The latest in the baffling yet beautiful and compelling Assassin’s Creed series has been announced, a Brotherhood style stopgap between 2 and 3.
The main bits:
Ezio’s now over 50 (!).
The game’s set in Constantinople.
New crafting system for bombs.
Hookblade travelling system.
Got to say I’d prefer more on Assassin’s Creed 3, rather than going back to Ezio’s story (some were grumbling about Brotherhood, so who knows what they’ll make of this). While I must admit that Constantinople is a great setting for an Assassin’s Creed game, I just hope Ezio doesn’t break a hip trying to parkour across the Hagia Sofia.
I have a dreaded feeling that Ubisoft is forcing sequels of my beloved series for the quick buck. They’re coming out at a pace of one a year now. They need to let the fans wait and foam at the mouth the way they do for series like God of War, Metal Gear Solid, or Halo.
My biggest worry is that they are overusing Ezio. He’s a wonderful character and clearly extremely popular, but he’s starting to get stale. I think the original point of the series was to showcase different assassins in different cultures at different time periods, which they seem to have gone away from. Having one game take place during the Edō Period of Japan, another during the Spanish Inquisition, and another during Victorian England (with relative technologies for each era) would keep the series fresh pretty much indefinitely.
As much as I love Ezio, I hope this installment closes the book on his life. Fifty is way too old to be realistically jumping from building to building. Hell, 41 was too old in Brotherhood.
Brootherhood was a surprisingly high-quality game for a 1-year project, meaning they probably have multiple teams developing ideas, plot lines and assets. Recycling is obviously the name of the game, in terms of assets and mechanics, but it’s also frankly one of the best realized series in terms or story and setting, ever. While it might not be pitch (or period) perfect, it’s a damn sight better than anything else.
I don’t have very high hopes for this one; I haven’t been thrilled with the previous games. (I haven’t played Brotherhood yet though.) Nevertheless, I’ll probably give it a shot. I just hope they try to make the scenery a little more diverse, instead of having the same couple of blocks (complete with flower cart, pile of straw, etc) repeated over and over and over and fucking over.
I figure I might as well try it. For all of the flaws of the series - and they are very deep flaws to me - the core gameplay mechanic has vast potential if they’d just do it right. So I maintain hope that their next entry in the series might finally fix some of the problems of earlier ones.
Dude, if you hate the series so much this far in, I think you may be happier with a different franchise. It’s not going to change much, at least not the changes you want. Why do you keep clinging to the series if you’ve never liked it?
I wasn’t looking forward to this much at first but as it’s gotten closer it’s starting to interest me more. Yeah, I’d prefer a new era but I’d love to see Constantinople.
And although a year is very fast for a game Brotherhood seem fully realized so they’ll probably do this one right as well.
I won’t be picking it up right away, Saints Row the Third has my complete attention, but definitely around Christmas.
Apparently, Ezio is travelling to Constantinople to get ahold of a technomagical thingamabob that would let him relive Altaïr’s life - basically a proto-Animus. Which depending on what’s going on with Desmond might mean he’d be hitching a ride inside Ezio who’s inside Altaïr. If the guy had psych problems before, he ain’t seen nothing yet
I wonder if Animus inside Animus will exacerbate the bleeding effect, it seems like the brain would have trouble handling that.
Of course, it could also lead to a “turtles all the way down” twist with Animus within Animus within Animus that everyone’s been predicting, but god I hope not.
Assassin’s Creed 3 better not be Altaïr re-living his caveman ancestor’s life !
Don’t worry: based on a hint towards the end of Brotherhood, the next one *should *be set in Paris circa 1789. God willing, 'cause that’s a pretty awesome period.
[spoiler]IIRC it’s before the chat with Juno - they find the Apple under the Colosseum and it starts projecting symbols on the wall. Shaun says something along the lines of “Hey, I recognize these. This is a Phrygian cap, and that one is a the Freemason Allseeing Eye. There’s only one place both of those symbols appear together.”
Then again, it could be baseless speculation - the GPS coordinates given at the end of the “Leonardo’s Disappearance” DLC designate a point somewhere in the State of New York.
