Finally beat Assassin's Creed 3, at 79 hours.
Let me preface by saying: I know this is someone complaining about a self-inflicted wound. I knew I'd have many complaints by choosing to finish it.
Now....where to start with this game.
Connor is a character that's for sure, and he's got more personality than Ezio. But it's mostly just being angry, surly, suspicious and hostile to pretty much everyone in the game except the Homesteaders. It's not just interpretation. His countenance in pretty much all the major story cutscenes says "fuck you." And yet conversely, when he's not in the story cutscenes where the stuff that comes out of his mouth is semi-believable, in all the Homestead missions and sidequests "Nice Connor" has all the believability of a Chuck-E-Cheese robot. His lines are stilted and have weird emphasis placed in the oddest ways, like his dialog was recorded completely separate from the people he's speaking to so all the conversations feel cut and pasted together. He started to grow on me a little by the end. But he's not a likeable protagonist at all. Ezio was kinda boring and one dimensional but at least he was likable, and had some charisma. Altair was a condescending dick and unlikeable, but also had some charisma and actually grew by the end of the game as a person. Connor acts like, not unbelievably, an idealistic, naive teenager with severe daddy issues on a vengeance quest. He solves all his problems with violence. It's his one standout redeeming quality, actually, that he knows how to savagely kill people. And by the end is badly injured, alone except for his colonists and disillusioned. He's a character all right....just kind of a trainwreck of one that's hard to root for, because everything bad has happened to him yet he never really learns anything, just kind of angrily and stoically goes on. He's got two personalities: the one portrayed in virtually all the missions in the game, and the one in the Homestead missions. The angry Native Murdermachine with a huge chip on his shoulder on one hand, and the weird awkward Native guy who hasn't been around people long enough to know how to really act like one on the other. If you were to subtract the entire Homestead from the game, at its end Connor would be a broken, aimless, incredibly lonely figure after winning. Victories in AC games have been portrayed as somewhat Pyrrhic victories due to the ongoing struggle and what not, but AC3 really doubles down on the theme in every way. This isn't a game with a story you feel good about, it often times feels like watching someone's domestic drama constantly, with Connor the angry, unresolved fist at the middle of it.
It's buggy. Sooo buggy. Relatively few crashes but just oodles of inconsistent annoying glitches. Connor getting trapped in animations of one kind or another was common, either while moving around or switching weapons or contexts. After buying the dual pistol belt, I would have, instead of 2, 1 to 4 pistol shots despite not changing weapons. How does one have three shots between two single shot pistols? Buttons that say they're supposed to do a thing like reload your gun but in fact do nothing. Garbo targeting and/or target detection. Wonky timing on counters. Counter indicators regularly just not displaying for reasons? Stuck AIs. Bad collision. Camera getting stuck in certain perspectives for no discernible reason. Glitchy terrain. (Riding a horse anywhere but on a road is an exercise in frustration and horrible shrieking horse sounds.) Weird inputs on the start of time sensitive cutscenes so you, for some reason, can't start running. Stealth was so spotty I eventually stopped trying to do it. Far easier to just get a lay of the land and then sprint in and murder everyone rather than trying to tediously, unnecessarily, unsuccessfully do it quietly. Conversely, sometimes I could be standing next to an enemy in plain sight, so I could actually see the details on his facial texture and he wouldn't detect me. I get it, it's an open world game. New things were done and tried and reworked. But for a series that has reused shit constantly, the same core mechanics for every single one, how some of this rather basic stuff was gakked up mystified me. There's plenty more bugs I could list but won't.
80% of the game is blandly ugly. There is no richness to most of the textures in games. You notice it less in the forests but feel it once you hit the towns. It's not just the colonial stylings of the buildings, the actual texture work is sparse, the palettes are muted browns. The fort walls in particular look atrocious by the light of day, like a single texture horribly repeated over an extremely large object. Cutscenes give the appearance of higher quality until you see a non-story character get in frame and the difference between how carefully done a main story character is done and a rando supporting character is night and day. Which brings me to....
Lazy and inconsistent execution. There are two things every AC game needs to deliver on: the moment to moment gameplay and the story. And in AC3, the sloppiness of how the story is delivered is kind of mind-boggling. It's not the writing (although you can make plenty of complaints about that), it's not the ideas (whatever you may think about them), it's the literal delivery and execution of these things that's done so lazily. Cutscenes are paced poorly, erratically. Cuts will happen either too soon, or too late, all the goddamn time. At one point a character was still talking in an important cutscene when he was literally cut off midsentence by the "you completed the mission!" screen. Awkward pauses in conversations beyond all reason. Some pretty piss poor facial animations and lip synching. Dialog delivery that doesn't even match the context of the scene, like shouting to be heard over a lot of background noise _when the character is 5x louder than any noise present in the scene_. Music and sound effects cutting out mid-cutscene. The way the story is delivered on a technical level is sometimes like watching a bad amateur film maker. It's almost like they'd never done camera work in a video game before. There's lots of static, fixed shots that are poorly paced, completely stealing dramatic tension from the moment. For a game that has used in-engine cutscenes for most of its existence up to this point, to see it done so roughly here was again, difficult for the mind to comprehend. This isn't the whole game mind you, there's plenty of parts where all the pieces seem to come together correctly. And you'll be humming along only to find another example of it being done poorly and just have a "da faq?" moment. The two biggest antagonists in the game you don't even get to fight. You kill them via cutscene, essentially. One is granted a very cinematic "Press X" moment, the other you chase through a burning ship in the final mission, and fail utterly, only to catch up to him six months later and stab him at a bar. Someone gave so few fucks about this game that from the time you tackle Charles Lee in the burning ship and get injured, until the time you're back at the Homestead after killing him, pretty much one contiguous series of cutscenes, Connor still has blood from the fight all over him in every shot. He walks in to the inn where he kills Charles Lee sporting a wound that for real is wet and juicy. Either we're supposed to surmise that Connor has been bleeding for 6 months straight, and that Charles Lee never bothered to once wash the blood off of him in that time, or we should more correctly believe that whoever was making this game cared so little they didn't even clean up THE ENTIRE CLIMATIC SCENE OF THEIR WHOLE FUCKING GAME.
Ahem.
Much ado about nothing. There's so much shit in this game, even for an Assassin's Creed game, that just isn't worth your time to do. You could argue that's true of all AC games, when more than half of the busy work activities that make up gameplay outside the story amount to "Unlock a new outfit." But AC3 introduces the idea of mercantile trading in the New World, and introduces a whole additional layer of stuff you think you should care about, but which actually has almost no tangible impact on gameplay at all. The pay off for the vast majority of side activities in AC3 is, by and large, a metal engraved commemorative plate that, if you grew up like me, is something your parents and their parents had in their home. The crafting and hunting and trading boils down to three things: earn money you legitimately don't need, complete delivery quests for the aforementioned plate as a reward, and a very small list of upgrades and a couple new weapons for your character that you make and use in the last 1/3rd of the game. Even the standard quests from other AC games like the Assassination Contracts feels casually done, like they're just random dudes standing in the middle of the street waiting to be picked off. I spent HOURS walking the underground tunnels of Boston and New York, tediously activating every fast travel point from the inside because the game refused to let me discover them from the surface. And for what! A commemorative metal plate and the chance to fast travel through the game instead of playing it! I've pretty much completed all the AC games, including this one, up to 100% save replaying a few missions to perfection. And this is honestly the first time I feel like my time has been legit wasted.
Understaffed. In many, many areas of the game I feel like the garden variety NPCs, the things that fill out the background of most AC environments so they feel believable and alive, are substantially fewer in number than in previous games. AC3 takes place during the Revolutionary War, and for having an active war going on in the very region the game takes place in, you'd think you'd see a lot of battles right? Really leveraging the tech to present a cinematic spectacle of 18th century warfare, right? WRONG. What you get is basically three missions, with the conditions and what you're allowed to do highly attenuated, and where the #'s of guys the game can put on screen and done in such a way that you can't really reach them, or affect them, or fight them. Going along with sloppy execution too, the little cutscenes which punctuate the action are laughably undercooked. The battle of Lexington and Concord is one example, where after directing patriot soldiers to shoot at bricks of British soldiers trying to cross a bridge, you get a cutscene showing 3 guys sitting in the grass giving awkward and poorly synched cheers. There is no grand melee against 30+ foot soldiers you can wade in to. You're dealing with, at most, 9 to 12 guys before I suspect the game starts cheating and subtracting out guys. There's no epic battlefield action. Your part as an assassin during the Revolutionary War battles is doing what any competent line officer or artillery commander would have done: you just direct soldiers to shoot stuff. There is ONE mission where you actually act like an Assassin in the middle of an active battle, and again, it's filled with with a lot of soldiers in the backdrop but which aren't really there, giving the illusion of an epic battle when it's really just a glorified obstacle course. Other than that, the streets in the cities don't feel very populated either. It's kind of like they kept everything dialed back for performance reasons, and you can definitely feel that arbitrary limitation throughout gameplay, which leads to.....
The game is too damn easy. I say this in spite of the buggy and sometimes janky combat where I felt like I had to relearn to play again even though I've played the previous 4 of these games. Counter based flowing combat has been around a while so it's not like I expect some Dark Souls level of challenge out of it. But when the game wasn't being buggy, or inconsistent or unresponsive, rarely did I ever feel the pressure of combat. Just mash that button until the insta kills start happening, counter as needed, use the right counters against the right kinds of guys, use your consumables if you're feeling fancy fresh. It was pretty rare that I ran from combat ever. Most of the time I just, you know, actually paid closer attention and didn't make any more mistakes. Having your health auto-replenish after every fight or after a few seconds of not taking damage, basically sucked any real consequence out of gameplay. Missed that jump and almost died? No worries mate, you'll be full health in 10 seconds. Just barely got out of that fight alive and you're still on mission with more to do? Don't sweat it chum, be healed! I'm not saying having health potions in previous games somehow made those Assassin's Creed games hard where this isn't. But if the other games were easy, at least there were some legitimate consequences for fighting or parkouring poorly that you had to deal with. It's not that combat didn't flow, or look bad ass or feel good, but I didn't feel like it had any teeth. Even notoriety in AC3 is a joke. The minute you rack up notoriety there is a town crier on EVERY SINGLE STREET CORNER to bribe for, apparently, no money at all since I never saw it cost me anything. I've killed a man in an alley and watched my wanted poster materialize before my fucking eyes on the wall behind him! If you have notoriety, you can lose it in less than 15 seconds for no cost almost guaranteed in the cities. Or the game will just wipe it out of for you as soon as you fast travel or enter the underground. Speaking of the underground, for all the time I spent there, did I actually ever use it to travel or avoid the streets or escape pursuit? No, because at no time did the game ever get challenging or even interesting enough to do so. It's a sloppy, easy mess of gameplay. The only difficult, or rather TEDIOUS part of it, is navigating the Frontier for things you need to do. I'm generally the kind of gamer that avoids fast travel if I think walking it would be entertaining enough. By the end of AC3 I was fast traveling for what would have taken me 45 seconds to reach on foot, I was that over it.
The writing. Where to even.....I feel like very little happened in this game. Granted, I played the first 40% or so 5 years ago, so there's a lot I've forgotten. But that must have been where most of the actual story took place because fucking A, I felt like there wasn't much in the last 60%. Sure, there's the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Paul Revere's ride. All the most obvious Forrest Gumpian insertion in to American history that was expected. I don't know how Italians felt about Ezio being forcibly inserted in to their history and meeting all the big names of their past. But here to me it seemed cheap and more than a little forced. Connor standing there at the signing of the Declaration of Independence (which took me a minute to figure out because the cutscene started as an abrupt hard cut to three guys and Connor in a room and them going "We couldn't have done it without you Connor!", which I guess was their "who gives a shit" take on the Continental Congress and the signing of the DoI.) And beyond that, the rest of the game felt mostly like going places to talk to people. Riding out to Valley Forge at the ass end of the Frontier to talk to Washington multiple times. Stupid throwaway missions that were an excuse to give Connor and his Templar dad screen time together. The story mostly concerns itself in the latter half with Washington, how he's built up by everyone who doesn't know him to be a great man, while the game presents him as troubled and harboring doubts and making stupid, inflammatory decisions because in Assassin's Creed games, everything has to be morally complicated. But the way he achieves this moral complication is just plain stupid. The main antagonist, Charles Lee, goes to Connor's Indian village and convinces them that the Patriots will fuck them over, Connor has been seduced by the white man, and that his village should work with the British for safety and prosperity. And so they do. Washington learns of this and orders the entire village killed and burned to the ground, while Connor has literally been winning the war for him on the front lines, is a confirmed homicidal maniac who can't be killed and who will bury a Tomahawk in anyone that fucks with him or threatens his people, and is standing within 5 feet of Washington when he learns what he's done. It's betrayal, but of the unbelievable, thoughtless, "dramatically necessary" kind. I do love though how the last thing Washington and Connor say to each other at the end of the game, Connor basically calls him a piece of shit. There's so many bizarre things at play in AC3 with the messaging and the characters.....And that's just the story INSIDE the Animus. Outside, it goes roughly like this:
(Picking the story up after 40% completion and 5 years gap)
-Abstergo has a doomsday weapon.
-Suddenly, the sun is giving off solar flares that will destroy Earth, just like it has on countless other worlds the Ancient Race has been on.
-Abstergo's weapon now means nothing.
-There's a vault the team finds that contains "something" that, the protagonists hope, will save the world.
-The aliens helpfully manifest constantly as like digital ghosts and give long info dumps about who they were, their technology, their race, their history. There's been several throughout the series but in AC3 it's pretty much just one alien talking to you. They eventually tell you your salvation is in the vault.
-The point of the entire game is to find the "key" that opens this vault. The Apples of Eden? They're merely toys now. No longer the McGuffin, they've become OP plot devices when the story calls for it.
-You find the key and open the vault.
-Turns out the vault contains the....digital essence? of the alien that's been talking to you. She wants you to release her.
-Another alien shows up, one you've met before. And it goes "No stop! Don't let her out, that's what she wants! She'll enslave you!"
-Other alien says "If you let me out I can save your world from the Sun, like we couldn't do for ourselves."
-Previous alien says "This is true, she can save the world. But she'll enslave you."
-Enslaver alien says "Let me tell you the future if you don't release me. Most of humanity is wiped out by the solar flares. You emerge from the ashes and gather the survivors and life starts again. You teach people the beliefs you think will avoid problems until you become a legendary figure. And long after your death you become a religion and people start getting called heretics and burned at the stake and the whole miserable human cycle starts again." (That's basically Dune, btw.)
-Other alien goes "This is accurate. Don't let her out."
-Desmond chooses to let her out, and dies.
-Enslaver surrounds the world in an electromagnetic field or something (that's basically Highlander 2 btw) to protect it from the solar flare, and then goes "now to my real work."
The obvious thing to do would be to tell you the player what your magic time vision shows of the OTHER decision that you're naturally going to make. But of course they don't do that. Because that's the twist for the next game!
No wonder future games in the series took a hard left turn from this shit. I'm genuinely curious how they address all this going forward. It's like.....what's the point of the Animus and reliving ancestral memories now? All the artifacts have been found. The questions have been answered. The cat is out of the bag. It was aliens all along. And everyone knows about the aliens now. I want to play more games just to know how they write themselves out of this dead end plot. How much more tortured can the logic of the games twist to accommodate what is essentially an unnecessary gimmick at this point? What's the new McGuffin that the secret to lies in humanity's past?
I can't deny feeling a little sheepish about caring about the game's storyline. But there was a time when I found the series and the general idea behind it pretty intriguing. When it was about secret societies and secret histories of the world, when the mystery was still enticing. How, through all these layers of time and history the aliens had been gently nudging the Assassins and the Templars this way and that, leaving clues for the right person to find......now, in Assassin's Creed 3.....the aliens just send you emails when they can't be bothered to manifest and talk to you. The mystery was kind of answered in Assassin's Creed 2 I suppose, so what's really been going on has been known for several games whether anyone liked it or not. And I guess, surprise surprise, the answer is often a lot less interesting and satisfying than the mystery.
So....for all that, what I actually liked:
-The ship combat was easily the best part of the game and looked like someone actually gave a shit about it. For not actually amounting to a great deal of intricacy or detail, it felt good. It looked good. It sounded good. The pitch and the roll of the sea, the weather effects, the sound effects of the waves and the cannon and people shouting orders, blowing up muthafuckers on the high seas.....after hours and hours of what felt like drudgery, suddenly doing the naval missions felt like a splash of cold water on the face. And they were joined by some Assassin Tomb type missions which also, despite how short they were, felt like someone cared enough to make them good. No wonder they made Black Flag immediately after this mess.
-The counter kills and finishers are still some top quality violence. Tomahawks rule.
-The game can be pretty and scenic, in the Frontier. Someone probably watched Last of the Mohicans a dozen times in preparation to start making this game. With all the random weather effects, the lighting and sound effects, the changing seasons, it's too bad the actual hunting and survival of the game is paper thin, because it's definitely a convincing environment.
-Special mentions for the snow. It's deep and thin in places and can slow you down, and even deforms to the stuff running through it so you can vaguely track by it. I dunno how much work all that took to get right but maybe it should have been invested elsewhere in the game.........
I looked up the other games in the series. Good lord, between all the different games and platforms, they've made 22 Assassin's Creed titles. If you subtract out just the mobile games, it's like 16. I don't think even Call of Duty has that many titles behind it.
After all that bitching, I do want to play Black Flag. For just two reasons: pirates and morbid curiosity to see how the series pivoted after this mess. (Other than spawning a legion of spin offs.)
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Topic: What are you currently playing? (Read 192385 times)