few specific conversations, funny accents, and one or two major characters. I can remember plenty of things that happen in it sure, because the game never stops trying to twist its plot and rape probability to have you be present, cause, or take part in half the major historical events of the period or run into half the major historical figures doing something they're famous for, but for the actual story, not much interesting and independant of history books actually happens. It all begins to ring a bit hollow. AC2 did it to an extent, with you running into Leonardo Da Vinci, Machiavelli, etc, but at least it does something with it, makes them characters of their own, as opposed to AC3s preferred tactic of pointing out something famous and wallowing in it's presence for a bit before shoehorning Connor into it. Plenty of the historically significant things that Connor does end up being literally useless and pointless to the overarching story, achieving absolutely nothing. Connor barely even feels like an assassin, especially as there doesn't seem to be a brotherhood of it anywhere. I shit thee not, the assassins presence in colonial America appears to be limited to an old black man with a stick and Connor, who only became an assassin because a glowy thing told him to.

Okay, okay... so the story is a quagmire of pointless bullshit, the characters are almost without exception one-dimensional and bland, the mechanics of the game amount to a steaming pile of shit and even the appearance of the game could arguably have been improved by having all that fancy technology be used to render a pair of sweaty balls, but it can't be that bad right? I mean, at the end of the day, it is still an Assassin's Creed game, with all that entails, right? Like, you know, assassinating people, what with you being an assassin and all? Surely I'll be able to vent all my anger at this game with some nice theraputic stabbery, because at heart, Assassins Creed is still about assassinating?

WELL FUCKING NO, says the game. YOU WANT TO ASSASSINATE THINGS IN A GAME CALLED ASSASSINS CREED WHILE PLAYING A CHARACTER THAT BELONGS TO AN ANCIENT ORDER OF ASSASSINS? WELL FUCK OFF. There's almost no missions in the entire game that actually just give you someone to assassinate and let you do it. It's always with a bunch of extraneous objectives that result in the mission being linear and boring and almost never give you any choice or variation in how to do it. Most of these missions end up with you chasing the target (always frustrating in any situation) and if it doesn't, it tries to railroad you into doing it a specific way by giving you optional objectives that you can't get proper completion without. They don't act like it seems they are supposed to; as guidelines on how to execute the mission with grace and subtlety and finesse, but as irritating and arbitrary commands to do a specific mission in a certain way for no reason, resulting in the missions being even more linear and boring then usual. There are few exceptions, and the entire idea should be scrapped. But even with all of this extreaneous bullshit miring down the proceedings, there is still almost no assassinating. What there is is a LOT of combat. The game will stop at nothing to find excuses for you to fight a whole bunch of people, and while the combat was in a fairly good spot around AC2, even if it hadn't been butchered in this installment, the combat was never the most fun part of the games. Now it's even worse and you're forced to do it way more often. It's not Assassins Creed anymore, but some kind of perverted Combatants Creed. But even taken as an action game and not as a stealth/assassination game (without stealth or assassination) IT STILL SUCKS ASS.

I think I'm just about done. You get the message. The game is shit, plagued with bad design, awful decisions, irritating play, etc. Even if you can overlook half the problems with the gameplay, the entire thing is just boring. There is almost no motivation to continue or reason you'd want to continue slogging through it. If you were ever invested in the previous games but havn't yet got AC3, don't bother. Make up your own ending to Desmonds story and leave yourself with happy, nostalgic memories and a normal, healthy blood pressure.

[UndrCover]

Having just finished this game, I'd give it a 6/10. Worth playing, but I don't think I'd play it again.

The good:
-Visuals were awesome, the syncronizations atop high places were breathtaking. Unless it was during shitty weather by chance, then you couldn't see a goddamn thing. I really loved the setting, though I can see the validity of complaints that it might be a bit too plain in comparison to previous installments.
-Finishing moves felt very satisfying, though ultimately devalue combat (more on that later). Several times (especially during multi-kill finishing moves) I was left saying "holy shit, that was brutal!"
-Weapon selection is varied and each tool feels different, though some are much less useful than others.
-Freerunning through trees and the frontier in general was really cool, though not exactly practical when you can just ride a horse or fast travel.


The okay-ish:
-Story was meh, though definitely not Diablo III cringeworthy. Sadly I liked the Haythem part in the beginning the most. I think I would have been okay with the Desmond parts excluded entirely, as I found myself just wanting to get back to Connor.
-Characters other than Haythem are boring. Also a lot of Connor's dialogue with the people on the (admittedly optional) homestead is terribly awkward. Connor overall is just a bland and at times stupid character.
-Ammunition replenishment was weird. People had multiple cartridges for guns like 99% of the time, one of various assorted weapons (rope dart/poison dart/trip mine/smoke bomb/whatever else) like 25% of the time, a handful of arrows 2% of the time, and the rest of the stuff you had (like bait, snares) you could only replenish from shops. Felt sort of frustrating, especially early on before you can acquire larger satchels/quivers/whatnot.
-Exploring the world is pretty neat, but I would have loved some game music other than when fights break out. I know this isn't in huge demand as most people just turn off music of any game and listen to their own, but I've always loved games that provided good music.

The bad:
-Combat is pretty dull. If I want to kill people as quickly as possible using melee weapons, I just wait to counterattack. Counterattacking instantly kills your run of the mill guard, whereas simply attacking him would take many strikes, sometimes as many as six. And even though weapons had certain stats, I couldn't really tell what they did. Wielding something with 1 damage rating vs. 4 damage rating had no noticeable impact to me, which leads to the feeling that you don't really get more powerful as the game progresses (with exception to things like dual-holsters and finding new weapons), though that's perhaps intentional. All in all makes large street brawls trivial and unrewarding. Some things were neat, like human shields vs. firing squads. Also, at the maximum notoriety guards seem to be literally endless, which could have been intentional as well, but felt stupid.

-(only really relevant to the pc version) It's incredibly obvious the PC version was a cheap console port. The controls for PC are clunky at best, horribly frustrating at worst. To change weapons I have to hold a key the entire time I want to select what weapons I'd like. To open up the Assassin jobs menu I have to hold a key down and then click a small part of the screen (with no obvious button). While these aren't hard to do, they're just terribly unintuitive and awkward. Hell, to pick up an enemy's weapon on the ground during combat, you have to freerun briefly during combat then hit E. So stupid when there's so many unmapped keys/commands for the PC.

-Freerunning through the cities could be really stupid at times. Rounding a corner while running is perilous, because if you as much as touch the wall Connor will then attempt to climb it and very likely grab on to something, which is great if you want to climb the building in the first place. It's terrible if you're running to somewhere, and even worse if you're chasing or being chased by something. Descending places in general could be a pain in the ass. Also, it could have been just me, but blending in with the crowd as a means of stealth was fairly difficult in this iteration, though the bushes that are around nearly every corner make escaping notice very easy.


Still, all in all, the game wasn't bad. I'd say everything but the visuals could have used some work. I hadn't played a console port on PC in awhile and that's probably a major contributor to why it felt so awkward.

[Voidz]

Here's a discussion... who's more badass? Connor or Ezio?

I say Connor.... Here's an example...





Anyone else object?

[Valedus]

Here's a discussion... who's more badass? Connor or Ezio?

I say Connor.... Here's an example...





Anyone else object?

Yes, the hero had no charm and just felt bland. He also felt very amateur, even after supposed years passed.

[Vankrys]

hey, polling quickly for opinion

there are sales currently on GMG, i can get

Assassin's creed 3 for about 10€ or
Assassin's creed 3 + season pass (mainly king washington trilogy) for 20€

does the DLC worth doubling the price of the game in your opinion? is it really good? is it cannon?
or i would be better off saving 10€ and watch the washington story on youtube?

[Deleted]

I am 33% sync on AC3 atm, trying not to read too much in this thread so I don't spoil anything! . One problem that I have had with the game so far is the lack of explanations for some of your abilities, I found out a few hours ago that I had a horse whistle but had no idea where I got it from (and I don't skip any cut scenes).

Things like the crafting and trading feature baffle me because all they said is "YOU CAN CRAFT 'N' SHIT" but didn't really explain why. Is it only for extra money? Do you actually get benefits from it? How the hell do I level up my crafting guys? Another example of this is destroying the keeps and raising the american flag, why or when did they explain to do this and what reason is he doing this? I have not once been told these even exist but if I run into them I somehow know that I am meant to kill the captain and raise a flag? what?

One small thing that also bugs me is the animation bugs on some of the weapons. I am using a small weapon dagger but it has the same animations as a mace. Another thing about weapons is every now and then I randomly lose my main weapon during combat. I have no idea where or why but it means I have to go back and pick it up from the shop/house because of this (and because for some reason you can't sheath a sword that you pickup from the ground when you have no other sword).


I like the change of chests into less frequent, but higher quality loot - it makes it less grindy while making it fun when you find one because you actually get a lot of cash from it. I also like the fact that you can find elements like feathers and chests without needing to buy a treasure map - this actually makes exploring worth while and is a nice addition.
I love the animations they are using. The combat keeps getting better and better and while it was strange getting used to the different buttons after 4(?) games. I love how smooth and fluid it feels while you are killing people, it gives the impression that Conner is an experienced fighter who can control multiple weapons at a time to his advantage.

Anyway! I am really liking the game despite the bugs

[Kuntantee]

Don't buy AC3, the game isn't even worth 5 bucks. I paid 60 bucks, lost my interest in game around %20, completely stopped playing game at %35 - 40. Never gonna buy another Ubisoft game before cracking and trying it.

[Disenchanted]

Don't buy the DLC. It isn't worth the investment.

AC3 is easily their worst effort in the series. Looks pretty. Nice setting. Good historical backdrop. Fluid combat.

And yet they managed to drop the ball. Way too buggy. A completely uninteresting protagonist. Connor is so dull, I'm surprised his hidden blade isn't a spoon. The main antagonist is far better (and provides maybe the most interesting moments in the game early on. But then they never dive into his motivations or history properly).

The crafting and trading system is useless. The only thing you'd really need money for is upgrading your ship. 2, maybe 3 hours hunting (and just selling the raw materials you get) and cracking chests will get you all the money you need. You don't need any weapon upgrade at all. So there's no need to buy or craft one. Unless you're a completionist with severe OCD, just skip that aspect of the game.

The naval combat is interesting and has potential at least. It's just a shame that it's an obviously tacked on aspect intended only to test the waters for Black Flag. It doesn't really affect the story in any meaningful way, and the missions are a little too easy and short. But they're engaging at least. If this truly is their test run, I have high hopes for AC:BF.

It's just an overbloated mess. About 50% of the game is fat that should have been trimmed. Better writing and a better voice actor would have made Connor more appealing. In the end, AC3 feels too disjointed and like a game that didn't reach the potential it tried for. I still love the series. They can't all be home runs. It's worth playing through on the cheap. I just hope AC:BF isn't so rushed. We don't NEED a new AC every year, Ubisoft. I'll happily wait 2-3 years for a great game.

[SirRobin]

Thought we had a megathread for AC4?

Well here is a new vid for it.

[Hellravager]

Watched it was awesome

[Vankrys]

Half the video, i was wandering who the heck was edouard.

[GennGreymane]

Soooooo the awkward silence when you go near a group of people to hide is gone..... LUL!