Assassin's Creed III

The Game Room
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With the exception of the unnecessary bad language, there’s a pretty humorous Angry Review on youtube: Assassins Creed III Angry Review - YouTube

I love the ship battle missions. They’re a lot of fun. I’m pissed that it’s possible to not complete some of the homestead missions. You want to make it where I can’t complete them until after I complete the game? Fine. But don’t make me go back and play the game again to correctly complete a mission. They did this in a previous version with da Vinci’s flying machine.

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For the love of sanity, if you want to get full sync DO NOT upgrade your ship with a naval ram before doing The Giant and the Storm.

I hate when full sync relies more on luck than skill. And if you upgraded to the naval ram, well, good luck.

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Finished the main quest last night, by the way (although I never did get very good at shooting what I want to shoot and running where I want to run.) In an odd choice, all the satisfying denouement stuff happens after the credits, which of course are unskippable. (Did find out they made a lot of it in Bucharest, which is interesting because we were just there and they could use all the industry they can get!)

I did enjoy it quite a bit, but it was really hamstrung by boring-ass Connor and by having the side stuff be so unsatisfying. Red Dead Redemption was similar in many ways structurally but had so many interesting thematic side quests, and even the “collect all this crap for me” quests were on theme and mostly not annoying. I enjoyed the township stuff and all, but collecting almanac pages or whatever just isn’t very interesting, the crafting is clumsy, and if you craft a lot of stuff and sell it you get to get better ways to sell it and make more money with which you… buy more stuff to sell?

On the whole I’d give it a thumbs up - at least it was a game that tried to do something and be about something. If it had been about Haytham instead I’d call it a great game in spite of its flaws.

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I got this game and was loving every minute until they forced me to play Conner. His entire story was a mass of plot contrivance, random sidequests, whining, and irrelevancies. I couldn’t be bothered to finish.

The weird thing is that the diferences were written right into the script, so it shouldn’t have been surprising. Haytham is a character; Conner isn’t. Haytham may not be right, but he has opinions and goals. He’s a human being trying to build what he thinks is a better world. He genuinely likes people, and wants to bring about this world with the least bloodshed possible. He may do other things because he likes the activity or thinks it worthwhile.

Conner, on the other hand, is an idiot. He wanders around doing whatever he’s told to go do, without the slightest thought of the consequences. He never chooses a side - not even his own side - and ultimately has no idea what he wants to accomplish. He’s going to kill Templars, but even he doesn’t know why he’s doing it. He never stopped for one minute to ask whether it was good idea: they were the “bad guys” so he was going to stop them. I found it deliciously hilarious that he doomed his own people and completely failed in every conceivable way by the end, and that all his moping accomplished nothing except to advance the selfish interest of evil spiritual God-Kings.

However, I don’t want to just point out that big flaws. The truth is that I didn’t see anything of interest about him personally. We never have any idea of who he is as a man, so where he fits in some giant conspiracy tangle just doesn’t matter. He never laughs, has little-to-no interest in other people outisde of doing quests, and never seems to take any interest in the world he lives in.

I don’t think this was intentional. There’s actually some good concepts here: a half-Indian / half-British man helping to build the frontier, living literally at the intersection of the dying old America and the rising new civilization - that’s could be a powerful draw, and it’s one which really did happen countless times in history. But they never do anything with it. That’s why Haytham is such a better character - he does go somewhere. Hell, Haytham is the real hero of the game, and he’s the one who arguably “wins” in the end.

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Didn’t hurt that I would so nail Haytham. Seriously, yowza.

It started to drive me crazy at the two thirds point when Connor lost what little convictions he had to follow what the plot told him to do. Well, are you for the Patriots or agin’ em? Does Washington’s actions towards the native peoples change your personal politics? Oh, it changes them… today? Okay.

I think the writers sort of felt weird about it too, which is why after a certain point you don’t see the big Founding Fathers anymore. You’re still fighting the war for reasons that aren’t really explained and they move on to “er, gotta get Charles Lee?” which is at least a character thing. It was only when I noticed that all the mean red dots around me weren’t wearing red coats anymore that I realized we must have won the damned war somewhere in there. The best stuff, unsurprisingly, was there in the middle when you run into Haytham again, but of course you don’t get to make any decisions about how you’re going to deal with him.

If they really want to make me happy they’ll release some DLC where you play Haytham in the middle years. He seems to have gotten meaner and more bitter in there somewhere - I want to know what happened. And, I mean, they’ve already got the character models and stuff. (They missed my memo about more Red Dead Redemption DLC, though, so whatever.)

ETA - oh, you should at least play it for the naval stuff. That is So! Much! Fun! I hope they take that mechanic and do a really fun game with it. Hornblower: The Game I would buy so fast your head would spin.

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What annoys me the most is the constant “take two steps… cutscene… take a step… cutscene… st…cutscene”. Designers, this isn’t a damn movie. I WANT TO DO THE STUFF IN THE CUTSCENES!. I want to have options to do things differently, not the ludicrous stuff you make me do in a cutscene! Walk straight up to Charles Lee? Why, of course! Its the obvious way to get there! Nevermind the stealth tactics I’ve been learning, the distance weapons I’ve been improving, the hoarde of Assassin trainees I have, the rooftop drops I’ve learned, the frackin’ BOMBS and TRAPS in my inventory, naaaah… Lets just walk up to him! Why not! What could possibly go wrong!

I’ve been too spoiled by Skyrim. Being forced into a scenario, into area where I cannot travel, just pisses me off.

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To be fair, one should be respectful at a funeral. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I completed the plot a few days ago and finished up the last few delivery missions last night. Didn’t even trigger the thief missions until the very end. Was unaware they existed because the only way you actually trigger them is by stealing from enough people. Nothing in the game even hints at this. I found out about them online. And due to the fact that you can’t uncover the whole map through viewpoints anymore, many of the delivery quests you don’t even run into unless you literally run into them. Only a couple are located by viewpoints. (Speaking of viewpoints, I hate the stupid “whooshing” camera thing they added this time.)

But Conner never got better. He’s like the Desmond of the past, but I think even Desmond was a better character. I loved Ezio, as I mentioned before. I even though Altair was better fleshed out in the first game than Connor was in this one. (And in Revelations, you find out how great Altair actually was. Sure it was no doubt a retcon as the writers continued to flesh out the universe, and was designed to give Altair a nice conclusion, especially because Ezio kind of sucked in that game.)

And the voice actor of Conner was horrible throughout. I was waiting for some real emotion to come out, but none ever did. I guess we all just got spoiled by how great of a character Ezio was and how the voice actor did a good job of bringing that character out.

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I never did learn how to find the piles of leaves you can jump into from the big tree viewpoints because they’re generally hidden by the leaves on the tree. D’oh.

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And half the time if I tried to do the Leap of Faith for some reason the character would just jump like a 'tard to his death. :smack: Stupid controls.

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This game goes hard!!! Takes a while for the action to ‘really’ get started though.VanOrd should win the editor of the year award.

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Use Eagle Vision, that’s what it’s there for.

I’ve just finished the main game, and bloody hell they did their best to make a good idea suck. Connor was a complete personality vacuum, and they took the brilliant control system from the earlier games and dumbed it down to the point of uselessness.

To be honest, the game felt unfinished. The horse riding seemed to have been added in badly, and it was lacking most of the more enjoyable side missions from previous games, such as glitch puzzles and massive buildings to climb and explore. In fact, I don’t think there were any real puzzles in the game.

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The problems they had to fix with the patches were enough to make me never want to buy a game again that hasn’t been out for a few months. I was one of the pre-order players. Never Again.

I agree with what has been said above… the game has an unfinished feel to it. Like they had some ambitious ideas but then didn’t get to fully implement them. To me the sea missions were great fun. The whole “Encyclopedia of the Common Man” mission was just a big stinking pile of pain-in-the-ass. At least the patch allowed you to finish it after the game was over. The whole trading system could have been improved as well.

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It really is sad, isn’t it? They are so gung-ho on releasing games anymore now that they can do patch updates that the initial product is often completely unplayable. It’s like releasing a book with major typographical and syntactical errors.

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There were little ones - the doors and magic lanterns underground and such. But no, no real puzzles. I went back and played Assassin’s Creed 2 after this one and it was so frustrating - I really wanted the controls I could actually operate and everything in 3, but I wanted to keep what really was good about 3. It could have been such a great game! The time period was amazingly well realized, the places felt very real (not as “copy and paste” as 2 did), they had a great character they inexplicably left for most of the game…

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I was thinking of the massive, optional areas, with no major clues where to go, with loads of treasure and tough fights, and a very tight time limit for 100% sync.

If they do another one with these characters, I’d hope it has a younger Haytham in it, perhaps showing why he left the Assassins for the Templars.

There seem to be a few series that have been somewhat dumbed down recently, with massive open worlds replacing truly great games. Skyrim, much as I loved it, certainly did this. My main thought whilst playing ACIII, oddly enough, was how much better Red Dead Redemption did many of the things, both with gameplay and plot.

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Exactly - I thought of Red Dead Redemption through the whole thing, and how I really wanted to do all the side quests in that one because they were so thematically appropriate and I wanted to know what happened.

Please, Ubisoft, please give me more Haytham! I freaking loved that guy, why did you give me Connor for the whole game? Somebody who can speak in contractions, if you please.

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I actually wasn’t sure if I was going to get this. I didn’t like the direction Revelations went. It was a nice closure to Ezio’s story, but on the whole it was just too much work for too little gain. (Don’t get me started on that first-person platform jumping nonsense, which was 100% absolute total complete utter fail.) I resolved that I wasn’t going to get it unless I could find it pretty cheap. As luck would have it, this Gamestop had one brand-new for $30.

Well, I tell you what…it’s been fun, and it’s been torturous (trinket that I have to go through the guidebook AND look up online to get = not cool), it’s been great and petty, exhilarating and disappointing. I’ll just get to what seems to be the points of contention:

The setting - This was actually my biggest concern, mainly due to all the complaints about slogging through the snow for miles and every building looking exactly the same. It’s great. Really enjoyed the contrast between contentious Boston, bustling New York, the vast, beautiful countryside, and of course all the special areas. And trust me, the snow isn’t a massive headache.

The story - I don’t understand anyone who says this “isn’t about the American revolution”. The Revolution plays a huge part in the story (far more so than Richard the Lionheart or the Bonfire of the Vanities), and Connor takes an active role in pretty much every memorable event. I really enjoyed seeing events unfold, and the big battles, oho, simply breathtaking.

Moreso…and I can’t believe this hasn’t gotten more press…for the first time Ubisoft really nailed the “Gray and Grey Morality” aspect of the whole war between the Assassins and Templars. Yeah, they said that the Templars weren’t actually evil, which I’d believe if every single damn Templar they’ve shown us was evil. When freaking Sibrand is one of the more sympathetic Templars, you know something’s gone wrong. Well, guess what, none of the groups here…Assassin or Templar, Patriot or Loyalist…is exceptionally good or evil. Shaun Hastings even makes a point of this.

Combat - It was clear the Ubisoft needed to scale down. Ezio was simply way too powerful and by Brotherhood was essentially invincible. (One of the most memorable moments for me was when I had to cover Catherine’s escape and ended up taking down something like 50 guards without breaking a sweat.) The trick was making fights challenging enough that you couldn’t just charge into a crowd and walk away without a scratch, but not so difficult that it got incredibly frustrating. I think they struck just the right balance here. Charge mindlessly into a mob or use the wrong attack or counter, and you will get killed (and pretty quickly). There’s no more back dodging (which made Ezio untouchable), even lowly Redcoats can take quite a few hits, and the insta-kills have been toned down. Furthermore, Connor’s flamboyant killing animations take more time than Ezio’s or Altair’s, limiting the effectiveness of chain kills. Don’t get me wrong, Connor is plenty powerful, and it’s possible to take on a big group and survive, but you have to really work at it now. The best part, of course, is that there are a lot of situations where the smartest thing to do is RUN LIKE HELL!

Naval battles - Mmm. I dunno. I’ve never been good at battles where you have to launch unguided attacks on the move, and the fact that so much hinges on “weak points” makes my skin crawl. Maybe it’ll be more enjoyable once I can afford the upgrades. Leaving this alone for now.

Side tasks - So many. On my third foray, I’m going to go for them all. The nice thing is that even though there’s so much to be done, I get the feeling that it’s possible. Ubisoft seems to have learned their lesson from Brotherhood (No damage in the tank? Really???). I must confess that the search for Captain Kidd’s treasure has been wonderfully compelling, even if the ultimate reward probably won’t be all that great. Be an Assassin, see the world!

Connor - I don’t see anything wrong with his personality. No pretense, no lofty ambitions, he’s just trying to save his people and get back and the scumbag who abused him as a child. Heck, I find that refreshingly honest. And it’s not like I need a deep, rich backstory for an Assassin. He’s a tanned, toned, fully-loaded building-hopping death machine. Anything else is just embroidery. As for his problems with English…hello, English as a second language? I find it downright impressive that Ubisoft even bothered with voice actors who could do…that native language.

Haytham - Don’t see what all the lamentation is about. He’s wonderfully witty and charming in a Robin Hood/James Bond sort of way, he sets the tone perfectly in the opening acts, and later on he makes for a perfect antagonist. Antagonist. ENEMY. Know how the villain is so often the most memorable? Well, that’s how it is here. He had a grand role and he played it to perfection from beginning to end. Why would I have any regrets?

I think I’d better spoilerize this last part, just in case…

I’m glad Connor killed him. It was vindication. Polite doesn’t mean good, refined doesn’t mean honorable. The better man won. And remember, Haytham never gave him a choice. Heck, he never gave anyone a choice. For all his sweet talk and grace, he was a Templar through and through. Merciless, ruthless, vicious…bloodthirsty. I appreciate that he was a great character but don’t think for a second that he would’ve been a good thing for America.