Assassin's Creed 3 takes place in...

[HaemishM]

Does anything work in this game?

The mechanism for taking your money. 

[Paelos]

Is your horse causing you to stand up? That was my friend's problem with rapehorse. In cover and then, HEEEEYYY WILLLLLLBURRRR.

[Hawkbit]

I finsihed Revelations last night so I can go back to 3's story at the midpoint.  It is very interesting to see them almost exponentially burying the game in sidequests and features since AC2.  Revelations simply had too much side stuff to do; I couldn't finish it.  Unfortunately, the main story was weak outside the telling of Altair's life. 

On to AC3 now, I guess.  Let the rapehorse begin.

[Mazakiel]

Oh my god now I'm an assassination mission where cover randomly stops working and Connor just stands up like an idiot, attracting guards that don't even see him. Does anything work in this game?

And this is after they've done two patches or so to fix bugs from the release client.  It sounds like I won't be bothering to finish this thing anytime soon.  What a waste. 

[Venkman]

Overall, in terms of quality, I could forgive a lot of sloppiness if this was the first in a series.

But as the sixth game, this feels like they decided they absolutely needed a new engine for I-don't-know-what*, thought they had enough time to work on it in parallel the the Ezio series, and then had to slap it together with way insufficient QA and bugfix time to rush it at the end after all.

* New engine for the free-running in trees? It's pretty cool, but not nearly fluid enough that I couldn't imagine them replacing all of Constantinople with trees.

[Margalis]

A lot of "AAA" games in 2012 suffered from a very high level of jankyness - bugs, technical issues like rampant screen tearing, horribly designed missions, etc. It seems to me that the wheels are starting to come off a bit in that these productions have gotten so massive that turning them into coherent working wholes is almost impossible.

[Venkman]

Yea I'd agree with that. Next year is gonna suck worse with the new consoles coming that nobody possibly has enough time to fully get right for launch titles 

[Maledict]

Someone on Neogaf was speculating that maybe some of this years big games that turned out horribly optimised (AC3 and Farcray 3 in particular) may have originally been developed on the test kits for the next round of consoles. They then had to be scaled back when it became clear the new machines weren't out until next year (remembering that a lot of people were originally thinking we would see new machines this year).

Not sure if there's any truth at all behind that or if Ubisoft are just flat out bad.

[jakonovski]

Holy poop, I actually found a spot that is really good! Bugs remain everywhere (eg. during a boarding action I was completely unable to use a pistol and then the camera decided to lock on empty ground), but there's some excellent story going on right now in Sequence 9.

Gonna be bad when it ends, I just know it.

[Minvaren]

The stuff around Sequence 9 was pretty good, I must admit.

[jakonovski]

The game has exacted its revenge, I'm now in a sewer maze with a horribly bugged camera and the same water reflection bug that is found in WarZ.

[jakonovski]

..and it is done. The final sequence bugged out on me a few times (the correct path is very narrow and if you stray, chances are you'll get stuck in geometry), then a complete anticlimax of a Desmond happened.

[Minvaren]

There were 2-3 places on that final sequence where the "one true path" was completely non-obvious.  I lost my cool with the game a couple of times during that bit as a result.   

And yeah, anticlimactic is an understatement.   

[Paelos]

When asked if my friend could sum up the game in 2 words, he chose "butt fumble"

[Draegan]

Does this game work on the PC without a controller?

[Minvaren]

Yes, the whole series works fine with KB and mouse.

[jakonovski]

Oh man, I got shitty ending syndrome from this. I wanna play something new but can't muster the energy, and then all I do is read forum threads about AC3. The worst part is that there isn't even any lore to obsess over, they just fucked up the whole thing.

[Margalis]

Someone on Neogaf was speculating that maybe some of this years big games that turned out horribly optimised (AC3 and Farcray 3 in particular) may have originally been developed on the test kits for the next round of consoles.

There's absolutely no way this is true. The timing doesn't work out at all. The only way AC3 would be developed on a 720 test kit would be if they expected it to be a launch game for the 720, which does not work at all with the release date of the game.

[Samprimary]

assuming ac3 has BOATS in it, how is being CAPTAIN of BOAT in BOAT FIGHTS: 1700's EDITION

[jakonovski]

assuming ac3 has BOATS in it, how is being CAPTAIN of BOAT in BOAT FIGHTS: 1700's EDITION

It's a spectacle for sure, and fun for a time. However the whole thing of being a SUPER ASSASSIN BOAT who blows up a million other BOATS with impunity makes the whole thing nothing more than a shooting gallery in the end.

[Venkman]

One piece I don't understand and finding pitifully documentation for is the entire harvesting and crafting system. I can get animal stuff easy enough, but I've got this one Caravan which is marked as "attacked" and then a bunch of empty slots on this crafting UI. The whole Homestead thing is a mystery and the ingame documentation is a farce.

I miss the really well put together training modes from AC2.

[CmdrSlack]

Yeah, most of the homestead stuff is an obvious afterthought, unlike the totally awesome city building stuff in AssBro and the other AC2 titles.

I could never figure out how to FIND my under attack caravan to defend it. Lost some good pelts that way.

[Venkman]

Lol "AssBro" 

[Hawkbit]

I'm having trouble getting past sequence 7.  The lack of fun keeps me from actually playing it.  I'm sure I'll finish at some point, but AC3 was my second worst gaming disappointment of 2012. 

It's a huge open world, but the missions require such a narrow, linear way to complete them. 

[Fabricated]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E2w8TFBAI0

[Hawkbit]

The game is full of that shit, I lost count of how many weird bugs there are like that.  Hell, Skyrim had fewer AI bugs.

Also, I like how rapehorse makes an appearance in that movie at the 1:10 mark.

[jakonovski]

Connor the lion molester.

[Venkman]

Bugs haven't been too bad for me, once I remembered I can't play the AC series games with all four processors. I don't know what it is. Through all five of the titles I've played, I need to set it to two CPUs only. And if I want to be posilutely certain, I only use one. No other game gave/gives me this problem.

I will say those goddamn almanac pages though: I gotta stalk the damned things like I would a panther. If I can't guarantee to jump right on it from some hidey-spot, I'll end up chasing it around half of Boston and lose it anyway.

Still only on Sequence 6. There's no as much logical flow to them as in the other games.

Which is just adds to the list. This seems to have been developed by whoever wasn't on the a-team for AC2, with those poor folks being brought in probably for a polish phase or even to save it, which really is just ending up getting the blame. They couldn't just skinned that AC2 engine. I just don't see much difference in how it plays.

[Paelos]

I just started playing this after the sale on Steam. I've done almost all the AC games back to back to back, so control changes are jarring to me from game to game.

They completely overhauled the controls in this one. It's really annoying. I'm not sure people would notice it as much if it wasn't so obvious, but moving my block/parry key to E from my right click makes no sense, and I can't remap it because it will fuck up my running.

Also I thought I was playing a guy named Connor, and I'm spending my first two hours so far as a British dude. It's a long tutorial I guess. Side note, if you haven't read the database entries, they are written by "Sean" and many of them are hysterical in a dry British way.

[jakonovski]

I look forward to further impressions. 

[schpain]

Pael - I found the lore entries really annoying.  there'd be good info then a smarmy remark at the end which ends up being a random contemporary pop reference which breaks the immersion for me.

I had some bugs but not THAT many, agree that 2 hours playing as haytham was inordinately long (i actually liked haytham better than connor, but knew my playing of him was on borrowed time so...) and my other main annoyance was actually playing as desmond.  what a waste of time.

if they brought out an AC game with the blurb "100% of the stabby goodnesss, no modern day bullshit" i'd pay a premium.  especially the bit  .

I'm going back to finally finish witcher 1 and 2 before diving into ac4.  maybe i'll squeeze bioshock infi in as well, i'm pretty excited about ac4 but want to savour it.

[Paelos]

Pael - I found the lore entries really annoying.  there'd be good info then a smarmy remark at the end which ends up being a random contemporary pop reference which breaks the immersion for me.

That's part of the reason I like it because normally I hate lore stuff. This theatre was home to first production of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Snarky makes me read what I normally wouldn't even bother with. I don't play these things to get a first class history lesson inside my fictional mind machine that helps me summon my long dead ancestors.

[Paelos]

I'm into Sequence 4 now. The combat is wretched. Absolutely wretched. I'm literally doing nothing but mashing the left mouse button and occasionally countering. It's like they completely dumbed it all down to the "I win" key. I mean there's a happy medium between this and Witcher 2, you know?

Anyway the early twist got me. Now I'm a kid. That's when I turned it off and downloaded a mod for Warband so I can play something that doesn't have shitty combat in between session of this. I can already tell I hate this game.

[Venkman]

I gave up on 3 at about Sequence 4 iirc. The ground combat in 4 isn't all that different, but it's less annoying because you have more environmental objects to try some fun things with (like air drops). Of course there may be things about 4 combat that were already in 3 but I never noticed them for not having gotten very far.

4 is greatly helped by the ship combat. Like, I'd like 4 no more than 3 if it didn't also include ship stuff to this level.

[Hawkbit]

4 is greatly helped by the ship combat. Like, I'd like 4 no more than 3 if it didn't also include ship stuff to this level.

Yep.  I couldn't finish 3; played to sequence 7-ish.  Ironically I stopped playing BF on the sequence they added the diving bell minigame.  That was just so uninspiring.