Assassin's Creed IV Ideas

Apparently I don't have as many things to rant about as I thought I did, or maybe college is just slowly wearing away at my brain.

So only a year after the very disappointing, kill red coats because they killed your family, could have had a much better ending Assassin's Creed III, Ubisoft felt it was a good idea to try to release Assassin Creed IV: Black Flag. With the advent of naval combat in ACIII and a strange family twist, Ubisoft felt they could do more with the combat and expand on the Family.

This game will <sarcasm>shockingly</sarcasm>  not involve Desmond in anyway. You play as someone hired by Abstergo Entertainment, a subsidiary of Abstergo, to "investigate" why Conners father was a <spoiler>Templar and why his father was some mysterious rich pirate assassin.<spoiler>

The game will apparently have a 60/40 focus on land and naval, respectively, combat. Your ship is the Jackdaw and it will upgrade as the game goes on and you will be able to upgrade it as the game goes on. I was a big fan of naval combat (after a few upgrades), so to see that they plan on perfecting this is going to be interesting.

I have also read that Ubisoft has said that they plan on making this game more "sandboxy" and you will have much more exploration options. The interesting hunting system will be tweaked and will come back with naval hunting. Let's do some whaling!

Unfortunately the massive recruitment idea from Brotherhood will return. I only say "unfortunately" because it becomes massive and almost a chore. You get all these assassins that do missions or take over the world and baby sit them so they get the most out of their quests to level them up. Sure they can help you kill guards so you don't have to try to deal with them, but I never really find myself using them, they make the game to easy.

Now that all that confirmed nonsense is out of the way: I don't think that this game is the actual Assassin's Creed IV. If you notice, it has a subtitle. Look at Assassin's Creed III: Liberation, Brotherhood, Revelations and Bloodlines. These were either non canon or took place after the "original" game. I think that this is being called IV because of what happened to Desmond and the fact that you are not playing him, anywhere.

This could be a prequel to what is actually going to be happening in ACIV or this could just be to set something up for the actual story line for ACIV. It is possible that this is the actual canon AC game, but I don't think that it is actually going to turn out this way.

I just hope that they don't screw up the final assassinations in this game *cough* chase scene *cough*. I'm hoping that this one will be much better than ACIII, if they can blend good game play and give it a good story I'll be on board. If they just puke out what they did with ACIII and put on some new character meshes I'll be very disappointed ... I'll still play it though.

Cover Based Shooters are a Pox

Now don't take this the wrong way, but most cover based shooters are a disease among the current generation of shooters. I'm not saying that every single one is bad or that some of them aren't put together well, but ... no wait that's exactly what I'm saying. Let's take some games, for an example of good and bad: Mass Effect, Gears of War, Spec Ops: The Line and Max Payne.

Lets start off with what I would consider, "The Bad." You can argue Gears of War up and down that it's a "great" or "amazing" game. However, you would be mistaken. Don't get me wrong, I have fun when I play this game from time to time, but the game is just not "amazing". It revolves around bricks with faces killing brown aliens while they find or make chest high walls.

Like I said, I have fun playing these games but the problem comes about when they try to give the characters some sort of depth that just shouldn't be there. I haven't played through the whole series but I here there is a section where one of the bricks finds his dead wife and goes into an emotional break down. I'm sorry but I'm pretty sure a brick can't feel emotions.

When these games are just about killing things from chest high walls it can at least keep your attention and keep you in some sort of immersion. However when you try to throw in some sort of narrative that was forever absent in the series. Luckily, from what I've played, the new installment doesn't try to throw in some obtuse story arc for some character that most of us couldn't give a damn about. If you "felt feelings" when something "sad" happened to a brick you're doing it wrong.

The next up is Max Payne 3. If you played this game you know its horrible, just horrible. They took the run and gun unrealistic shooter that everyone who played these older games loved, and turned it into a cover based shooter, and didn't even do it well.

You go from one scene to another, barely understanding what is going on or why you are killing the other guys. The narrative is completely lost in the mess of a cover based shooter. This along with the fact that half the time you are completely outnumbered and your cover can be destroyed. Immediately following is your death.

Several things are wrong with both of these games. The biggest issue I find with these games are the narrative, the story arc and how they conflict with the game or whats been previously done. When you make a game that is focused around emotionless grunts the size of refrigerators then you try to make you feel feelings for them, it's a bit of a hard sell. Or if you try to take a ridiculous over the top shooter and tone it down with realistic cover based shooting, your going to have a bad time.

Now looking at good examples of cover based shooting. First up is the Mass Effect series, mostly ME2 and ME3. This game at first glance has the same oversights as Max Payne 3, except one mine thing. They give you good pacing, powers that make it more fair and still slightly ridiculous.

The characters have good dimensions and good story arcs while simultaneously keeping you invested. Even the few characters that closely resemble bricks have the own dimensions and story arcs that don't make them seem despondent.

The fire fighting itself is intense, it keeps you in the fight and very little pulls you away from the action, except the various glitches that will annoy the piss out of you. However all of this shouldn't even need to be mentioned. If this is the point of the game you better make sure you are doing it well. (Looking at you Max Payne 3)

Now to back track a little bit, I'm not saying that Gears of War as a series is bad. The fire fights are fun and can be very intense and the do a good job keeping the fights fair and not too challenging. The downfall of this series if that they tried to give the characters some sort of depth that was never really their and shouldn't have ever been there. That and they really started to focus on multiplayer, but that's an argument for a different day.

For me the Pièce de résistance of cover based shooters is Spec Ops: The Line. This game puts every good thing I have mentioned about cover based shooters and serves it to you on a silver platter that wants you to kill yourself.

Now that might not necessarily sound like a good thing, but trust me it is. This game puts you in the shoes of a leader of a small group of US soldiers as the try to do a rescue in Dubai.

Now this may sound like a cover based shooter that is just trying to ride the "Modern Warfare" band wagon, but trust me, it's not. This game takes you through the mental break down of the Lieutenant Colonel  Martin Walker as he has to make the tough decisions between killing one person or killing a group of people with one decision and in the end it turns into a lose lose situation.

Spec Ops: The Line is the perfect balance between cover based shooter and an amazing story. If only more games could take this into an example, not too many though, this kind of thing getting over saturated into the market could damn this masterpiece.

To reiterate I would like to remind you that I do not hate this genre of games or any of the games mentioned above (maybe Max Payne 3 a little bit). However this genre of games is having fewer and fewer good games. With the brown pallets, chest high wall after chest high wall and regenerating health this genre could be in trouble. Get your shit together guys, Spec Ops and Mass Effect (yes, even Gears sometimes) proves this genre has some major potential.

The annoyance of tutorials

Do you remember a time when video games weren't bogged down by bad tutorial levels, that you were forced to play? I do, but I haven't really played one since the N64 and maybe the Playsation 1. Today it seems like the big shot video game companies think that everyone in its consumer base suffers from some sort of mental deficiency. 

Think about older games like the first Legend of Zelda. What tutorial did that game have? You went into a cave, got a sword and went off on your merry way to kill things. The game itself didn't have much narrative; however, if you looked in the instruction manuals (If you don't know what an instruction manual is, you are too young) it would tell you the story and what exactly was going on. The booklet would also have some cool art to give better detail with what you were fighting. Along with all that nice stuff were the instructions on how to play. The game didn't need that because it was in the booklet that came with the game.

Now I'm not going to say that all games now a days are committing this atrocity. With the well developed trend of no longer needing a booklet because they can just milk another half hour out of your game play with cinematics and "how to" game play. The major offender here are the instruction segments where you cannot continue because you didn't do it right, didn't do it enough times or you were slightly off. Along with this tends to follow an hour of enraging gameplay as you try to pass what would seem like a simple tutorial. Luckily I have only seen this a select few times and you were aloud to skip the intro scenes.

Now I reviewed a game recently that had a decent  tutorial to the game. Metal Gear Rising. As most of the Metal Gear series goes, the tutorials are occasional calls form your team mates telling you what do to. Or if you feel ballsy enough, and you are playing the right game, you could do VR missions, which either prep you for the game or test what you can already do. Anyway, MGR does the tutorial through a series of OPTIONAL VR missions. These give you a decent grasp of what to do and don't punish you if you do them wrong. 

During the first missions the game does a pretty good job of making sure you know what your doing with subtle reminders, like the current mission would be "Ninja Run across the bridge" or one of your team mates will remind you how to parry. At times it seems like the game is treating you like you are stupid but these games are still tailored for those that don't fully know what they are doing, even if the difficulty is on some unforgiving level.

One game series that comes to mind. with horrible tutorials is the Elder Scrolls Games as of late. Morrowind wasn't all that bad, sure it tells you how to move and what button is the action button and what buttons bring out weapons and magic but it was short and simple with a series of easy quests you can optionally do that help you further understand that game.

However, Oblivion takes the cake for annoying tutorials and unfortunately brings it into Skyrim. I don't know what penchant Bethesda has with criminals saving the world, some strange savory in the irony? 

Oblivion and Skyrim don't have optional Tutorials and when you make a new character you have to do the tutorial over again each time. You need to relearn how to walk, run, swing a sword, hide, talk, use the action button, cast spells, use a bow, learn about poisons and monster. It gets very old after the first few times of doing it. At least Oblivion had the niceness of allowing you to modify your character before you left the tutorial section so you could just reload there and not have to deal with the horrible tutorial again.

It's things like this that make me really question what the game developers think of its player base. Do they think that we all are missing a good chunk of out brain or do they think that we are just plain dense? These tutorials are nice the first time, sometimes, but when they aren't optional and we are forced to sit through it each time it gets a bit tiring. In the next installment of the Elder Scrolls Series (no not the MMO) the tutorial better be a guy just handing me a sword and a bow and letting me go on my merry way or I will riot.

Proper Introduction

Pretty simple idea for this page: The gaming industry has lost base with the consumers and thinks everyone is stupid. I plan on highlighting all the ways that my previous statement is true throughout a series of (probably not so) well written posts. For now I'll just leave you with a simple question. When was the last time you played a game and it didn't give you a tutorial that was incredibly long and could have just been found in the instruction manual?