Assassin's Creed: Buccaneer

[Erkki]

Also, those sea shanties were a brilliant idea! If they weren't there, I would probably use fast travel. I wish I could turn their volume up, but they only have an on/off setting.

 

[edit] after writing that I found on Google that music volume also controls the shanties so I turned other volumes to half way and left music at maximum. And ended up playing 2 more hours although I should have been asleep a while ago now...

[Erkki]

Ok, I think I'm ready to start using fast travel, because I've now sailed most of the seas and noticed that every place pretty much looks the same. There are a few areas with some distinction, but especially the tiny uncharted islands are so boringly same, even down to what they contain: (variant 1) one animus fragment (variant 2) a treasure chest and optional cargo crate. And some birds.

 

I haven't really looked for many making-of features on the Assassin's Creed games, but I assume most of the world in them is hand-designed? It seems like in big worlds like these, especially if it's nature and not just towns, procedural generation could give a big benefit because the hand-designed elements start to repeat too often in way too similar configurations. Right now it's starting to seem like a numbers game: I still have X out of Y exactly similar tiny islands to explore to earn some more money and/or achievement.

[Erkki]

I think I hate this game now. I can't get myself to continue playing.

[Thrik]

You fickle bastardo.

[youmeyou]

That's pretty much where I stopped playing, Erkki. It's just diminishing returns after a certain point. I might hop back in to take on the legendary ships or do the treasure maps but I have no interest whatsoever in "100%ing" the game.

[SilentBtAmazing]

The brief but brilliant life of Erkki the Evil, Pirate King

[Frenetic Pony]

  On 1/2/2014 at 9:20 PM, Erkki said:

I think I hate this game now. I can't get myself to continue playing.

 

Yeah, I absolutely loved the idea. But the repetition is pretty bad, and the challenge in sea battles is lost the second you realize you can board tiny gun boats you disable in one hit for an instant health refresh n the middle of any battle.  I absolutely love the idea though and am excited to see what they can do with it once they've fully ditched the Assassin's Creed baggage. Maybe a full on Piratey RPG with customizable character and ship type and etc.? Heck yeah!

[melmer]

Credits are rolling. Nice ending, I'd say its worth sticking it out for.

The game had far too much alien bullshit that kinda ruined the second half of the game but I'm glad they ditched it all for the proper ending

I'm going to try and take on some of the legendary ships and see how I get on

[Squid Division]

This game is killing me. I like the characters fine enough, and I like how they don't beat you over the head with the famous historical pirates. But, good lord the gameplay. The eavesdropping missions are by far the worst part of the game, and they've been getting more frequent. It's especially annoying because you usually have to infiltrate a compound to find the guys to eavesdrop, and that's usually fun with the tools they give you. Then they ruin it by having you tail and eavesdrop. So many instant-fail missions in this game.

[Badfinger]

I loved this game. Amazing. I did almost all of the side content before being about halfway through the story. It was sort of funny to have the story show more and more things you can do when I'd been doing them for hours already, but I liked all the activities in any event. It was very cool to see historical pirate characters come together without really beating you over the head with it. I'd forgotten how cool that was.

 

Did anyone actually win any of the legendary ship encounters? I have almost everything unlocked except the treasure chest ship upgrades (very irritating) and I don't even feel like I'm close. I still want to go back and do it, though.

[Nappi]

I have developed a weird love-hate relationship with Assassin's Creed. I have completed every "main" game in the series starting from AC2. Even though I always end up being more or less disappointed by the end of the story, I still find myself being excited for the next game (though less so with AC3). I think the main reason I keep playing these games despite all the annoying stuff is that traversing and exploring the stunning and exotic locations feels so fantastic. However, the annoying stuff gets more and more annoying with each installment.

 

The main annoyance from the gameplay perspective is that AC doesn't work well as a stealth game. The darts and the foliage make the stealth missions a bit less frustrating this time around, but tailing and eavesdropping mission a simply painful. It is very hard to know if the enemy will see you should you step out of the haystack, and practically impossible to recover from being spotted. Many of the stealth missions also have extremely poor check-pointing, which effectively discourages any sort experimentation. There are various smaller annoyances, such as the final collectibles being locked until the very end of the game (for example, the Mayan armor in Black Flag can be crafted halfway through the second to last chapter) making that extra effort of yours almost completely pointless.

 

Story-wise, I find it very hard to care about the story and characters at all - even in the non-Space-God bits. In Black Flag, the Templars vs. Assassins storyline felt more forced than ever before. In my opinion, the beginning of the story of Assassin's Creed 2 was excellent and nothing in the series has come close to that since, mainly due to the pasted on Templar bullshit.

[melmer]

Legendary ship? More like Lame-odary shit

1 down, 3 to go

Little disappointing that you don't get to board or add it to your fleet, it just sinks :/ but on the plus side it actually required a bit of strategy to take it down.

[Thrik]

Yeah I've never understood why Ass Creed hasn't done better with stealth. Just copy/paste some Metal Gear Solid mechanics into there and you'd be good to go.

[youmeyou]

  On 1/6/2014 at 8:36 PM, Mington said:

Legendary ship? More like Lame-odary shit

1 down, 3 to go

Little disappointing that you don't get to board or add it to your fleet, it just sinks :/ but on the plus side it actually required a bit of strategy to take it down.

 

Oh so you can't board any of them? I just thought I overkilled it... that is lame. Do you get gold automatically?

[melmer]

No, you have to fish it out of the water afterwards and it took a hell of a long time to pop up on the surface too

Not sure about the rest but I assume they're the same

I did bottom left. Took some pounding

[Squid Division]

I went ahead and finished the game, and I'm glad I did. Kenway is probably the best written of the AC protagonists, and the game itself is probably the best written as well. I really liked the ending as well, as it felt more like a real ending to something, as opposed to what most video games do, which is just end. It was what I would have expected a pretty good character action movie to have.

[melmer]

So I've put this game to rest today. 97% completion :/ I did everything but all those pesky chests/fragments floating around on shitty little islands in the middle of no where... Was it worth it? Nope not really. Got some chevos for my trouble and a sweet ram boost special move for my boat (I shit you not). I just googled what you get for collecting all the animus fragments thinking there'd be some sweet Adam and Eve cutscenes or some shit..,. Nothing, you get no things!

Anyway, overall I loved the game. I haven't done the conpletionist 'thing' since... We'll, since AC Botherhood probably. I should really go look at my stats because I most have murdered thousands

[Merus]

The employee passport is a great read. You get a week off after a year of work! You can be very excited about Abstergo in social media, but here's a massive list of exclusions that you're not allowed to talk about!

[Architecture]

I enjoyed most of the time I spent with Black Flag, though the repetitive tedium of Assassin's Creed lingers like a pall over a fun pirate game. I ended up deleting it after my Uplay file became corrupt and wanted to redownload 5GB of data.

 

They really need to build traversal from the ground up--the bolt-on systems are starting to bog down an already-spastic movement system.

[Erkki]

Is my crew ready to have me back? I might give this game another go. A lot has changed, as I've now swam in the real Carribean sea.

[Architecture]

Did you ever see a frigate rise up from the depths while 'er crew floated in suspended animation thirty feet above the waves?

 

Because I have.

[Erkki]

Crap, so I returned but instead of getting out to sea I managed to find myself in an English blockade. Great moment I picked to stop playing it before...

[Erkki]

Ok, I beat the game, at 99% (and maybe will redo the missions to get 100%). I think I made the right call before when I decided to quit. Everything after that was just not as exciting as the beginning. Perhaps the most exciting part was fighting the legendary ships, but it was also frustrating as some of them were doing impossible things (mainly the last man-o-war of the pair at the top-right corner of the map). Made me learn a few things (by reading FAQs) I had ignored before, though, such as how to fire heavy shots and that chain shots actually slow ships down.

 

But the worst thing is, I did all of the side content first when I resumed playing and then I did ALL of the remaining main quest missions in one row. And it made me realize all the better how fucking stupidly awfully designed the missions are. MOST of the missions (at least after a certain point, which was somewhere after getting the diving bells) involve at least one section of tailing somebody, which are usually the worst kinds of missions in video games and no better here. Some OCD part of my brain kicked in and decided that I want to get 100%, but the secondary goals in missions are so frustrating in how they don't show you when you've failed them. Often I'll play through the mission only to discover that I didn't get the goal I thought I would surely get.

 

But maybe playing it to the end was worth it because I actually really liked some of the final bits of the story and the ending. It felt somehow refreshing for a video game ending.

[Brannigan]

I honestly can't remember the last string of missions much, and I just beat this a week ago.  So clearly memorable.  I kind of would like to see more content like the dlc where it's just in the world story.  Granted the outside animus stuff was fairly minimal in this one.

[Merus]

I remember the last string of missions, but I've complained before, loudly and often, about how the single best aspect of Assassin's Creed 1 was that the assassination missions told the story of the people you were killing through their actions and the gameplay, and how that's been abandoned in favour of leaving them out in the open so you can solve the puzzle of how to drop down on them.