I dont see it. Mario is a forever brand that is handled well. Sonic is a forever brand that is handled a little less well, but its hanging on. Ubisoft had a forever brand, possibility with rayman, but handled it like shit. Forever brand is a mascot and something that associates with the company. AC is an open world action game with little relatability between each title. What is AC’s character? What distinguishes it from FarCry?
Assassin’s Creed’s shift to open-world RPGs would never have happened at many companies, Alex Hutchinson says
Literally everyone and their mother could have expected this change. It’s literally the one single way AAA studios have been padding gameplay and time for a decade and a half now.
Ubisoft codified a certain style of open world design that many other AAA releases were using as a template. He’s right, you can’t deny the impact the franchise had.
It WAS a good idea when first used. And, when imported across to Far Cry, they also tried to come up with new forms of climbing and even puzzles to get you up. Then, simply because the internet made memes about it through repeat emphasis (repeating an old mechanic alone isn’t necessarily a bad thing) they responded, took the system out, and even lampshaded it in Far Cry 5 - WHILE other devs as far as Nintendo/Zelda were copying it.
Theres a lot to condemn Ubisoft for, but the towers thing always irked me. Call open worlds as a whole boring, but it suggests it’s not the sort of game to keep your interest anyway.
You say that and I can kinda agree with it, and I can see them agreeing with it... but I recently got FC5 on a discount and despite it all - it still felt like the exact same game as every previous one. So artificially gamey and forced in some interactions, so predictable in its plot and map exploration structure...
I don't think it ends up feeling that different at all. Maybe you zipline up the towers today and they just discover POIs instead of removing map fog, but it's still the same crap, just served differently
I feel like Nintendo 64 was the real OG adapter of open world RPGs. The success of Mario 64 and legend of Zelda had already proven the genre wildly profitable
I really liked the first AC game but when I played Odyssey I was disappointed. Beautiful game, fun mini-games, nice subsystems like upgrading the ship and whatnot. After the initial couple of hours I started to feel like everything is a chore.
Need a map? No way to buy, you have to run/ride and climb the chore tower.
Want to use equipment? Grind chore for the XP to meet the level requirement.
Want to beat a quest handed to you early? Grind XP
Want to complete side quests? All of the boilerplate fetch/kill quests.
Just please, give me a starting weapon that’s good enough and I can just stealth kill my way through the main quest. Also, just allow me to buy the map.
After the initial couple of hours I started to feel like everything is a chore.
Exactly. I don’t know what I expected, but that was my experience as well. The game more or less told me this:
“Hey, did you enjoy the first chapter? Well guess what? We’re going to throw that at you x20 with the occasional plot beat thrown in for variety. Have fun!”
For the obvious boatload of cash poured into Odyssey’s development, I feel like half as much game done twice as well would have been a better experience. Instead, we get something that is seemingly padded for play-time, in the same way a 4th grader adds extra blank lines to hit the required page count on a book report.
Want to use equipment? Grind chore for the XP to meet the level requirement.
Want to beat a quest handed to you early? Grind XP
Want to complete side quests? All of the boilerplate fetch/kill quests.
I mean this respectfully, but you were holding it wrong.
First off, Odyssey was too big, but I enjoyed it! The voiced side quests were great, especially those heavily involving Kassandra. The Atlantis DLC was sublime. But:
You don’t worry about equipment beyond your level!
Leave future quests in the journal!
Fetch quest? If you’re bored, skip it! TBH I Cheat Engined some money in.
Odyssey requires no grinding, as it has waaay too much filler as is. It is a game that’s utterly miserable if you give into completionist impulses, but pretty neat if you don’t.
…Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t particularly enjoy the combat, and the main story is so dull I don’t even remember it, aside from the Atlantis bits. It’s not a masterpiece. But I remember the experience of trekking across Greece quite fondly.
You know what I would buy? Hitman set in ancient Egypt.
Infiltrating a workgang forced to build a pyramid, putting a spitting cobra into a nasty enforcer’s chamber pot because he owes the Potiphar some serious myrrh?
Honestly, not a bad idea. Synthesizing and iterating, taking things out of context, combining elements you haven’t before - that’s how you get something interesting.
Ubi’s problem is that their gameplay loops are completely stale. There just isn’t enough new and different, the stories are trite, the dialogue is shit, and everything is boring and predictable.
I somewhat enjoyed the first Assassin’s Creed, but was a little bitter it wasn’t the Prince of Persia game they’d intended the engine for. I didn’t find “walking slowly to blend in with a crowd” to be as fun as the intense combat and tight platforming of Sands of Time. But I cannot for the life of me understand how the series blew up into a juggernaut of a dozen releases over two decades.
I’m actually playing The Lost Crown now and - not that I’m the first to observe this - but I feel like it’s the best thing Ubi has done since The Two Thrones twenty years ago. This is the kind of risk that Ubi should be taking. Modest games, smaller budgets, new genres. Diversify and let the creatives create. Let small projects succeed and give them a sequel. If small projects fail, it doesn’t break the bank. But for christ’s sake stop releasing the same three giant boring games over and over.
I’m still sad they killed the 2008 Prince of Persia after the DLC, top of my list from them. (Lost Crown isn’t far)
Also TBF, Origins isn’t the best example to blame them for making a stale loop, since that’s precisely the game where they updated the AC formula to make it a lot more RPG.
But I cannot for the life of me understand how the series blew up into a juggernaut of a dozen releases over two decades.
Heavily historical setting fairly accurate about settings that a lot of people are interested about. Nothing easier. You can literally throw a dart at a map and a timeline and make something interesting with a shit story. People will buy a million of them, doesn’t matter if they’re all the same game. It’s a goddamn mystery that no one is doing anything like that with their own engine, absolute lack of imagination.
This is what kills me. There’s so much squandered potential in AC with this kind of thinking. Instead, Ubisoft just wants to be EA by re-selling the same game every year, but doesn’t have the sports licenses to pull it off.
If you look at the picture from Soulja Boy’s site, it’s clearly just the Retroid image run through an AI Image-to-image filter to make sure it’s not exactly the same. The buttons have random symbols on them, some of them seem to bend, the D-pad is misshapen and from a distance, the whole thing just looks like a slightly less detailed copy of the original Retroid image.
The Assassin’s Creed franchise nowadays seems more like one of those slushy machines at the mall that perpetually move the same ingredients around in a neverending cycle of despair and stagnation.
while its hilarious that he is trying this again, that website not only popped a text box that opened my keyboard automatically and then did another pop up after that.
gamesradar.com
Aktywne