By Jim Rossignol on June 5th, 2009 at 8:22 am.
“More variety” seems to be the mantra uttered by the Assassin’s Creed II development team, and we get to see some of that variety in this new walkthrough. It’s the bulk of an entire assassination sequence from the game, and possibly one of the high points, so beware spoilers if you’re definitely going to buy into the dude-slaying sequel. Venice certainly looks impressive, and hopefully the new game will give you a little more freedom to make the most of that enormous cityscape. I hope “more variety” somehow also translates into “fewer cutscenes”, but perhaps that’s expecting too much.
05/06/2009 at 08:31 Nighthood says:
So they’ve implemented swimming? Hooray!
05/06/2009 at 08:45 Ashurbanipal says:
Ass Creed? Oh come on, not you too, Jim? I hate that terribly unfunny, dismissive pun. Ranks right up there with sheeple.
I liked the game. I thought it did some things brilliantly, even if the repetetiveness sucked. Beautiful animations, a joy to behold, some thrilling and clever assassinations, and an interesting story, even if the dead were inclined to waffle. The missions were shitty filler, and I can’t help but feel it would be considerably improved if missions were full-blown narrative side-stories in their own right. Something they could have taken from more open-world RPGs.
This looks amazing.
Hot fires giving you attitude and speed? Er…
05/06/2009 at 08:48 Kieron Gillen says:
Ash: It’s not a gag. It’s so that it fits on a line.
KG
05/06/2009 at 08:50 NegativeZero says:
I hope that the citizens of Venice have more than three lines of dialogue to yell at you repetitively this time. For me the constant YOU THIEF I’LL HAVE YOUR HAND etc over and over was far worse than the gameplay.
05/06/2009 at 08:50 Jim Rossignol says:
Aye, I should have written “dev walkthrough”, come to think of it.
05/06/2009 at 08:53 Ashurbanipal says:
KG and Jim,
Oh, okay. I take my dismay back.
Love.
05/06/2009 at 08:54 bhlaab says:
I hope they skip the idea of doing missions for “intel” entirely.
Here’s what Assassin’s Creed should be: Hitman Blood Money, but you climb on shit.
05/06/2009 at 08:58 The Poisoned Sponge says:
They say more variety, but.. that mission seemed to be the only possible way you could complete it. He did even say at one point that using Da Vinci’s (sigh) flying machine was the only way of reaching that particular place. So, yet again, it seems like there’s only one way to kill each target, and it’s not particularly assassin-y. I guess I’ll just have to wait for Hitman for my Hitman needings.
05/06/2009 at 08:58 Spliter says:
I’m glad they changed a few things.
1- when you kill the guy, he dies, and doesn’t walks around for 10 unskippable minutes talking about things he could say in 10 seconds.
2-swimming. yay!
3-seems more action packed. I didn’t like the first one because it took you far too long to get to the next target, and the time was spent doing unnecessary missions many of which didn’t feel right with the theme and location.
Still, I’m gonna wait until one of my friends plays this first and see if it’s worthwhile before I think of buying it…
05/06/2009 at 08:59 windy says:
I haven’t played AC1, might get 2 though! Looks fun.
05/06/2009 at 09:01 Mr Pink says:
I’m tempted by the original at £10 on Steam. I hear so much backlash about it, but is it worth picking up do you reckon?
05/06/2009 at 09:01 Kieron Gillen says:
Windy: That’s what Jim just said he should have done, and what he’s changed in. Never assume malice what can be totally explained by incompetence. Especially with RPS.
MrPink: Yeah, for a tenner.
KG
05/06/2009 at 09:02 DSX says:
My rig falls right under the min spec for the first one, it refuses to run and has sat in a disc sleeve ever since waiting for Christmas hardware. This one looks even better, hope the “exit the game” idiocy has been addressed.
05/06/2009 at 09:03 Andrew Dunn says:
This could potentially be pretty good.
I really liked the setting and world and free-running and combat in Assassin’s Creed, it’s just every other bit of it that let it down (including the weak assassinations). I’m fairly optimistic about this though (despite signs pointing to them keeping the sci-fi bollocks front and centre).
I definitely agree that it’s worth picking up for a tenner. Just get past the cutscene-heavy first hour and into the free-running meat of the game and you’ll probably enjoy it a fair bit. Even with the repetition.
05/06/2009 at 09:09 Ashurbanipal says:
For £10, definitely.
The backlash was largely because of the hype it had to live up to. It’s a very good game with occasionally tedious bits. Bit like Farcry 2.
I found it nowhere near as infuriating as that other run and jump game, Mirror’s Edge. The platforming controls like a dream, in fact, to the point where some thought it was too easy and uninteractive. Combat is also pretty easy to control.
05/06/2009 at 09:09 SirKicksalot says:
I loved the cutscenes.
It was a mistake to say the first one is like Hitman in the Crusades. Hitman fans now expect to see 47 jumping in a time machine.
Read the Game Informer article, it’s floating around the web. They explain how they got rid of the “mission loop” and how they’ve added a narrative component to each mission.
About the flying machine: it’s not like you land right on top of your target. It’s more like every Hitman mission inserts you at the same point. And don’t worry, this can’t be the entire mission on display.
I thought the glider was really awesome.
05/06/2009 at 09:13 Kieron Gillen says:
I thought of the platforming stuff as… well, it’s not really about platforming. It’s about getting around. It’s the equivalent of Cars in GTA, turning traversing a map into something fun. If they’d made it like Prince of Persia, people would have just ran around the streets because the chances of fucking up would mean people to avoid it.
It’s a… interesting game. The flaws are enormous and so obvious that even my mum recognised some of them when watching me play (“You spend a lot of time standing in that grey room”) but the high points are totally glorious.
KG
05/06/2009 at 09:27 TC says:
I largely missed all the hype for the first game but ended up actually really enjoying it.
I think people concentrate far too much on what it got wrong rather than acknowledge the good parts of the game.
(Did anyone else just end up using the autotravelling between cities despite the visually impressive outdoor areas?…I couldnt work out how not to be busted by guards when on horseback).
05/06/2009 at 09:30 kvertiber says:
@Spliter
I think they just edited the talking out in this video because of it being too spoilery.
05/06/2009 at 09:30 Mr Pink says:
lol @ KG’s mum!
05/06/2009 at 09:35 feffrey says:
I’ll like it of they fix the whole 50 steps just to quit the game.
05/06/2009 at 09:35 Heliocentric says:
When the non gamer (ie kg’s mum) can tell what is wrong with a game how the hell did the focus testers miss it?
05/06/2009 at 10:00 Alex says:
Let’s hope the combat is improved. The farther I got into the game, the larger the mobs chasing me would get. It makes sense- as the authorities get more paranoid, they hire more guys to look out for jerks in hoodies. That would be fine if the combo moves worked reliably.
Even the massive health bar I’d earned by being OCD with the missions and flag hunting, I’d get pummeled to death in the most frustrating ways.
05/06/2009 at 10:03 demonarm says:
“What does he think he’s doing?”
“Only a fool would do such a thing.”
“He will get himself hurt.”
05/06/2009 at 10:09 sigma83 says:
Heliocentric: My guess is people not listening to the focus testers.
05/06/2009 at 10:10 Andrew Dunn says:
“God help him, he’s lost his mind!”
“Me family’s sick and dyyyyyin’, could you spare a few coin?”
05/06/2009 at 10:17 Fede says:
There seems to be lots of gorgeous detail in the city and I enjoyed a lot also the voice acting, the lines in italian were pretty well done.
05/06/2009 at 10:21 Bobsy says:
Variety was the one thing that stopped Assicrid from hitting greatness, really. So big hoorays for this!
It needeed more types of mission, more places to hide, more varied dialogue, more more more.
“Filthy thief! I’ll have your hand for that!”
“Course him! Course the Christian king!”
05/06/2009 at 10:28 Simon Jones says:
Surely the main thing to not from this video is that the player character has an ‘authentic’ Italian accent, rather than an incongruous and annoying American voice?
05/06/2009 at 10:34 qrter says:
From what I remember, most of the backlash had to do with it being a badly optimised PC port, making it an unwieldly behemoth.
05/06/2009 at 11:02 Bobsy says:
@qrter:
Really? I experienced rather nice and nippy game, ridiculous quit menus aside. I was playing the “director’s cut” edition, though.
05/06/2009 at 11:12 Voidman says:
Shait AI routines, the opponents wait for their turn to be pummeled. It looks ridiculous especially with the halberds (they look elite but fight like idiots). Also DaVinci wings sequences seem to be a bit silly and out of place akin to the new PoP3 chariot stages.
05/06/2009 at 11:19 Markoff Chaney says:
The Greater Good.
This game does look pretty fun. The first wasn’t that bad, but I enjoy Far Cry 2 as well. If you can make your own fun and use the open world as a playground while trying different stuff, it can be quite enjoyable. I liked it more than the newest Prince of Persia, though. Are the powers that be planning on waiting 6 months to bring this to the PC as well?
05/06/2009 at 11:36 Stupid Fat Hobbit says:
I just finished the first one (always on the cutting edge, me) and it does certainly suffer for only having about an hour’s worth of gameplay endlessly repeated. All the running, jumping, climbing walls and stabbing people was fun enough to carry me through, though. Also, I liked how it let me deal with beggars the same way I do in real life, i.e. by punching them in the face, then quickly scaling the nearest wall and making off across the rooftops.
Definitely worth the current price on Steam.
05/06/2009 at 11:57 Supraliminal says:
Looks good, especially the fighting mechanics, but maybe a bit too scripted. You HAVE to take the flying machine to infiltrate the castle, it’s too well GUARDED. Thats lame, there should always be multiple possibilities for different playing styles, at least for more skillful players.
05/06/2009 at 12:44 Demon Beaver says:
I’m a bit disappointed in the fighting animation… thing? When he dispatches of the guards with their own weapons, he just punches through them with a Halberd. Maybe Ezio is just that badass, but it does look unrealistic. Here’s hoping to lots of polish, preferrably without having to wait an additional 5 months for the PC version
05/06/2009 at 12:44 The Sombrero Kid says:
Incidentally Saboteur looks like the perfect blend between this and Hitman! Cover Saboteur pls :D.
EDIT: i look at assasins creed like Mario, Super Mario 64s jumping around was awesome, when they added too much crap meaning less jumping around in sunshire it wasn’t so good, 64 had variety though, so the key is vary the things that require you to do your fun mechanic over and over again, which is where assasins creed failed and assaisins creed 2 seems to be changing running and jumping for flying, which is what mario sunshine doen and failed.
It’s the goals that need mixing up ubisoft not the mechanics!
05/06/2009 at 13:30 Gorgeras says:
My only worry is that they seem to be using the same dodgy ragdolls.
05/06/2009 at 13:36 MrFake says:
Tasty. I hope they can make Venice as interesting as the Holy Land–as same-y as it was it had great atmosphere.
And I weep at contrived sequences like using Da Vinci’s flying machine as an approach to the target’s palace. I’ve only played about half of the original, but so far I’ve been forced to find my own routes in and out of every situation, and I love that. Sometimes I just feel like there’s this one dev on the team who sits up suddenly at his desk with the epiphany, “Hang-gliding is fun!” and that dev is unfortunately the lead mission writer. Sure, dude, hang-gliding is fun. It’s fun when you’re not doing it on a monitor, but up in the air. All it amounts to in a game like this is a slightly interactive cutscene. Hell, it was simple enough that it seamlessly cut into its own mini-cutscenes … during flight!
Just saying that doesn’t really fit the feel of Assassin’s Creed’s “I did this!” style–where I totally think I set up and executed the perfect kill all on my own (not true, but I think it)–and I’m hoping they won’t compromise it outside this one demo mission. Scripted sections and cutscenes are just fine by me, but leave them to a minimum!
05/06/2009 at 13:43 SuperNashwan says:
I was honestly hopeful that without needing to spend the time on tech development they’d really nail the sequel because Jade Raymond does seem to have her head screwed on right in interviews, but there was nothing in that walkthrough to suggest any more depth over the very shallow original. Additionally, the one shot kills seem to utterly trivialise dispatching guards, just as the platforming was trivial in the first game. So if fighting and platforming are instant one button deals, where’s the game?
Ultimately, I think what I really want isn’t another Assassin’s Creed, but another Hitman: Blood Money…
05/06/2009 at 13:55 Ashurbanipal says:
Supernashwan mentioned Jade Raymond and screwed in the same sentence and there wasn’t a crass joke. Shocking.
05/06/2009 at 14:06 SuperNashwan says:
I have a special bucket of hate for all the misogyny the internet aims in Raymond’s direction.
05/06/2009 at 14:15 The Sombrero Kid says:
@SuperNashwan
she is hot though.
05/06/2009 at 14:23 the dudeguy says:
This is a specific E3 demo mission, or so they claimed on Gamespot. However, the flying machine will be included in the game.
05/06/2009 at 14:37 Zyrxil says:
Giving AC more variety isn’t going to fix the fact that the gameplay design itself is fundamentally flawed. You play a supposedly stealthy Assassin that spends half his time killing guards in street with great efficiency and lethality. The other half, he is undergoing missions that have 0% to do with his ultimate boss-assassinations, missions that compartmentalize game skills to a ridiculous degree – where a normal game would have you combining such skills as running, shooting, dodging, flanking, and sneaking, AC has you undertaking missions that use one skill at a time. Giving a greater variety of missions that test your knowledge of rooftop running or knife throwing doesn’t change the fact that such missions are stupid in the first place. IMO, that the first game actually sold incredibly well is a mark of shame on all consumers.
And yes, bring on the next Hitman! I’ll take complex stealth gameplay over (I admit) incredible animations any day of the week.
05/06/2009 at 15:05 Ziv says:
the vid is down… where can I get an HD download?
05/06/2009 at 15:12 armlesscorps says:
The main backlash with Assassins creed was that it was a rubbish game with about half an hour of game play stretched over 10 hours or whatever. If someone had provided me with that half hour on its own I would still have said that the game is too long and too rubbish. It was the worst game id played for a long time.
However the climbing mechanics were awesome and so were the graphics, and I like Hitman-esque games. Hopefully they can radically change the sequel and it might be good.
05/06/2009 at 15:26 The Innocent says:
Yeah, it was repetitive. I had more fun finding hidden flags by running around like a ten-year old with a juicebox than “eavesdropping” on people; you know, the missions you could win by sitting on a bench? It got to the point that I’d stab all those beggar women just to get chased over the rooftops and watch the guards fall off of wood beams.
05/06/2009 at 16:08 Zyrxil says:
The beggar women, the street crazies. My god, I would love to get a hold of whoever thought those were a good idea, plus whoever approved them, along with a hacksaw, handcuffs, rubber tubing, and Mickey Rourke.
05/06/2009 at 16:17 SirKicksalot says:
Zyrxil – they ditched that mission structure. The missions fall in one of 16 objective types, but each of them is now hand-crafted and has its own place in the storyline, they’re not repetitive, they can be linked (a delivery that transforms into a chase and then an assassination, for example) and aren’t part of a preset structure. There are no more passive missions like pickpocketing or eavesdropping (I loved eavesdropping though).
05/06/2009 at 16:18 odd parity says:
To people complaining about the long quit sequence: Is it your Alt button or your F4 button that is broken? ;-)
I’m so far very much enjoying the first game after picking it up for cheap on Steam, but I might of course have thought differently about it had I paid full price. The repetitive dialogue is what bugs me the most. Also, the sandbox elements are often more fun than the actual missions. Gently pushing guards off cliffs? Best Asshole Physics implementation ever.
I can see where people are disappointed if what they wanted was another Hitman, although for me the “oops you made a wrong step now replay the last half hour” game mechanic Hitman had got old pretty quickly.
05/06/2009 at 16:42 Tei says:
@odd parity “To people complaining about the long quit sequence: Is it your Alt button or your F4 button that is broken? ;-)”
Well.. If to exit a game you have to press the OS hotkey to kill a task, the game is broken. If you do that, probably you will left temporal files everywhere. In %TEMP% and who know where. Eating slowly all your hard disk free space.
Let say it was a(nother) shoddy port to PC.
05/06/2009 at 16:59 odd parity says:
@Tei – any evidence for temp files being left out on quitting with Alt-F4? All I can find on a quick Google search seems like tinfoil hat brigade theories, I can’t find anyone it’s actually happened to.
Alt-F4 isn’t the “OS hotkey to kill a task”, in fact it has nothing to do with killing tasks. All it does is send the program the WM_CLOSE message. If this is unhandled (which is very unlikely), the DestroyWindow function will be called from DefWindowProc, which is still a much cleaner exit than a forced task kill.
Any program should clean up the resources used on exiting, whether you exit through an overblown system of menus or through pressing a button.
(Sorry about the OT, cranky win32 software developer reflex).
05/06/2009 at 17:03 Tei says:
@odd parity: It sounds like you are right, and I was wrong.
Can we still call ACreed a poorly conversion, because of the overcomplex menus to quit the game? I ask.
05/06/2009 at 17:19 armlesscorps says:
were the street beggars the people that would block your path or something. I remember something like that, it felt like I was playing a bad mega drive game, before developers learnt the basics of how not to make an annoying game.
05/06/2009 at 17:22 Taill4f4r says:
I must use the flying machine to infiltrate the palace and avoid drawing the guards’ attention…SMASH! BOOM! CRASH! AAARGHH! Intruder! Kill him!
Now, maybe I’ve just played Thief too much. But that was not a very discreet method of entry.
Annd, how come he lands on the palace at night, then it’s daytime on the roof?
05/06/2009 at 17:30 odd parity says:
@Tei – I’m of two minds on that one – I’ve only played the Steam version, which is the Director’s Cut version as far as I’ve heard. It’s been pretty stable for me, and runs well in 1920×1200 with all settings on max apart from AA, which I’ve left on the default of 2. It’s much less resource-demanding than GTA4, for instance.
I know that a lot of people had problems with the first version though, and I don’t deny that an exit button on the main menu would be a nice addition. So a flawed port, maybe, but nothing causing any big problems for me.
I think what’s mostly keeping me from calling it a poor port is that the biggest problems I have with it are game-specific and not port-specific – the poor and repetitive voice-acting I mentioned, the repetitive missions, the lack of subtitles and the unskippable cutscenes. If they can fix those things in the sequel while keeping the things that made the original fun, I’m in.
05/06/2009 at 17:43 JKjoker says:
WTH!?!, that “assassin” is not stealthy at all
are they high ? how can they not see or hear the dude getting stabbed in front of them (yelling “UGH!”) by a weirdly dressed person who then proceeds to climb the building like superman while fully illuminated ?
why does he try to infiltrate a castle like Rambo getting everyone’s attention with that flying crap ? ,even funnier the dev says its to “avoid grabbing the guard’s attention” everyone saw him!, a more logical choice would have been to swim in and climb the wall
and why the Italians seem not to have any blood in them ? well it does explain why the unstealthy “assassin” is wearing white, in the real world he would be wearing red pretty fast
I don’t know about you guys but strictly following “the rule of cool” doesn’t work out for me in stealth games, which is also a problem i have with Spliter Cell 5, they need less awesomeness and more kill-you-before-you-know-wtf-and-then-dissapear-in-the-shadows badassery
05/06/2009 at 18:32 SirKicksalot says:
Why does the 6 feet tall albino bald guy with a codebar tatoo never get identified? How comes he changes his outfit in 2 seconds? Why does he always reload his weapons with the exact same slow animation, even when under fire?
Seriously.
Annd, how come he lands on the palace at night, then it’s daytime on the roof?
It was for demo purposes.
05/06/2009 at 19:11 OutOfExile says:
I started the video and automatically burst out laughing. “After the SUCCESS of the original game…”
05/06/2009 at 19:20 EBass says:
Assasin’s Creed was stuffed so full of bad design decisions that I’m surprised there was any room left for a game, but for all that I still liked it because it did everything with such style.
*sigh* I really don’t see this fixing any of the flaws of the first game though. For example, you’re apparently an “Assassin”, yet despite all your “intelligence gathering”, all the game allows you to do is walk into the target area one way, to precipitate a cutscene where the target goes “Come get me Assassin! GUARDS!”.
It seems the same here, only access via the flying machine (for no reason) and then simply stoll up to the already alerted target, effortlessly killing all his henchmen on the way and stabbing him with all the subtlely and finesse of a rubber mallet.
Speaking of which, the ease of dispatching bad guys was another huge flaw. Fine to dispatch unalerted bad guys easily, but I could (and regularly did) kill five or six bad guys at once in a straight out swordfight without losing any health. It totally broke the stealth gameplay mechanics, since there was no fear to being caught as you knew you could easily dispatch any guards with no threat.
05/06/2009 at 20:56 Z says:
Someone warned him that the canals of Venice are basically sewers, right? Right? Because, from that lead-in screenshot, I’d say that someone skipped that in the briefing.
05/06/2009 at 21:22 Ninja Dodo says:
Assassin gets a lot of flak for not being a perfect game. I had a great time climbing on things and stabbing dudes. Look forward to continuing.
Venice definitely a city I would like to clamber around in. I wonder which the others will be.
The first Assassin’s Creed succeeded at far more things than most games and was refreshingly different in many ways. All this repetitiveness I keep hearing about has me mildly puzzled. I’ve played a lot more repetitive games than this – any RPG ever – It depends perhaps on how you play. I found it helps to turn off the HUD, ignore the GPS and just explore… and not treat the missions on the map as some kind of OCD checklist.
My only real gripe with the game (aside from superfluous sci-fi) was that the forced linearity around cutscenes often interfered with carefully laid plans.
On that front, this demo is not entirely encouraging, though it may not be representative of all missions and certainly it sounds like they’re taking a much more free-form approach to mission structure now.
05/06/2009 at 21:37 SirKicksalot says:
The world is different now. It’s not just three cities and a place to travel between them. There is a countryside now, with mission and story progression. The big cities control smaller towns and villages.
Florence and Venice are the main cities. We can assume that Padova, Ravenna, Bologna, Modena, Vicenza and Verona are included, since they’re in the proximity of these two and some of them were under the rule of Venice.
05/06/2009 at 22:52 Chemix says:
As some have said, Assassin’s Creed did a lot right for everything it did wrong.
IE: For every annoying npc sword fight there was climbing action
-For all the utterly stupid tasks, that the character that gives them even insists are for their own amusement (flag grabbing) there are routes to kill your ultimate target. F
-For all of the beggars humping our legs, there were extremely fun stealth assassinations.
-For all the damn things you have to do to exit proper, well… there isn’t much to make up for that
Non-assassination combat had a few problems-
Using actual sword fighting felt dull and slow and left a bitter blood taste in my mouth as I crawled away, whereas counters quickly and effectively killed my enemies as soon as they approached. The difficulty ensued from counter point on when they didn’t die from a counter, and it became a semi-quick time event that you had to repeat up to four times to kill a single guard, a high level guard, but usually these appeared en masse, specifically towards the end when you have to fight a dozen knights before taking on that fracking panzie Templar.
To improve combat they could: open the system and get rid of the equation singulation enemy crap (basically the numbers effect around enemies and the fact that you could only fight one at a time) which might actually have been improved, because we see Ezio or Enzio dispatch two guards at once, but this might just be for assassination take downs.
Beyond that they could actually apply direction to the sword fighting, ala JKII:JO, which if they did have in AC I didn’t find useful enough to be memorable. You don’t hold your sword up in a fight to block, you parry in the direction of their attack and use blocks to stop blunt damage instruments. I do recall that you have to parry at the same time as the attack, but it’s something that you can just keep on pressing throughout a fight (like I did) and doesn’t involve any skill, hell it’s not even fun, it’s like having to exploit a glitch to avoid injury, and the fact that you’re looking at the character from a camera too distant to really see where the blows are heading doesn’t help.
NPC annoyance: they never surrender, unless they’re lying or running to get help, okay, maybe 2 or 3 surrendered to me throughout my play through, but still, come on
-Speed Limits, the fact that they don’t notice you when you’re moving at half a mile per hour is both ludicrous and frustrating, because anything beyond slow as dirt speed alerts them, when it should actually be less noticeable when compared to when they get a good hard look at you for 20 minutes while you ride past practically choking your horse to death
-Missions where every kill has to be a stealth kill, I don’t know about you, but as long as no other guards are alerted I call that a stealth kill, but if their eyes saw me in AC, even just before I robbed them of their last breath, it ended the mission. These missions, and the other info gathering missions killed immersion, because they were arbitrary quests that served no purpose that we could see and were infinitely repeatable. “Take out all the roof guards so I can make my mark and get you the intel,” is simple enough, but theirs a timer (wasn’t there?) and the guards have the aformentioned ESP abilities, and the worst part is, you can repeat it. In GTA it wasn’t so bad because you could just say fuck it and do something else, but these are often vital pieces of information, or are made to appear vital when common sense could have granted you this wisdom without having to perfectly stealth kill 7 guards in 30 seconds across several rooftops.
-NPC attack structure after counters are discovered leads to the further destruction of the basic combat, they’ll simply block until you stop trying to hit them, and then attack, blocking always afterwards if they prove unsuccessful, making normal attacks pointless, and making the counter the only effective way to kill something in under a minute.
-Beggars… I understand the concept here, but there should be ways to get rid of them, after all, that’s sort of what they suggested early on in development, that you’d deal with them as obstacles if you didn’t treat people well, not that all beggars should dissapear when you have a good karma rating, but please, give them more lines, more voice actors, and less of a demanding penchant for my leg as some kind of sex toy.
-An extreme excess of “random” police brutality; isn’t there someone that is either not helpful and in trouble with guards or someone that is that isn’t being hassled by guards, or not helpful and not being hassled by guards, or helpful and being hassled by non-guards, or etc. etc. Soldiers are not the sole owners of the rotten sausage award.
Info: You should be able to gain info in a realistic manor, not by questing for arbitrary npcs. For example, to scope out a place, you can climb high up, draw a sketch or memorize it or something, or listen in to conversations, or steal documents, or forge documents, or pay someone, or have money of any sort to do things with (like pay/ distract/ use beggars)
Albeit, I did enjoy climbing and assassinating
05/06/2009 at 23:25 Ninja Dodo says:
Actually that was one other thing I did not like…
The motherfucking time-limits.
There seemed to be no reason for them, they were applied very inconsistently and turned what should have been an exercise in patience and stealth into a race. Thankfully most missions were not subject to such arbitrary frustrations.
That’s probably my number one wish for them to fix, actually.
Your post reminded me also I kept thinking every time I climbed onto some hidden balcony somewhere it would be really cool to swipe docs giving clues for your mission, and yeah: the eavesdropping would’ve been much more natural had it just been mixed into the ambient crowds and not treated as a ‘mission’…
06/06/2009 at 01:58 Alexander Norris says:
Am I the only person who is going to get this for the sheer, unadulterated joy of watching the counter-kills?
Again. And again. And again. Oh, and again.
06/06/2009 at 04:47 Lanster27 says:
I’m pretty sure the narrator in that video said ‘attitude’ instead of ‘altitude’ when talking about the flying machine.
06/06/2009 at 05:53 Spd from Russia says:
looks fab, hope they improved all the awkward moments from the 1st one
06/06/2009 at 06:39 Pantsman says:
This looks pretty cool, though I never played the first. I quite like the setting.
06/06/2009 at 14:26 Howard says:
This is a definite AVOID for me. The first game had some potential but, even ignoring the world beating hype and bull that surrounded it (looking squarely at you, Jade), it was an enormous disappointment. Nothing worked well, from the free climbing to the fighting to the ludicrously repetitive missions, and once you had played the first level and completed your first assassination you had seen everything the game had to offer (bar the frankly horrid horse riding sections: ugh!). The one and only good thing I had to say about it was that, for a PC shovelware port, it ran well and was pretty stable.
The sequel, as seems to be the norm these days, will no doubt be a better polished version of the first game but so far I do not see that it offers anything different aside from improved (though still ugly) graphics.
I think Ubisoft has had enough of my money while giving me nothing for now…
06/06/2009 at 15:39 autogunner says:
i loved the orginal ass creed, at least it was a different take on things, original in that you didnt need to go sneaking everywhere, I think it should be praised more for that aspect, and its relatively freeform approach to assassinations.
I was a proper awful assassin, i remember one mission where i had to kill a bloke who was executing people, i managed to get above the satge and was about to do a perfect swawndivethroatstab but instead slipped off the ledge and fell into the guards, got cut up a bit and hacked my way through the crowd and excutees till i finally found him.
also you could play assaimarti damacy, coolecting guards while running away until you had an army parkouring behind you
brilliant game if taken with a pinch of salt
edit, oh yeah, and i couldnt kill the final boss straight up, so I ran around in cicles until i could backstab him purely by chance
07/06/2009 at 01:14 Urthman says:
Quitting with Alt-F4 can corrupt your save games in AC1. Use with caution and/or backup your saves.
Crazy people: a pain when you’re trying to be stealthy, but if you’re just running around, you can run straight at them and knock them down before they can push you around. Like American Football. I thought it was fun, and an important life lesson for how to treat the retarded.
Those incredibly annoying repetitive street preachers: I treated them as another side mission. Assassinate the street preacher (you can get away with it in stealth mode) any time you plan to do something in hearing distance. (Unfortunately they respawn).
Super-long overacted cutscenes? Go get a sandwich. Come back to find the guards have killed you. Reload after the cutscene and get on with the game.
07/06/2009 at 05:15 odeed says:
“I hope they skip the idea of doing missions for “intel” entirely.
Here’s what Assassin’s Creed should be: Hitman Blood Money, but you climb on shit.”
So this, it was what I was expecting from the first one. I want to plan my attack, and pull it off seamlessly, rather than have one, specific, kill. I love in ‘Hitman’, figuring out the perfect, clean, assassination, and it actually being an interesting puzzle.
07/06/2009 at 17:10 Jason says:
I don’t get it – am I the only one who watched the “combat” in the palace? Your dude would get a magical little highlight over his target, and then he would (apparently) oh so skillfully press the X button to execute them.
While he was executing them in very improbable fashion (taking the halberd away from the halberdier and then shoving it THROUGH HIS BREASTPLATE) the two other guards standing behind him with the sword and the axe would wait very politely for him to finish and tell them that it’s their turn.
Looks like crap to me.
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