Ok, I'm here to tempt you to the darkside.
I liked AC1 quite a bit tho, despise some obvious flaws and lack of features.
As I've said above, that was mine, and pretty much everyone's biggest gripe with the game. "I love doing this stuff, but damn is it repetitive. Why am I collecting flags and what not for MS points I'll never use."
AC2 addresses ALL THAT, in spades, IMO.
Here's a list of non-storyline stuff to do that I've found so far.
-4 pieces of armor, and 5 sets of armor total, to buy at Blacksmiths. Armor reduces damage and adds health bars. Each set looks different.
-22 weapons, which are varieties of daggers, swords, maces and two-handed weapons, each with varying levels of damage, speed and parry capacity. Also included are throwing knives, primitive guns, smoke bombs, bows and multiple levels of your hidden blade.
-Tailors can re-dye your clothes different colors. I've found 9 different variations so far. They also sell bags that hold more instant medicine for Ezio to use.
-Doctors can heal you for a fee, and sell medicine for you to use on the spot.
-Your notoriety level can go from incognito to notorious. When you're notorious, wanted posters appear around the cities, heralds talk shit about you, and government officials start wandering around. Tearing down posters, bribing heralds and killing officials brings down your notoriety level. How guards react to you, and at what speed they react to you, is based on notoriety. At zero, you can stand next to them and they don't care. They even warn you when you do bad stuff. At max, 10 seconds of close observation puts them on full attack.
-You can pick pocket people on the street, and loot bodies for cash. This adds to notoriety.
-You can chase down pick pockets across the rooftops, and beat them up for their money. They randomly spawn in the cities, and lots of times you'll see them tearing across rooftops with archers chasing them.
-You can track down tax collectors, and beat the crap out of them for lots of money. Lots of notoriety there.
-You can hire thieves, mercenaries, and prostitutes to become your little crew. They provide "blending" cover, fight for you and can be used to distract guards.
-Race missions, beat up missions, courier missions, all for cash.
-Your own private villa and city. You can renovate the whole place using your cash, buy a blacksmith, art dealer, doctor, bank and tailor up to three levels. Higher levels provide better equipment and discounts for you in the city. You can also renovate the church, the thieves guild, the brothel, the barracks, the well and some other shit.
-All the stuff you collect: weapons, armor, items, renovations, codex pages, art, EVERYTHING....adds to the value of your city. Every 20 minutes, this value is deposited in a personal chest for you to play with. As you renovate the city, its whole look changes, going from looking like Transylvania to the Italian Countryside.
-Codex pages. 30 pages that, when found, need to be taken to Da Vinci to decode. When they're decoded, your hidden blade gets upgraded, and you get some more health. The pages are also aligned on a wall in your villa. They form a giant puzzle that you need to arrange using Eagle Vision. What happens when you complete it, I don't know. Each codex page also either has flavor text, or some medieval/renaissance images. It's a diary that Altair started. It's actually pretty good reading, half of it sounds like it's drawn from the Life Advice forum here.
-The Glyph missions. Basically Dan Brown style puzzles with a lot of art history going on, that when solved unlocks a small video that show you "the truth." You have to first find the glyphs in the cities with Eagle Vision, then solve the puzzles, which get increasingly harder, vague and numerous to unlock the next part. Stuff like...scanning an image in infrared, looking for a secret hidden imagine within it. Or giving you 10 images and telling you to pick 5 based on some metaphorical instructions. Sometimes the images need to be sequenced right as well. Often they'll mix multiple types of puzzles into one puzzle, like taking an image and splitting it into rings that you have to sequence, then making harder still by making the order in which the rings have to be sequenced specific. At first I thought they were too easy and cheesy...but they're getting really tough now. Really trying not to use spoilers, but on some of them I've just given up "solving them" and just started entering combinations.
-The Seals missions. 6 secret seals hidden in tombs throughout the game. Collecting them all and placing them in the villa's vault unlocks the highest level of armor, Altair's armor.
-Art Dealers sell art that you can buy and hang in your gallery in the villa. Lots of choice RL renaissance art pieces.
-Feathers to collect. Collecting all 100 and putting them in a chest in your mother's room helps her recover from all the shit that's happened to your family. When you get all 100, I assume you get a warm fuzzy.
-Multiple cities. The last game had them, but by 75% through, you were starting to get burnt out on just finding view points and doing missions. So far in AC2, there's been Florence which is the biggest main city, then two other much smaller cities, your own and the city of the Pattzis'. Each one has ALL the stuff I've mentioned above, so none of them have been one shot experiences. Completely clearing a city takes a long, long time since it's very easy to get distracted. AC2 has GTA4 levels of extra stuff to do around every corner. Combined with the notoriety mechanics, there is a lot of dynamics going on to game play that the player is largely responsible for creating.
They've also expanded the amount of stuff Ezio could do over Altair in the last game. You can assassinate from a lot of different positions now, like over ledges and from haystacks and stuff. You can throw dirt in people's eyes when fighting unarmed. Lots more weapons. A flying machine at some point. You can throw money on to the ground, which makes wandering minstrels fuck off, and makes crowds of people go insane with greed. Pretty funny to watch and to do in combat.
The best overall feature change though is the BLENDING. No more "4 completely obvious priests walking in the street." There are still "clumps" of people walking as a group, but instead of locking into them, you just have to get inside the ring and you get blending while still moving freely. This makes using the crowds to move MUCH MUCH easier and more immersive, as you seamlessly blend in and out of cover on the busy streets. They almost went overkill with it, you can blend with as few as 2 people.
The behavior of NPCs and the AI in pretty impressive, and comes with all the immersion goodies like screaming shit at you in Italian, and paying attention and reacting to the stuff you do in front of them. Nothing funnier than dumping a corpse off a roof into the middle of a busy street.
There are also different enemy archetypes now. Agile guys dodge a ton of your attacks but get tired if you repeatedly attack them. Bashers are dudes in heavy armor and take a lot of abuse, and ignore stuff like grabs. Seekers are really good at finding you when you're trying to hide or blend. When they start mixing up enemy types, combat gets even more nuts than it was in the last game.
Is that enough extra stuff for you to drool over?
They also DONT make you break away from the memory sequences every hour to check back on Desmond, which is nice.
edit 666 views. <head bangs>
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Topic: Assassin's Creed 2 (Read 7387 times)