Assasin's Creed

[poopinmymouth]

I'm kind of disappointed. I was really looking forward to this game, and got it today to play, and was just kind of "meh".

I thought while the art was nice overall, the individual stuff had a lot of visual errors. They needed to get their normal map shading to work perfectly, right now it fights with the vertex shading for some visual errors. The textures have too much painted in information in some cases (the chick in the labs face), and too little in others (his white uniform gets no shadow from his red belt at all). The eyes had no advanced solution to make them look as if they're lit inside the head, so they look floaty and disconnected. No indoor foot shadows, so things look floaty inside. It looks like they did do some shader variation between materials, but I thought they were too similar, the fabric especially could have used some time of color transition other than black to white in it's shading.

As far as gameplay, I hated the gimick. It was like the game designers couldn't think of how to get a tutorial level, load screens, and mission maps in, so they went the lazy route and used the technology excuse. I didn't think it blended well. The gameplay mechanics are way too obvious, where you can hide, etc. The movement at times felt smooth and fluid, and then other times was chunky and abrupt. They definitely need sliding against collision instead of abrupt stop.

There were so many cool things about it though. It made me sad to see so much good and so much disappointment in one package. I really wanted to like it.

Anyone else gotten and played it, and have an opinion?

http://www.mr-chompers.com/images/poop.gif (http://www.poopinmymouth.com)

[Kickflipkid687]

I see what you mean about all the texture issues and whatnot. But also, the scope of the game is massive, with over 300 unique characters, and all the buildings and everything seem to be uniquely textured, or at least seem that way.

I am only about 3 hours into the game so far, but I really think it's quite amazing. The controls are a little wierd to get use to, but Altairs animations are really well done for the most part. Moving around the city feels really smooth and the Ai crowds are really neat to see.

I am sort of on the fence right now though for the overall gameplay and story, but we will have to see as time goes on. I definately think that Bioshock had that wow factor as soon as you started the game, where Assassins grows on you or something?

But none the less, I still find myself wanting to play it more and more and just explore and see what I can do. I really like the free running idea and how it works out really well for the most part. I don't really like that you can only hide in like 2 different types of things though :S.

I heard that Assassins wil be a trilogy, so if that is true, hopefully the next one in like 4 years will improve alot of these small graphical errors and whatnot. But I suppose it was somewhat hard to do all that when they had no actual 360 or PS3 to build upon and had to guess. But Crytek did that too, but they also invented normal mapping and kind of paved the way for next gen games.

[Miguelito]

I havent played it actually just watched a teammate playing it for 30 minutes. I like the whole presentation but there were several unacceptable slowdowns and fighting looked really boring.
I wanted to buy it but now I think I'll leave it in the shelves...
Dont believe the hype, dont believe the Medusa Jade Raymond. Without her there wouldn't even exist all those 90 rankings.
On the other side there is Crysis. Our Producer was at the release party and came back with a few free copies. And this game is really nice. My little donkey here is able to run on 1024x768 at medium details and jungle never looked soooo good

[Sordid23]

Well atleast its good foor for zero punctuation :P

[Deto]

Assassin's Creed, bought it today, seems pretty nice.. Combat is boring, yeah, and horse animation is terrible, somehow dang unreal.. But I sort of like the game itself, should at least prove fun till Mass Effect :)

As for Crysis... Duh, crappiest graphic engine I've seen.. I got 4800+, 2gb, 256mb card, and I can't run it higher than 800x600 with lowest graphical quality, looks terrible, the HUD scales according to your resolution (and it doesn't scale well and looks terrible because of that) and so far I've seen nothing new in it.. no thanks :P

[smithyjake]

Haha. Deto, you're the first bad review I heard about Crysis. Shame on them. Maybe there's some issue in your computer system or setting you miss out. Else, is quite sad that you dont like a game that is making history now regardless you like it or not.

[Deto]

Smithyjake: I presume its the 'engine physics' which are doing history... But the game itself don't seem too much to me :) I like the suit with anemic voice saying you're out of batteries, but other than that I don't see much 'new stuff', especially not on low specs so my opinion isn't really accurate :)

But as generic FPS, it seems fine.. Its fast-paced, easy, fun :) alot of FPs seem to forget the last two parts :)

[East]

Assassin's Creed was (is -- still trying to force myself to finish it) a bit of a letdown for me. It's a huge, massive world -- perhaps too big because it is very repetitive, and the different cities are too similar. There's a ton to do, sure, but it's basically doing the same thing over and over again.

One thing that stood out that got me to throw my controller down onto the sofa and exclaim, "oh fuck this, you have got to be kidding me! Really? Really?? You want me to do that?!?!", was when one of the informer missions was to gather 30 flags in 2 minutes, or something. I'm an assassin. Ask me to enter a building and kill someone, even steal something, but don't bloody break the immersion of the game by throwing me into some arbitrary shitty time sink like gather X number of Y times in Z minutes.

Christ..

Anyways. The only thing that keeps me playing right now is that I want to know what the story is all about. I don't care about gathering all the 500 or something flags, or assassinate 60 templars. These are all mechanics that pull me away from the actual game and are just cheap, fake ways to make the game "longer".

[Shivmoo]

I have played it for a while, done the first proper city that doesnt feel like another tutorial (that tutorial feeling goes on for far far to long, its like some epic tolkien book is in your way before you get to the meat)
I also dont like being reminded its a game, all this "fast forward" and random effects are like screaming at the player "its just a game" over and over again, i like the escapist feeling.. this somehow laughs in the face of years of games trying to get more involving and wrenches you from it.
After finally getting past the tutorial and into my first city i notice i can no longer counter, its like... losing my ranks means i am no longer able to defend myself accordingly... how the hell does that work?! so the fights where very dull :( i finally got them back and had to get used to using them again, this then felt like another tutorial.
The core game itself, when it finally lets you go! is awesome, i really enjoy jumping from the roofs assasinating 2 guards then killing the other 2 in a nice sword fight followed by the "thankyou kind sir" from the peasant i just saved.

- - -- Are you guys on the ps3 version btw?.. the xbox version's audio is seriously repetative, it even goes so far as repeating the exact sentance twice for the 2 times i have been in the annoying sword ring thing...

Overall its an awesome game :).. just so many things distract from this between the awesome that it feels like chewing on carboard with slivers of sugery goodness every so often.
O well :)

[bb0x]

One thing that stood out that got me to throw my controller down onto the sofa and exclaim, "oh fuck this, you have got to be kidding me! Really? Really?? You want me to do that?!?!", was when one of the informer missions was to gather 30 flags in 2 minutes, or something. I'm an assassin. Ask me to enter a building and kill someone, even steal something, but don't bloody break the immersion of the game by throwing me into some arbitrary shitty time sink like gather X number of Y times in Z minutes.


Got to agree with that... That part was really like wtf... if it were some Mario-ish game then I wouldn't mind, but an assassin getting some flags back in 3 minutes was just bull.

I kinda didn't expect anything from this game, I was just looking forwards to the free running part. Its nice but sometime it just makes these stupid mistakes like falling to the ground. I mean your supposed to be a trained assassin, yet you jump from 50 meters high. Also the hay-carts which your supposed to fall into, its just way to repetitive and makes no sense. jumping of a building landing in a cart like that would break the cart wouldn't it?

Anyways I'm also just playing to know how the story ends.

[LowRez]

Im really enjoying it, as for some of the complaints, yeah the combats a bit slack in that if you have good reactions you can beat everyone with the counter,

The plays a little repetetive at times, but theres enough to do for my liking

The flag collecting I actually enjoy, I love little tasks like this in ocarina of time with the skulltulas for example, so thats all good,

Overall Im very happy with the movement and free running aspect of the game I love just running around the city dropping gaurds at will and stuff :)

I'd give the game about 85% probably, not exceptional but by no means bad....

[blankslatejoe]

personally, I loved the art...if you took all the assets and looked at them on their own..sure, nothing stands out as particularly beautiful, but I could say the same thing about WoW, which has stretching, seams, shoddy UVs and rushed mistakes all over the place. But the sum of the parts makes it devastatingly beautiful, and I feel the same way about Assassins creed.

Though, to be fair, I walked out of the room whenever there was a sci-fi/tech/future bit. That destroys the context of the game to me and stinks of being some producer's last minute marketing addition; 'Oh all the kids love future games these days! This HAS to be a science fiction game!!!!1' Beh.

But, when you sit back and look at all the huts and houses and castles, man... the game sure is purdy.

[Deto]

blankslatejoe: Yeah, 'sci-fi twists' are becoming quite a trend in games, especially in games set in past or todays.. Run in to those in alot of games, don't really understand why not make a real plot instead of stupid twist :D

[Marcus Dublin]

I'm currently six hours into the game and I don't have the words to describe what I feel about this game just yet. I think I'll save that for my postmortem once I beat it, but what I will say is that so far this game is a solid 9.8 out of 10 for me and hands down the best gaming experience I've had all year next to Bioshock! More to come!;)

[kirilot]

I watched it it for a while at the Anime Con here in DC this past weekend, on a huge tv. Granted i wsnt playing but, personally was expecting something more. it was my first experience with the ps3 in action and its been slightly disapointing

[Beartastic]

blankslatejoe: Yeah, 'sci-fi twists' are becoming quite a trend in games, especially in games set in past or todays.. Run in to those in alot of games, don't really understand why not make a real plot instead of stupid twist :D

Somewhere out there M Night Shyamalan just started crying for no reason :lol:

I got to play Assassin's Creed at eGames this past weekend and what little I got to play of it was incredibly rewarding. Strangely enough I enjoyed watching it be played more than playing it, though. I was looking for visual errors and I saw some but overall I get the same impression so far about this game as I did playing Shadow of the Colossus -- both the art and game are flawed but overall beautiful.

[onelung]

about 5 hours in, extremely rewarding. As for repetition... is GTA repetitious when you have to go shoot more people? Its the bases for the game play, you might have to do it often... .then again I'm only a little bit in, but most games lose me before this... that flag part sounds lame though.

[cookepuss]

The previews and the commercials had me jazzed. Even my 60 year old father, who only plays FPS' on the PC or Wii Sports, was salivating over it.

Glad to hear the opinions on this one. I really am.

I've been holding off on getting a PS3, on the notion that the launch price was too high. With the lowered price, I was teetering on the brink of plunking down the cash. Assassin's creed almost pushed me to the electronics's store. Hearing half of you say "meh" and the other half saying "rewarding" just pushed me back into the middle. :p

Guess I'll pick up Super Mario Galaxy for now and Final Fantasy XII DS. I've been itching for new Wii & DS games anyway, especially since I plowed through Phantom Hourglass so quickly.

[LowRez]

The previews and the commercials had me jazzed. Even my 60 year old father, who only plays FPS' on the PC or Wii Sports, was salivating over it.

Glad to hear the opinions on this one. I really am.

I've been holding off on getting a PS3, on the notion that the launch price was too high. With the lowered price, I was teetering on the brink of plunking down the cash. Assassin's creed almost pushed me to the electronics's store. Hearing half of you say "meh" and the other half saying "rewarding" just pushed me back into the middle. :p

Guess I'll pick up Super Mario Galaxy for now and Final Fantasy XII DS. I've been itching for new Wii & DS games anyway, especially since I plowed through Phantom Hourglass so quickly.

now that is a super awesome game ;)

[-JL-]

I've been enjoying the game quite a lot actually, even with all its faults (repetitive tasks, shoddy AI and random crashes/bugs)... I still find the gameplay and stories (past and future) entertaining. :)

And I quite like the future bits, it adds a nice form of contrast to the whole.

[Kus Umok]

Just played it about an hour ago, I found that the combat was way too repetitive, you just had to hold the right trigger and press X when they attacked (Xbox 360). Granted the actual deaths of the guards were pretty cool, but after killing a guard more than 5 times in the same way you get pretty bored. The actual assasinations of the top figures seem to be pretty annoying since theyre all repetitive, and I felt that the Sci-Fi twist really took the "medival" part out of the plot. Granted I began playing at the end of the 3rd assasination, but when I saw the futureish twist I became dissapointed. Overall the art in this game was exceptional, few details here and there but when you scale to the top of a viewpoint tower and look around, its just amazing. Overall i'd give it a 8.7/10, the only reason its not over 9.5 is because of the repetitivness in the game.

[Deto]

btw, for all those who wish to see some additional combat things... Don't stick to sword, and don't stick to counter strikes. Instead try to strike after all different kinds of blocks, dodges and such. The combat gets much much more interesting and you'll get very nice combos and such that way :)

[-JL-]

Personally I tend to stick to the shortsword/dagger... it's a little faster in combat then the sword and if an enemy is far away enough you'll automatically throw a knife to them usually killing them instantly. :)

[JacqueChoi]

There's too many small graphical glitches (easy fixes) that take away from the larger picture.


Really dislike Altairs shoulders (completely deformed to a point when he climbed), and the red belt noticeably clips through the white nearly every step.


I really don't think 300 unique backround characters would add to a game experience. I think solid randomization that dosen't break immersiveness would greatly increase quality and efficiency.

[East]

I finally pushed myself to finishing the game, and it was a lot quicker to do once I realised I just needed 3 out of 6 investigations to start an assassination mission. This way I could just skip the boring timed informer missions, and go straight for the good stuff.

Now I just have to wait for AC2.. :rolleyes:

[-JL-]

Yea I skipped those annoying informer missions near the end also... I did everything else though. :paper:

The ending was kinda... weird, not bad though...

But yea... now we'll have to wait for the next game to see what happens next... :brick: