Is Assassin's Creed 3 better then AC2, BH, Rev?

[Deleted]

AC3 in one Word: Vague.

[xebtria]

Oh, so you actually switch character later on in the game. Good, I might actually give it another shot, then.

see the first part with haytham as the prologue to the game. you then start playing connor and after a while (you will understand which "while" I mean when you play it), the actual game does start.

[Deleted]

Eh?

I don't for the life of me get the people saying that AC3 was the worst. Worst main character, sure, but worst game?

Not even by a long shot.

For me it's BH = AC2 > AC3 > AC > Rev

[Spl4sh3r]

I actually liked Assassin's Creed 3, though I wish the cities were more like in Assassin's Creed 1 and that between cities would be bigger as it aswell. The wilderness was not big enough for me. As for Assassin's Creed 2, I have them but never actually played.

[Tradu]

see the first part with haytham as the prologue to the game. you then start playing connor and after a while (you will understand which "while" I mean when you play it), the actual game does start.

Small update, I've now played another few hours and have finished the Haytham part and escaped Boston as Connor. I can see how ranged weapons are important for hunting, but they still feel wrong in combat. The QTE's for some animals(predators, I think?) are complete bullshit, and the combat overall is worse than in 1/2, somehow. It's still a counterfest, but countering is now quite annoying to use.
And Connor's story starts out very similar to Ezio's, tbh. Parent dies, son goes out to get trained to get revenge.

I absolutely despise the Desmond/Precursor story. The games would've been perfectly fine as "Assassins vs Templars conspiracy in different time periods".

I also dislike how you see the ultimate bad guy(I assume, considering he's the Grandmaster of the Templars) really early on in the game, you're standing like 20 meters away from him, and yet you don't even try to kill him, instead you're just standing there being like "So yeah, thats my dad. Do I need to kill him?". Even if you'd died after killing him, it'd almost definately be worth it. I guess I just don't like how illogical it is, and similar stuff happened in AC1/2 as well, iirc.

[Very Tired]

Horse riding mechanics stink. They are completely unable to travel over or off the smallest bump in a surface.

[Malderon]

For me AC2 > AC:brotherhood > AC3 > AC 1 > AC rev, liek i said in my topic, last 2 sucks because it has no revenge

[Linkedblade]

I agree. Connor was a HUGE downgrade after playing Haytham. I actually started liking Haytham more than Ezio. XD

But Haytham is the enemy :X

[Oerba Yun Fang]

But Haytham is the enemy :X

Still awesome!

[muxx]

Ok, so, no its not the best game of the series.

My biggest grief with the game is that it was WAY to short and could have covered more material. Outside of the story being amazing, i wish there could have been more going on as far as the actual war. Also the bugs. But one thing i did miss that all the other AC games had except the first one was the dungeon/cave crawling. That by far was my favorite thing about AC2 was the difficulty of some of the caves and ahving to actually think about what i needed to do to get through it.

[Tradu]

Ok, so, no its not the best game of the series.

My biggest grief with the game is that it was WAY to short and could have covered more material. Outside of the story being amazing, i wish there could have been more going on as far as the actual war. Also the bugs. But one thing i did miss that all the other AC games had except the first one was the dungeon/cave crawling. That by far was my favorite thing about AC2 was the difficulty of some of the caves and ahving to actually think about what i needed to do to get through it.

You mean the silly climbing/jumping/timed puzzle stuff? Never saw the point in having those.

[Malderon]

Still awesome!

I actually agree, AC3 is awesome but the main character is not attractive at all. Gaytham wins all the way!

[Deleted]

If you loved the others then you won't find too much wrong with AC3. But the series is still going downhill IMO. Not that that has stopped me buying every damned game on release day.

[Clockwork Pinkie]

Nah, AS:2 is still my favorite, BH and Rev are expansions to that, AC:3 is just....not as good as it should have been. Most of it was very pointless.

[Puck]

I like it more.

[Migey]

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.

[Tethrys]

Story length review

One thing I didn't notice til you pointed it out is that combat really is forced on you in that game. It should feel like you do it when it's necessary and/or for the mission ahead, and do it subtly. And the assassinations just were not carried out well. There wasn't always a main target to kill and there was no awesome chase sequences or whatever. I remember in the first game, I think he was like the 7th or 8th? I honestly don't remember...but you had to hop across the water on the little wood stands and then climb up the tower, all while being shot at and chased. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT4CNrMyi2k this guy)

The 3rd game just doesn't have the depth where you question all the targets and they tell you that you were wrong, leading you to a deeper web.

[Migey]

Yeah, those came under the newly shittified mechanics and controls, but I probably should have given them honourary mention, as they were more annoying then most of the changes.

I also disliked how there's basically only one run speed now too... way harder to avoid pissing off guards.