Assassins Creed 1. WTF kind of last act was that?

The Game Room
1

So I finally got around to beating AC today. Took forever as the game is long as he’ll. Yes it is repetitive and there are many borings ass aspects of the game but the free running through the gorgeous levels is worth the pain of the story.

Anyway, you go through the first 8 assassinations where you are supposed to be stealthy and sneaky and they work great. Then, all of the sudden, the last assassination turns into an unavoidable royal rumble with 20 guards chasing you all over creation and a giant sword fight ensues. This repeated itself for the last hour and a half of the game. Each segment dropped all stealthy assassination stuff and turned into 10 on 1 sword fights. This is extra maddening because the rest of the game doesn’t prepare you for mandatory free for alls so when you have to fight 10 templars at a time, 7 or 8 times before the end it gets aggravating since the combat is so terrible to control in crowded spaces. I must have died 30 times during the final fight with Robert trying to kill all the fucking knights first.

Now I admit the standard sword fighting never really clicked with me and I’m sure there are others who found it terribly easy but why did the game completely change focus like that in the last act? Dumb as shit.

Started AC2 tonight. Much better game so far but AC1 was good for it’s time.

2

I found the combat trivial. You just wait to be attacked and counter. Poof! Dead knight.

Unfortunately this doesn’t change much in AC2. The story is a bit better overall though.

3

Oh wow. I tried that about 10 times and gave up the game as I didn’t have the skills to do it, I had no idea the end was right around the corner.

4

Yeah, the ending combats were crap. I don’t know why but for some reason the designers of stealth games always seem to make the end something entirely different where the skills you have spent the whole game honing are useless. *Thief *ended with a fight against a gigantic monster. AC2 also ends with a series of open battles (although less annoying than the ones of AC1, and you have waaay more tools to make them a cinch).

Not to mention the combat with Robert makes no sense even from a plot perspective: duels calling for the Judgement of God were duels. 1 vs 50 is not a duel, it’s a bushwhack.

5

I’m several hours into AC2 now and it’s a much much better game. I’m glad I played through the first one before starting this because the first pales in comparison.

6

I’ve got no arguments about the fights toward the end of Assassin’s Creed, though I can’t say they really gave me any trouble. I will say that the last big fight (as opposed to the hide-and-seek) is more fun if you do lots of running, jumping, and throwing knives than if you just stand around and do counters.

Are you talking about Thief: The Dark Project? The end of the game required you to sneak out and swap a trapped gem for the real artifact. Then you hide and wait for the BBG to spring the trap on himself and die–ideally without ever knowing you were there. In The Metal Age, you surreptitiously reprogram the BBG’s army of borged slaves to destroy him. Deadly Shadows has you placing artifacts and triggering a failsafe that destroys the glyph magic that the BBG is trying to misuse.

I don’t recall any fights against giant monsters in any of the games. (At least, none that weren’t avoidable.)

7

You were doing it wrong.

Just keep countering (don’t ever attack unless it’s to provoke them into lowering their guard after they start turtling up, something that’ll happen now and again when they watch you butcher all their friends) and you can slaughter an entire army single-handedly. I wish the guards/knights were stronger, not because I wanted a challenge, but because there’s no tension during the chases because I know that even if they catch me I can just gut them all without breaking a sweat. There’s no point in being stealthy because I’m a fucking god of destruction. I still go for stealth anyway but it’d get the heart going more during chases if the risks of failure were higher.

I wasn’t caught unprepared at the end because I tended to intentionally piss of guards and try to gather the largest groups I could before facing them whenever I got bored.

But let me just say that I loved the game and can’t wait to play the next one.

8

The one that gave me the most real trouble was the one against Robert and all those fucking knights. The space was so small and there were so many dudes in there. For some reason the game switched from counter-kill to counter-kick for the last big brawls. That pissed me off too because I had a hard time countering and when i did and he just kicked the knight down it pissed me off big time.

Believe it or not I made it through the whole game without using my throwing knives. I forgot I had them.

9

I also had the feeling that Altaïr could fight his way through an endless sea of guards. The challenge of the game wasn’t in trying to survive or complete objective, but to look cool doing it. You could slog your way through most parts of the game, or you could be a cool guy and avoid fights and escape through sheer panache. Which makes the obligatory slog at the end rather jarring.

10

Hmmm, must have misremembered, then. I could swear I played a stealth game which ended with a fight against some sort of giant snake-god. The snake was coming out of a pit in the middle of a circular room, you had to shoot into its lone eye-slash-weakpoint… no ? never mind then.

11

Yea, the problem with the AC games was that combat was too easy. There’s no point in stealth games if the concequences of being discovered are pretty much nil.

12

You’ll find little argument that the un-stealth-able assassinations and final 25-on-1 with Robert de Sable were very weak points in an overall great game. AC2 rectified this by making all the assassinations stealth-able, though they didn’t make the combat any more difficult.

It’s possible to get your ass kicked in AC: Brotherhood, though. They made the mobs tougher and the AI better when you’re fighting a group of them.

Brotherhood is the best of the three, in my opinion. Ubisoft Montreal continues to listen to their fans.

13

Well, wasn’t Thief. Sounds familiar, but I don’t recall.

14

The problem is that you’re thinking of Altair as an invisible, stealthy agent of shadowy death. He’s not. He’s fooling his targets into thinking he’s an invisible, stealthy agent of shadowy death. That way they’re unprepared when he eviscerates 200 of them in the open without breaking a sweat. Remember the first Metal Gear? How Solid Snake was supposed to remain silent and unseen, but if he got caught and had to blow away an entire roomful of guards, he could (and pretty easily)? Like that.

I played in through a total of three times (before the derelicts and beggars and broken records everywhere became just too much), and each time I got into many, many massive brawls before the ending sequence. I never even tried to figure out how to take out the executioner the “correct” way, I just shoved my way to the front and let nature take its course. Doesn’t matter how many lambs there are, they’re not taking down a lion. (In my experience, they do scale up the further you go without desyncing, but not all that much, and you have unlimited chances anyway.)

If anything, 2 is worse. Know how Little Mac can beat opponents twice his size because he can dodge or duck anything? Make him about five times as strong and as durable as a truck, then give him swords, throwing knives, smoke bombs, Hidden Blades, poison, a friggin’ gun, and a suitcase full of insta-heal elixirs, and you have some idea of what Ezio is like. Brotherhood adds chain executions, and stunning kicks, which allow him to singlehandedly massacre a whole platoon of guards even faster, and along the way, he gets help. Adding papal guards to balance this is like the Boston Celtics spotting the local peewee squad 2 points.

Anyway, Clockwork Melon nailed it. Counter, counter, counter. Never be the first to attack. You’re grabbed, counter grab. A lot of times you’ll knock him down instead of killing him outright; if he’s close enough, you can slash him to ribbons on the ground or switch to the Hidden Blade to finish him. Whenever someone goes off guard…twirls his sword, taunts, holds his head, etc…again, you can dispatch him with the Hidden Blade if he’s close enough. Otherwise, just keep your eyes open and turn their attacks against them.

2 is more complex, of course, but that’s a subject for another thread. If you ever get that game, I’d be glad to help.