f13.net

(http://i.imgur.com/JdsYyvw.jpg)

Get ready to be a pirate.

After AC3, this will not be a day 1 purchase for me.  AC3 is so bug ridden and poorly crafted that I can't even slog through it like I did Rev. 

Hoping for the best, expecting the same.

Henry Rollins finally snaps.

I will buy this if there IS a downloadable skin of Mr. Rollins.

Meh. I haven't bought one since Brotherhood was mediocre, so this doesn't do anything for me. Just another formerly decent series getting shitty due to annual releases.

Got me with that one.

Guess they've given up on Connor already.

Next Assassin's Creed will be ninjas then we can finally wrap this shitheap up.

Ugh, what's next?  Assassin's Creed 5: Bronx Ghetto?

Plenty of untapped time periods, especially if they don't try to stay linear.  AC5: Club the Pharaoh: Moses Infinite ; AC6: Get High and Fuck: Burning Man 2009 ; AC7: 99% Perspiration: Edison's Sweatshop ; AC8: Colons: HUH: What Are They Good For?

I assumed they were staying linear since they had been this far.

AC9:  Everybody Walk the Dinosaur

I would totally play 80s New Wave Assassin's Creed.

Shamefully, so would I.  I probably wouldn't even need the New Wave qualification.

AC10: Rage against the Machine

Apparently the PS3 version will have 60 minutes of exclusive gameplay (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-02-28-assassins-creed-4-black-flag-confirmed-by-ubisoft-has-60-minutes-exclusive-gameplay-on-ps3)

rabble rabble rabble

Assassin's Creed 11: My Own Prison

Hmm, perhaps instead of Rapehorse we'll get Rapeboat.

Assassin's Creed 12: A Space Odyssey

Just give him dual light sabers already.
Shia Lebouf to star in the movie adaptation.

http://i.imgur.com/G1WBFO8.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/G1WBFO8.jpg)

 :why_so_serious:

Bullshit PR Speak turns out to be Bullshit Shocker.

I lost all will to give a shit about AC at the final boss fight in the first game. Spend the whole goddamn game learning how to kill people 1v1, then get dickslapped with a final fight where you have to kill a gaboodle of fuckers to win. Then get treated to Desmond's ending which is basically "Fuckers are coming into the building, and you can wander around aimlessly but never get out of this room and no, we won't explain who you are or give you any sort of resolution on this story."

Fuck Assassin's Creed.

omg spoiler

We must have played different versions of AC.  My playthrough was more like "spend the whole goddamn game trying to kill people 1v1, and then bumping into the guy right before stabbing him or something retarded like that and suddenly you're in a sword fight with like ninety guys."  My brother kept looking over my shoulder as I played it going "I thought this was a stealth game" as I was wading through a sea of corpses after the target turned around right as my knife was coming down or something.  It was pretty sad.

Seriously, though, I agree with the bitching about the ending, and it's the big reason I didn't buy AC2 until it went on sale for like $5.00... but the second game is way better.  Ending is still kind of :uhrr: though.

Everything about overarching "story" of AC is  :oh_i_see:

If you could just play a fun stabby stabby game without the conspiracy nonsense, I would probably like it better. However, AC1 is still may favorite because it was about killing. Running jump stabbing archers is still fun no matter what version.

The meta-narrative conspiracy of the AC series is its second worst part.

The worst part are those first person jumping sections of Desmond's.

This.

AC3 was a big disappointment. I can't even be arsed to finish it. And it's a testament to their delivery that they're jumping to IV right away rather than milking 3 with a few years of same-character sequels. Black Flag indicates a lot more of the ship combat introduced in 3. I didn't hate that stuff. But the meta conspiracy (such as it is*) has passed the big voodoo 12/12/12 thing, and with all those years to develop, this particular team didn't really seem to go much for the quality thing.

So I'll wait for the real reviews before thinking about it.

* I swear the AC conspiracy shit is like that recent Bungie b.s. video where they said absolutely nothing with great feeling for 20 minutes.

ok, this cracked me up.  :drill:

Trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW1rapFNwqQ)

Not seeing how this game will offer as much in the way of free running and such, but I guess the trend is towards more fighting.

Assassin's Creed: Capt. Cloud  :why_so_serious:

We'll sing him down with a long, long roll. Where the sharks'll have his body and the devil have have his soul.

Yo ho!

Assassins Creed could've done a ton of really cool stuff with the "DNA contains your ancestor's memories" thing and the Animus but instead it's Evil Templars Vs. Assassins over the magic alien macguffins.

Alternatively, they could've dropped all the Animus/DNA/Aliens bullshit and just made games about assassins.

I'm deeply disappointed at what looks like a lack of pirate hat on the protagonist.

I mean srsly, wtf.

Game franchises: You either die a cult classic, or you live long enough to become a yearly release.

Because you have to have the protagonist wearing hoods because it was the coolest thing about the first game.

Of course the point of THAT was so that Altiar could blend in with a bunch of monks to get places.

The nice thing about the first game was the level of historical research that went into it.

Seriously at this point they should have just gone with cool and had AC IV, Pirates delivering pizza V Ninjas delivering hamburgers.

I still think they umped through history too fast. They missed out potential Assasins Creed 3: Musketeers and something from feudal Japan. I guess they could jump forward to prohibition era America, when the first true cities were being established, and you could start having some of that environmental fun again.

Well given that AC4 is going back in time seems like they aren't going to restrict themselves to going ever forward now.

I got AC I, II, & III for Christmas this year.  Didn't like III, went back to II.   Race up a building?  Alt-F4.

The mechanics are just not my cup of tea.    I know what UbiSoft is going for, they're going for the realism of it.   The hard work it takes to put yourself on a roof.   Ummm, no.   Unless you've been on a roof sweating your nuts off and wanting to be ANYPLACE else, even the gates of hell are looking good to you at this point, then no.   Come home everyday smelling like shit and falling asleep in the middle of your dinner plate?   Score!  Sleeping for 10 hours and still waking up tired?  Score! 

Add to this the Alex Jones level of crazy that I believe that you must have to believe that these two groups exist and just...  No.   Not just no, but fuck no.   God, don't even get me started about the dashes in the game code.

I don't know what the fuck you just said, little man... but you touched a brother's heart!

reads like one of my scottish CK2 AAR TBH. Wrong thread, but here it is.  :why_so_serious:

I think they're just trying to rush their way to Assassin's Creed: Shoot the Brown People.

Golden Brown Edition available?

I've been waiting for a good Rourke's Drift simulator

All games must be CoD:MW!

Anyone else pick this up? I already like it more than 3, though I'm only two or so hours in.

It's miles better than 3, though I think 2 will be the high water mark for this IP. 

As I said in another thread, it would be a perfect game if not for the Assassin's Creed parts of the game.  Interestingly, Ubi sent around a survey that seems to be gauging interest in an 'all pirates' IP.  Fighting with and/or against friends.  Maybe they're looking to expand the Caribbean out. 

Yea.

I will say the AC parts of the game feel like the promise they made when they rebuilt the engine for 3. It's much more fluid than 2, there are more options, not as herky/jerky when it comes to combat. But it's also more polished/less buggy than 3.

Not sure about the story. 2 had a really compelling character journey. Connor never interested me that much. Jury's still out for me on Kenway. But so far he's no Ezio, and there hasn't been a compelling supporting recurring cast I've seen yet.

It is odd to be running into AC parts even before the main story arc introduces you to them. But that's built into all of these versions :-)

Honestly, a game where the latest AC protagonist is a Zulu at Isandalwana?

I would fucking buy that in a minute even if the mechanics were shitty.

Still loving it. I think it's the variety. They really got the ship combat refined, and the ground stuff I still like once a year. But also, to be honest, this reminds me of what I was hoping PotBS would turn out to be.

Caved in and bought this even though the sale percentage was paltry. It's pretty great, especially after AC3. One thing is driving me crazy however. Is it possible to dock your ship when roaming the world? You get a dock button when you're on a mission, but not otherwise. I always have to swim ashore and it makes absolutely no sense.

You can only dock at certain locations. Most major cities require you to dock or sail towards the harbor to enter them anyway. Some other islands allow you to dock, but not all. For any tiny island with a chest and an animus fragment, you'll be swimming.

There's usually a highlighted circle on the water if you can dock somewhere. When you get far enough into the main story, you'll be able to dock at sunken wrecks and forts that you've taken over.

You can only dock at places that have actual docks, which is a minority of the islands.  Anywhere that does have a dock is probably a place where you will just wind up using fast travel to get to anyways, and then you're auto-docked.  If you get really close to the small islands you can sometimes use the rope swing beside the helm's swivel cannon to land on your feet (you will take damage).

I liked most of the game but got pretty pissed off by the end and was just happy to get it over with.  I liked the sandbox collections, ship fighting and optional missions but by the halfway point I started hating the main plot missions.  I found it especially jarring going from a fairly well done sandbox into those hyper rigid follow/eavesdrop missions where you just have to guess exactly what and where the developers wanted you to go.

Also, since it's so poorly explained, you use heavy shot by pulling the right trigger without aiming.  I can't count the number of times I accidently launched a volley of heavy shot into wherever I was docked since I was so used to holding it down while moving on land...  Nobody seemed to mind or get wounded by it though!

Edit: Somthing else I didn't pick up on because either I'm stupid or hadn't played any of the previous games is that you don't have to wait for the "break defense" icon to pop up over an enemy's head to do it, if you are fighting an agile or heavy you can do it right away and then just kill them.  Captains you do have to wait for the counter icon.

Thanks for the docking tips ( :oh_i_see:), turns out it was just a bug, probably the spirit of AC3 wafting from my old HD.

Anyway, I'm pleasantly surprised that you actually have to do open world stuff to level up against harder enemy ships. AC games are usually such trivial pushovers that even this little bit is refershing.
 

After taking over the forts that control the four corners of the map legendary enemy ships will be revealed.  Holy hell are those hard.  I managed to kill one and afterwards I decided not to seriously try the other ones because it caused me so much frustration.

23 hours in and the open world just keeps delivering! The plot missions pretty much suck, but at least it's not buggy this time.

Oh, and fuck moray eels. Seriously.

35 hours in and I haven't even seen a moray eel :) I just finished Sequenc 4. Keep getting sidetracked, particularly on the sea. Just got enough ooomf to clear my way to Portugal. Took me a bit, and a few hundred gems, before I realized I could scuttle the smaller ships to make way for the bigger ones instead of constantly always adding new docks.

My one beef is that I can't send more than one ship on a mission (yet?). Seems an odd ommision when the make-a-route-safe minigame allows you to mix and match ala AC2 (and maybe AC3 though I never got that far into it to see).

Also a fun game to be playing when watching Pirates of the Carribean in the new home theater area I'm slowly cobbling together. Lots of attitude crossover.

I recommend Master and Commander. It's what propelled me to buy this in the first place.

Oh that'd be a good one too, though I thought it kinda slow in the middle-ish iirc.

Also would look good on the projector :-)

I strongly advise reading Master and Commander (and if you like it, the rest of the Aubrey-Maturin novels). 

Only one ship, you will need Man O' Wars to carry the cargo.  They are super slow.  I wonder if the plural for Man O' War is Men O' War, like that annoying courts martial.  Doesn't seem to be much point in the fleet mini game once you get the treasure map reward.

Fake edit: Hah I looked it up and it is Men O' War.

Reminded me I need to do more treasure maps. I kinda like those. I assume the treasure map rewards makes those easier or irrelevant or something, but don't want to know :-) I don't mind the extra bit of cash and occasional reward the minigames give, so I generally keep up with the timers to keep them going.

Was the fleet minigames something they built into an AC IV app or was that something I dreamed up?

I haven't done it but yeah you're supposed to be able to do the fleet stuff from tablets and phones.

My fleet mission list is full of stuff that needs all sorts of cargo, but I can't see any way to procure said cargo. Is this some stupid social thing?

You get cargo by winning fleet battles in the mini game to make the routes safe, you can keep fighting until the route is green.  I don't know if it's random but I was always short on wine.

Ok, 32 hours in and the game is finally starting to get a bit stale. There's no point to finishing any of the side stuff (Ubi has always had a complete inability to make an interesting loot or reward system), and the main missions are utter dogshit. I mean seriously, where do they get this need to micromanage the player's exact position? Why is it so important that I only walk on the left side of the barn while eavesdropping on some assholes? Also, you have to sneakily tail a ship by remaining within 100m of it? That just looks retarded. Again, what is the goddamn point?

edit: oh god, the story missions just became worse than AC3. The plot lost coherence (major characters basically transforming from cutscene to another, for no reason) and the missions are contradicting themselves, putting an emphasis on stealth but level design making it impossible. I guess it was fun while it lasted.

Ahahaha I know exactly which fucking barn you're talking about because I rage quit at that point before coming back the next damn morning and just going left.

The "sneaky ship tailing" missions are even more laughable but way easier than eavesdrop.  I really like how they recorded Kenway whispering all of his sailing shouts instead of yelling!

The main mission completely falls apart in the last third of the game but you're too deep to quit now so just hold your nose and get through it man!

I'm too far to not finish the game, but no more side stuff. Funny how after clearing about a third of it, you realize it's all copy pasted and there's no point to any of it. Like you literally just grind stuff for the joy of grinding.

Also,

Yeah I got to that point yesterday and decided I needed to push through the main mission line or I'd never complete it. I have 50some hours played so even with the story I can't say that I didn't get my 30 bucks worth. Overall still found it to be a fantastic game, and the first AC that I thought was fun. But totally agree that it would have been just as fun if you removed the AC pieces.

I've yet to try sinking a legendary ship and haven't tried multiplayer. Will give the first a go before I shelve this one but not sure about the latter.

The legendaries might be nice, but they pretty much require grinding out the elite upgrades, which I can't handle at this point anymore. To make it worse, I don't think you get anything special for killing the legendaries.

I got one of the actual rewards you can have, the locked up Templar suit. It gives health, but the graphics glitch out if you wear it. Edward's head clips through the coat and in all the cutscenes he keeps doing the hood animation even though the suit doesn't have one.


 

I just got that Templar outfit last night also, didn't notice it clipping, I'm playing on 360. I really wanted that Mayan outfit, but who knows how long that grind would have been so screw it.

I didn't have any bugs with the templar outfit.  My main issue with the outfits is that your starter set looks better than everything else.  Most of them don't even do much, I wound up spending a lot of the game in the horrible looking stealth outfit because it claimed to make being detected more difficult.  Most of Edward's upgrades were useless, there are a dozen types of swords but you just save up for the one with the best stats and ignore everything else...  Even then the stats don't seem to do much, if anything.

You can't actually unlock the mayan outfit until very late in the plotline making it mostly useless.

Bwahaha, I beat the thing, and as a parting shot it gave me one last middle finger. Screen shots from my credits sequence (spoilery obv.):


 :uhrr: :why_so_serious:

Think your xbox is on its last legs.

It's my pc and naw, it just randomly spawns your ship under the sea and takes a long time for it to make its way back up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj5DDR6c9JE

Dude... terror of the deep! I'm sure it's annoying in practice but that looks fucking awesome!  :drill:

I finally downloaded the companion app. It's pretty slick. The UI is the same, but it's a lot more responsive and doesn't require I stop what I'm doing to manage the fleet. Not that I'm doing anything more than shaving a few minutes off each session by doing it on the iPad instead of the PC, but it's nice. All the functionality of fleet battles is there. I think crafting too, though I lack mats to do anything. The interactive map isn't populating, but I'll poke around that later.

Anyone else using the app? It's good but I am seeing a discrepancy:

In Kenway's Fleet mode in the app, it says I have "[to collect in the captain's quarters | 88000R". But in game I just spent about 50k R on upgrades and ammo and shit so am down to 2000R or so. While I could think the discrepency is due to a sync'ing issue, the app is pretty realtime. I mean, it might as well be a second monitor for how fast it updates things like collecting new ships and even scrolling the map at almost 1fps (which is fast considering all the stuff from my PC goes through the cloud to ubi servers to the app rather than some type of AirPlay immediate connection)".

Plus the app has been telling me for some time I have to collect this stuff in the captain's quarters and I haven't found anything in the captains quarters from which to collect such untold (well, "told", really) riches.

Arghh, from the depths of Davy Jones' locker, arise! (http://i.imgur.com/eE13N0T.gif)

Inspired by Kail keeping the AC3 dream alive (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=21940.0), I meant to ask like a year or whatever ago:

I don't understand how he was an assassin. Like, at all.

So, like, I played through all of AC4 and I think about 90% of all the content. I got all the Absergo stuff, I got he went all pirate, I got the ending with his daughter and his dead wife and all that. But as far as I know, he never actually became an Assassin during my play through. He wore the stuff, had the skills I just got better at using, climbed the tech tree as normal. But as far as I can tell he was a drunk laborer who went pirate, mugged a turncoat, thwarted some Assassins he ended up helping, but only go so far as half committing to joining them after he cleaned up some stuff back home. Then his daughter arrives and they sail off into the sunset.

Did he ever become a member of the Order?

He registered in their forums and lurked afterwards, never to be seen posting again.

The story gets really confusing near the end, but what I got out of it was that while he never formally joined, he allied himself to the assassins close enough as to not really matter.  Everything is permitted, etc, etc.

Cool yea that was my takeaway as well.

:drill:

NECRO!

Finally got around to playing through this.  Like every game in this series, I thought it was a mix of really great and fun sections and annoying bullshit.

The game ran like dogshit on my PC for some reason.  Crashed frequently, low framerate.  This is a cheap PC, but only a month old, I've got a Radeon HD 8670 with 12gb ram while the recommended specs for this game are a Radeon HD 5850 with 4gb ram, and it still chugs on medium detail.  Seems awfully unpolished for a game that's been out for years.  Still a fun game, but I wonder what the problem is with this computer.

The pirating bits were generally pretty good, the naval battles were sweet in general (though that boat stealth section was stupid as hell) and sailing around was a lot of fun (though the sea seemed a bit crowded a lot of the time).  But every time you want to take a ship you have to board it, and that means doing the mass battle thing on the deck of the enemy ship which gets really tedious after a while because the melee combat is still based off of the AC3 combat and doesn't seem to work well with huge crowds.  I spent a lot of the time hitting enemies I didn't want to hit or just plain not attacking at all because when there's fifty guys on screen the game has a hard time guessing what you want when you press X.  Enemies would attack me but get interrupted by allies, and since B causes you to block if you're being attacked or put your weapons away if you're not, that causes some issues.  Moving around on ships is pretty janky (especially the masts of two adjacent ships which can overlap in weird ways as they bob up and down).  One time I boarded a ship and killed everyone on board and they just stopped spawning before I reached the required enemy count.  And despite the tutorial lasting for hours, they still never explained a lot of core mechanics like what heavy shot is or how to fire mortars.  

The missions were kind of mixed, with a lot of bullshit optional objectives, same as always.  I'm at 98% sync and the objectives I missed were such a pain in the ass I have no desire to ever attempt the handful I failed again (one of them glitched out, I think, "perform an assassination from a rope swing" which I'm pretty sure I did but didn't register and since I killed the guy in doing it, it autosaved and I couldn't reload to try again).  Eavesdropping missions were pretty awful, and there were a ton of "stay out of combat" objectives which are always annoying considering how patchy the stealth is in these games.

The underwater sections are pretty much the worst thing ever.  In every way.  Nothing about them was well done.  As someone who enjoys diving in real life, this was a big let down.

The trading game was about ten million times better than it was in AC3, which is to say that it's functional.  The interface is still a mess with a lot of time wasted due to menu and animation issues navigating the options as well as the battles themselves being super slow considering how little interaction there is.  It seemed kind of pointless, unless you're going for 100%, but at least crafting was a separate thing this time.  Wasn't nuts about the harpooning minigame (it's weird that I can stab a thousand video game dudes in the throat but chucking harpoons at a virtual whale makes me feel guilty) but the hunting and crafting in general was pretty painless.  Treasure maps were pretty fun, I thought, and really appropriate to the setting.  A lot of the other collectibles were kind of half assed.  Pages from the Voynich Manuscript with no context or messages in a bottle from a previous Sage didn't really add much.  I've beaten the game and I still have no idea what the Animus fragments are for.

The story I'm kind of torn on.  In terms of telling a coherent narrative, it's a complete trainwreck.  Kenway's story makes no sense and has no real climax, it just kind of goes on for a while and then stops.  But on the other hand, it does a pretty good job of portraying Edward as a person, and integrating him in to the setting.  I felt that him hanging around and being on the same level with Blackbeard and Calico Jack was a lot more interesting than the previous AC games where the historical figures either feel mostly like cheesy cameo roles or are just blade fodder with 75% of their dialogue happening during their death scene.  The stuff with the Assassins and Templars was pretty much crap, and the whole "Observatory" thing was never really fleshed out (Edward wants it so he can... sell it somehow?  To someone?  For more money than he's making by robbing people?  This makes no sense to me).  There were two stories, the story of Edward hanging out with pirates until he was forced to grow up, and the story of Edward getting caught between the Assassins and Templars, and the two stories don't really compliment each other much.  The pirate story has an arc, but it's undercut by the Observatory bullshit which meanders all over the place until you just kinda murder the last named villain and win because you've run out of people to kill.

And the modern day Abstergo stuff is even worse than Desmond's shit somehow.  The bad guy is doing stuff, everything is going according to plan, and he's manipulating you behind the scenes, but then for some reason his master stroke doesn't work and then you just win.  Somehow.  It's like Star Wars, if Grand Moff Tarkin lines the Death Star up with Yavin, pulls the trigger, and the station suffers some critical power failure and they have to evacuate it while IT tries to get life support back online.  And then Tarkin dies of an undiagnosed heart condition.  It comes out of nowhere, fails for poorly understood reasons beyond your control, and then nothing happens as a result.  What the fuck even.  I liked them including Shaun and Rebecca again, but the whole plot basically goes nowhere.  The idea of the player being an employee of Abstergo rather than having to go through Desmond was a nice change, I thought, but Abstergo Gaming felt a bit masturbatory at times.  I don't know how much of this is supposed to be hilarous in-jokes for people at Ubisoft, but I didn't think it was utilized particularly well (though there were a few neat ideas, I thought the "In a world..." trailer was pretty funny).

In general, I really liked it, maybe the best in the series (as far as I've seen) from a gameplay point of view, but I gotta agree with the consensus that this would be a way better game if it was just "Pirates sailing around looting shit" and we didn't have this flailing attempt at a story hamstringing the game mechanics (I think it was literally close to 40 or 50 hours in before I unlocked rope darts, for crying out loud).

My favorite in the series, even more than II. But like II and III, I had to drop it down to run on two cores just to be able to play for any amount of time. I don't know if they ever fixed that. Didn't pick up Unity nor have time for Syndicate.

And also like II and III, the stuff not set in the assassin world sucks. I don't care what their original plan was, it's not working out in my opinion. It only breaks the fourth wall and doesn't do anything to tie it together. It would have been better if the whole series didn't have it.

My one beef with IV is he really never became an Assassin (he had all the trappings, but he sails off into the sunset saying he'll come back and do it someday I think).

Agreed wholeheartedly. It put me off the original AC so hard I dropped the game almost immediately. I liked II well enough, but after Brotherhood and whatever the other Ezio one was I sort of lost interest in the series.

I've stalled out about 40% on AC syndicate because FO4 came out. However, it's my favorite since ACII. London has a good feel to it and so far there's no playing in today's time at all. There's a few cutscenes with Rebecca/Shaun, but only at the start of the game (so far).

I'd say if you liked ACII, snag Syndicate when it's $20-$30.