There is apparently a significant introductory period In Assassin's Creed: Shadows, one Gabe almost didn't endure, because he felt like he had seen and done all this stuff before. Then he got really into sneaking around as Naoe. Then he started staring at foliage dancing in a gentle breeze. Then, well, he found "the real game" and he lost his mind.
I finished every AC game up to and including Unity; I'm enough of an Assassin's Creed weirdo to think that Three is the best one. It has a huge pain in the ass parkour sequence at the end that almost made me twist my controller in half, but the alternate take on US History was a great combo with the metanarrative and it had the best intro twist of any game in the series. Adding the organic environment to the movement was also fairly shocking for a game which was mostly about right angles. You could climb way, way up on a tree. Plus, his tomahawk blade was the Assassin's Creed symbol and that's fly as hell.
There used to be really fun, experimental multiplayer in these games that just fell off and burned up in the atmosphere at some point. In Unity you could do special co-op missions together, which I suppose is on brand. But we were always more interested in the competitive hide and seek gameplay seen in earlier games. Assassinating another person is, I presume without direct experience, like injecting heroin. Or tricking someone into assassinating someone else, exposing them. Productive work in the office would just… stop, because everybody had to watch it. That shit would tear up Twitch.
As a generality, we here at Penny Arcade call this genre "Map Fucking." Far Cry exists in the same genre. But I'm only gonna fuck a map right now if it's got big monsters on it, monsters whose flesh I can drape about me for protection. It just showed up at the wrong time.
I understand that this game has become a Site of Conflict and that the systems we use to communicate multiply, elevate, and reward fractious horseshit. One might suggest that "both sides do it," but it's actually a specific personality type that engages in these morality plays as I have said before. It's easy to tell because sometimes these parasites invert their entire worldview but engage in the same attention seeking behavior. The vast majority of people have no time for these puppet shows. It's not that conversations like this can't be important, or can't reference important things, but the tenor and prosecution of Gaming Discourse is often so tinny, false, and grasping that it is beneath its participants - let alone the observer. For our part, we are interested in beautiful games which are fun and varied. I couldn't care less if I don't score any points in these status games, and I would be ashamed of myself if I did.
(CW)TB out.
