Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag

[jakonovski]

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.


 

[CaptainNapkin]

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.

[Miasma]

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.

[jakonovski]

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.):


 

[Miasma]

Think your xbox is on its last legs.

[jakonovski]

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

[CaptainNapkin]

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

[Venkman]

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

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.

[Venkman]

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.

[Venkman]

Arghh, from the depths of Davy Jones' locker, arise!

Inspired by Kail keeping the AC3 dream alive, 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?

[rk47]

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

[Phildo]

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.

[Venkman]

Cool yea that was my takeaway as well.

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

[Kail]

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).

[Venkman]

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).

[Rendakor]

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.

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.

[Hawkbit]

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.