As fun as Assassin’s Creed 3 can be, the game definitely needed a little more polish time.
I’ve always loved the Assassin’s Creed games, traveling back to beautiful places in crazy times, meeting interesting people and ramming a blade into their squishy innards.
In Assassin’s Creed 3, Ubisoft has added a mechanic I already, and can see myself continuing to, sink tons of time into without making much game progress at all; hunting. It’s just like killing guards and Templars, but more character building (for you and Connor) because you quietly stalk through the woods, setting traps and investigating animal tracks. The clue mechanic is nicely done because it just adds a little more detail for people that want it, but can be skipped the majority of the time.
The clubs (hunting, frontiersmen, etc.) is something I didn’t get right away, but it basically just seems to be a side-quest delivery system. If there is anything more in-depth than that I have missed it.
Homestud
One thing I feel happening in the game, between my frantic runs through story missions and off-time stalking elk, is the process for adding people, resources and progress to your “Homestead” seems random and not as featured as such a mechanic should be. The idea is a nice change to the storefront mechanic from the last few games, but for as far along in the game as I am I realize I can’t make anything because I’ve barely found anyone, and the ones I have found aren’t leveled enough to make me anything but barrels and other things I can only sell for a few bits.
Being a treasure whore I wandered the map finding chests, thereby collecting a bunch of recipes…that I can’t use. The guiding for adding to the Homestead should be more forceful. “Connor, go to Boston, I heard there is a Canadian miner there.” or some such hint would have been helpful. It seems like a half finished idea.
Treesus Christ
As I mentioned in Episode 10 of the podcast, I was nervous about the tree running before the game came out but, while the branch look obviously gets a little repetitive, they managed to create a network of running paths hanging in the forest. Sometimes you wander trying to find a damned spot to climb up, which is kind of realistic and also frustrating.
SAIL! (na na na na-nah, na na na na-nah-ooh, SAIL!)
I’ve had a passion for a decent pirate game for…ever. Many a game came close, Sid Meier’s Pirates was kind of fun, but the majority of pirate-based games, mostly MMOs, are crap.
How is it that a game series not about pirates at all, added a sea-faring mechanic that is like 800 times better than any boat-centric game? Ubisoft, make a pirate game. Character sails, attacks and steals boats to sell them, searches for buried treasure, kills people, goes into town, robs and plunders. You have the majority of those pieces in Assassin’s Creed 3, I want it. I will pay you 100 American dollars! Give!
Other stuff I don’t have clever header for
I don’t know if anyone else is like this, but sometimes I find a mechanic in a game that I think is spectacularly well done and I play that mechanic and make up my own little game. Like in Grand Theft Auto 3 I would drive the cab for hours. First to learn the maps by memory, but I would make a little back-story in my mind that Claude was a mute immigrant who was trying to make a living to support his twelve kids…maybe it’s just me.
I can do the same thing with hunting and the naval battles in Assassin’s Creed 3.
I think I’m 40% through, the next city is New York. But I haven’t established my Homestead nearly enough to head on to the Big City, so I’ve been trying to do everything else.
Maybe it is my play style (treasure-whoring, pocket-picking, pack-ratting, hyphenated sum-bitch) but I always feel like I have more money than I will ever need in Assassin’s Creed games. I pinch pennies though and wait until the digits in the game completion field get into the plus 80s before I really buy anything. Then I go BA-NAN-AS! If you could by a vibrating, gold plated pimp chalice, I totally would.
The Indian aspect is handled…decently. (Yes, I use Indian. Because the reservation I grew up in/near was full of natives who identified themselves as such.)
The use of the language seemed a little forced, as I don’t remember Italian or other languages being used except in short pieces. Connor and his buddies have full conversations in the Iroquois language, it can get a little thick and really killed my interest in hearing (reading) all of the side conversations.
The camera, especially with the addition of forests worth of trees, has its occasional problems and the “new & smarter” free running system can still cause some grief. The biggest thing is the game just seems like it was rushed. They added a bunch of new mechanics and didn’t give them even a spit polish, let alone a full coat of wax and a full release rub down.
A horse I was previously riding continued to fucking stalk me throughout the countryside. It was so bad that after I managed to defeat a squad of Redcoats, with an animal that weights two metric tons blocking my way about every third swing, as I tried to harvest the spoils of war by looting the corpses, this goddamn fucking horse would bump into me just as the loot timer would get close to full. EVERY TIME! I shot him in the head about five times, but the clopping bastard wouldn’t freaking die! I wanted so badly to turn that big-toothed, long faced prick into glue.
But, besides that I didn’t have many of the bugs that seems to have plagued others, there were a few side quests that I had to abandon because the target just didn’t appear, but mostly it was alright.
Not having reached the end of the game I can’t be sure, but I assume there will be an Assassin’s Creed 4 and possibly more. What I hope they get to is a modern landscape, which will probably feature Desmond as the assassin. If that happens I will feel a little bad for absolutely hating every time I have to be Desmond. Because the “modern” environments they’ve created so far have been some post modern stylistic bullshit.
But if I can scale the buildings of a modern city, I will make it up to Desmond by stealing, killing and climbing everything in sight.
Another Trivial Conversation - ATCpod 