Topic: Assassin's creed.

[Quemaqua]

TOO MANY FUCKING GAMES.  I AM GOING TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK.

That is all.

[MysterD]

TOO MANY FUCKING GAMES.  I AM GOING TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK.

That is all.

Poor Que.

Well, the PC version's planned for Early 2008, if you wanted a reason to miss the console versions of Jade's Assassin's Creed.

[Pugnate]

Jade's?

[MysterD]

Jade's?

Jade Raymond is the Lead Producer on Assassin's Creed.

[Pugnate]

You need to start picking up on jokes and stuff.

[Jedi]

oooooh somone loves Jade! 

[idolminds]

Hands off my woman!

[MysterD]

Hands off my woman!

Go jump through a portal!

[MysterD]

Looks like anyone wanting this game for the consoles in Australia and New Zealand, you'll have to wait a little longer -- Wed, Nov. 21st.

US release still on track for this week, though -- Tues, Nov. 13th

[gpw11]

PC release next year right?

[Pugnate]

Idol jumps through a portal and lands on Jade.

Anyway PC release is supposed to be early next year. I thought I'd never buy another Ubi game, but their Montreal studio is still good.

[Xessive]

PC release next year right?

Yep. I think it's scheduled for Autumn Early 2008. Pug is correct, I had misread the announcement date.

[Jedi]

Looks like anyone wanting this game for the consoles in Australia and New Zealand, you'll have to wait a little longer -- Wed, Nov. 21st.

US release still on track for this week, though -- Tues, Nov. 13th

BOOOOOOO!

[Xessive]

Man, I must have resolve. I must be patient. I am so anxious to play this! To play the role of Altaïr! By the way his name means "The Flying One" or "The Flyer" in Arabic.

[MysterD]

GameSpot
9.0 from GameSpot for X360 and PS3

GameSpy
3½ stars for the X360 and PS3

1Up
7.0 from 1Up on the PS3 Version

Eurogamer
7.0 from Eurogamer for X360 version

[Cobra951]

IGN gives it a 7.7, but the review makes it sound more like a 6.  I watched their video review mostly because their high-res FLVs are so pretty and so easy to download.  That made the reviewer sound out of place, because the visuals in full motion make this look like an amazing game.  He's going on about how it's one of the 5 most disappointing games of the year, and all I want to do is grab my controller and take control over what I'm seeing.  I hope there's a 360 demo.

[sirean_syan]

Now that's not a spread of scores that I expected. It's almost as surprising as the over glowing reviews for Crysis. Huh. We'll have to see how this works out.

[Quemaqua]

My guess is it's a bunch of bullshit.  I don't trust the gaming media at all anymore.  I know I've said this about a hundred thousand times in the last few months, but it seemed like a good time to reiterate it.  Nothing makes sense in this realm anymore.  Good games get driven into the ground for trivial pet peeves, great games are lauded for tightly-developed but still utterly mediocre game mechanics, and all the while you've got games where no fucking consensus can be reached at all because vast rifts in opinion have emerged more than ever over the years, and the journalists who are just getting into the field are beginning to show this quite vividly in their profession.

I don't get it at all.  I've more or less just stopped reading game sites and resorted to reading forums and looking at the sweeping generalities of sites like MetaCritic.

[Pugnate]

Anyway I am reading 1up's review who gave it a 7.5 and not a 7.0. This review seems far better organized than the Crysis review:

Kill nine dudes. Yep, that's it. But before you can start the slaying, you must perform various investigations in order to gather the adequate information for each hit. You gather information in several different ways: picking pockets, eavesdropping on conversations, performing tasks for fellow assassins, and interrogating informants. In order to find out where you need to go in order to accomplish these tasks, you must climb up to various viewpoints throughout each city. (Though how you learn where to eavesdrop by simply climbing up a building is beyond me.) Regardless, turning Altaïr into a medieval Spider-Man in order to reach high points is one of the best parts about the game.

Or at least until you get sick of it -- which will likely happen very quickly. The fault of Creed's game structure isn't what you do -- gathering intel and conducting hits is actually pretty sweet. The repetition of these actions, however, is severely bitter. I kept waiting for a changeup of the objectives, and, well, that never happened. From the first hit to the last, you go through the same motions over and over and over...find the viewpoints, do the investigation missions, and take out the final target. It got to the point where I only did the minimum amount of investigation tasks needed to perform each kill. To make things worse, despite Ubisoft's faithfulness to history, the three cities of Acre, Damascus, and Jerusalem are practically the same. Do they have different people populating them? Yes. Do they have different buildings? Yep. Do they have different color tints to remind you that you're actually in a different environment? Uh-huh. But do they actually play any differently?

See I've reed three of their reviews on the trot now, and just seems to me sometimes that they are less frustrated by the game as they are by the limitations of the medium.

The complaints about the cities just sounds so absurd. What the hell does he want? Idiot.

Well, judging by the (disappointing) ending of the game, we don't have to worry about that -- they are definitely setting up a sequel. And that's Assassin's Creed's biggest problem: It's a game what was clearly created with a sequel mindset. Instead of making a complete experience, we're getting a game that's obviously holding stuff back for the inevitable follow-up. For instance, I felt as if the historical assassination portion of the game could have been half of the overall experience, with the other half focusing on the present-day stuff. But no -- we have to wait for that. It sucks, yes, but I'm definitely willing to wait (albeit impatiently) until the next game eventually comes out. And it better -- I hate killing time in between games.

That doesn't sound good.

Anyway here is IGN's 7.7:

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/834/834676p1.html

Assassin's Creed could easily have been one of the best games of 2007. It is, without question, impressive on several fronts. But developer Ubisoft Montreal took some missteps along the way and squandered the immense potential of its pseudo-stealth action title. A bad story, repetitive gameplay elements, and poor AI lead to the downfall of one of the more promising games in recent memory. Assassin's Creed could have been one of the great games of this generation. Instead, it turned into just another action title.

Ouch.

Each of the three main cities was well-researched and beautifully recreated.

Sounds like what everyone is saying.

Though Assassin's Creed is an action game, the story plays a considerable role from start to finish. This is a story-heavy title, which proves a detriment in the long run. There is a major twist in the Assassin's story, the kind that (if it hasn't already been spoiled for you on the Internet) would likely blow the lid covering your brain. That is if this big twist were revealed towards the end of the story and not in the first five minutes. Ubisoft's decision to introduce the only major surprise just a few minutes into Assassin's Creed proves costly. Imagine if you were watching the Sixth Sense and ten minutes in the movie told you

(click to show/hide)

Bruce Willis is a ghost

. It would deaden the remainder of the story. This is exactly what happens with Assassin's. The moments with Altair are well-told and interesting (though perhaps a bit too drawn out), but every time the "twist" elements come into play, the entire game grinds to a halt. Over a 10- or 12-hour gaming experience, that becomes grating. So much so that all of the clever story elements begin to play against Assassin's Creed rather than elevating it to high art as seems to have been the intention.

Ouch again.

It doesn't help that the voice acting for Altair is abysmal. The 12th-century assassin speaks with an American accent and sounds as if he is auditioning for community theatre. He stands out against the rest of the cast, the rest of who offer fine performances. But when your star (who is forced to chatter almost as much as he kills) sounds like a B-movie reject, it takes away from the story. Sound in general is not impressive in Assassin's Creed. You'll hear the same handful of comments when running through cities repeated again and again. And the music is fairly absent in most instances to allow the atmosphere to be king. But there is little aural atmosphere.

OK that freakin' sucks. This is starting to sound like a Hitman game.

The good news for those who hate being stealthy is that the AI is pretty terrible. If you stick to the rooftops, you can get away with quite a lot. The guards on the roofs are plentiful, but dumb as bricks

Wow... I remember watching that E3 video a year ago and we all thought the AI looked horrible. Then most of us thought that it would be ironed out by release time.

If Assassin's Creed focused more on its open world and less on the minutiae; if it was a bit more clever and a little less pedantic, it could have turned out to be an incredible game. But this is a title that delivers on too little of its potential. There are some baffling design decisions. Though you play as an assassin, the final hour of gameplay devolves into a series of combat exercises. There is no way to be stealthy and no opportunity to run along the rooftops in these final missions. You fight and fight and fight until you reach the end boss at which time the game becomes Prince of Persia. Many won't make it that far. Assassin's Creed is too slow and too repetitive. It's a shame, because there are many great things in Assassin's Creed. There just happens to be an equal number of bad things. There are so many great individual elements, but they are lost among the myriad of poor decisions from Ubisoft Montreal. Wasting the big twist on the first five minutes of gameplay is a tremendous mistake, but not nearly as damaging as the ill-conceived assassination investigation quests, which get old fast. The exploration aspects of Assassin's Creed and the combat are both plusses in my book. But those two elements are only part of the whole.

[Pugnate]

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/assassinscreed/review.html?sid=6182793

I jam reading the gamespot review... totally different from IGN's review and 1ups. Then again 1Up didn't write a review, just random thoughts.

Assassin's Creed will stay with you long after you finish it. Here is one of the most unique gameworlds ever created: beautiful, memorable, and alive. Every crack and crevasse is filled with gorgeous, subtle details, from astounding visual flourishes to overheard cries for help. But it's more than just a world--it's a fun and exciting action game with a ton of stuff to do and places to explore, rounded out with silky-smooth controls and a complex story that will slowly grab you the more you play. Make no mistake: Assassin's Creed is one of the best efforts of the year and a must-own game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners.

Wow... guess they really liked it.

Anyway I am not going to bother quoting, the whole review is like that. Basically it seems that the gameplay is fun, but repetitive and not at all deep. The visuals and atmosphere are where the game really shines, and how impressed you are by the production values will determine how well you like the game.

To me, it just seems that IGN and 1up may be a little too harsh, but we'll see.

But it does sound like a bit of a one trick pony.

[Cobra951]

See I've reed three of their reviews on the trot now, and just seems to me sometimes that they are less frustrated by the game as they are by the limitations of the medium.

The complaints about the cities just sounds so absurd. What the hell does he want? Idiot.

That was my impression to a tee, when I was watching the IGN video review.  Are people beyond spoiled these days or what.  I could hardly believe what was unfolding on the screen, in extreme detail, on a console, and the incongruous voiceover was this bitter guy bitching about how it isn't the Second Coming of gaming, repetitive, not deep enough, blah blah.  Is total freedom in a realistic, massively populated world no longer entertainment in and of itself?
I wonder if anyone will complain about the Sixth Sense spoiler. 

[Pugnate]

Thanks for reminding me. I meant to put tags on that quote.

I agree with you man. I thought it was just me. As a reviewer they need to look beyond the hype, and that works both ways. On one end, you don't let yourself buy in and overrate the game, yet you don't underrate it either because it didn't meet your expectations. I mean the score doesn't reflect this, but IGN's written review makes it sound like the game is horrible.

And 1up's complaints are beyond ridiculous.

Fact is that I haven't played Crysis or Ass Ass In's creed yet, so I can't make a judgment. However the complaints seem to be petty.

[MysterD]

Destructoid is attacking IGN for changing some of their PS3 review of the Assassin's Creed

[Pugnate]

Jeebus.


I doubt IGN made the changes because of Sony. I am quite certain they just got a bad copy of the game etc. What they did was wrong, but James Sterling is acting like the typical paranoid gamer that seems to be plaguing the industry today.

He really does come off as an ass. He seems so full of it, and I am amazed how often he tries to sneak his own name into his 'report'.

I'm not sure why IGN felt the need to do this -- pressure from Sony and/or Ubisoft, a need to impress PS3 fans and keep them reading, or maybe they just didn't want Destructoid on the case. Either way, this kind of activity makes sites like us, who don't have the luxury of IGN's cash and traffic, who have worked hard for our credibility, look bad. It's not professional behavior, and not behavior I condone.

Way to add fuel to the fire. How good of him to speculate. With all the talk about reviewers being influenced by big companies etc., it is brilliant how he says IGN did the industry a disservice, and then goes on to speculate unintelligently. I think he is doing a far bigger disservice by accusing Sony of stooping to something so ridiculous.

Maybe they didn't want Destructoid to look bad?

Give me a break.

Even if I make a mistake on Destructoid, I keep it here, as my Elder Scrolls/MMO snafu proves.

What an egotistical fool.

Well, I do care in a fashion that IGN modified the review, but I don't care about IGN's running half as much as I care about Dtoid's own credibility. I'm just personally glad I never got that full-time job there if this is how it's run.

Get over yourself and your substandard website.

I am one of the last people to defend IGN. I find their writing to be of a pretty poor standard, and quite amateur. And there is no defending their actions here, but in all probability they got a bad copy of the game. To say that  Sony paid them off is just beyond retarded.

I'll end this post with a quote from Chris Rock,"The shit may be big, but don't make it bigger than it is."

[Quemaqua]

Seems to be a lot of that lately.  Maybe there's a "stupid fuckwit with job in games journalism" virus going around.

[Pugnate]

The time is ripe for Overwritten to unite.

EARTH! WIND! FIRE! WATER! HEART!

[MysterD]

The time is ripe for Overwritten to unite.

EARTH! WIND! FIRE! WATER! HEART!

HEART ruins everything!

[idolminds]

HEART LIFESTEAK

[gpw11]

The problem is that 'the blogging revolution" basically enabled those with a ton of excess free time yet little talent to become 'games journalists'.  Pump out four or five shitty articles a day, embed a 'digg this' button on the bottom of your page, get your internet clique to digg it, and BOOM next thing you know you're getting paid(?) to post on a 'reputable' underground site like shitty destructoid.  The guy sucks at what he does, but there's this aura around the industry that he's in kind of like a massive credit bubble.  His influence is in no way related to his ability or intelligence and people don't really catch that because he's been dugg or whatever.

If you think about it, the whole 'games journalism' thing is a joke. Not much happens in the games industry over a day, and yet dozens of major sites all make dozens of posts about the same news, usually linking to one another in some fucked up circle of life.  I mean look at this guy's 'stories', they're all links to other stories with his uninteresting and unintelligent commentary.  The only reason anyone reads it is because some other blog linked to it. And he posts like four worthless stories a day.  Somewhere in the last couple of years, the gaming population totally forgot that there is a difference between an article and a shitty blog.  Hopefully, that will be fixed one of these days.

[TheOtherBelmont]

For anyone curious, Gabe from PA made a pretty interesting news post about Assassin's Creed, reviews and gaming news sites, and how advertising plays into the reviews.  It's on the front page of Penny Arcade and he touches on several subjects and gives his own review of the game.  He brings up an interesting point about how reviews might be affected because reviewers rush through the games because of deadlines.

[Pugnate]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/

I just read his blog.

I have to say straight up, that I don't enjoy Penny Arcade. I find almost all their comics humorless, and am just amazed at their following. However that blog was excellent, and I can relate from the time I used to review games for AOG. I didn't get my games free either, so it was doubly frustrating.

The one game I remember was Jedi Outcast. I had paid $60 for the CE, and was trying to enjoy myself even though there was a deadline. When I went past the deadline, I got regular e-mail from Duckfat (my editor). It was a really hot title, so people were interested in a review. At the same time, I did not want to rush through.

Now I'm going to tell you how advertising on PA works. Every other game site out there takes ads for whatever game they can get. It doesn't matter if it's a pile of crap, if the publisher pays for the spot IGN or Gamespot or whoever will run the ad. That's fine but that's not how we do it and the news posts you just read are part of the reason why.

The difference is that his site is operated by two guys who handle everything including advertising. IGN, Gamespot etc are operated by companies. Their advertising is handled by a totally different department than what handles the writing. So it is a different scenario.

However this I found interesting:

We were huge fans of the first Prince of Persia game so when Ubi came to us and wanted to run ads for the second we said yes. We had no idea they were going to completely fuck it over. So from then on we started demanding playable copies of games before we'd agree to advertising. No matter how early the build we tell the publishers that unless we can see it played in front of us or play it ourselves we won't run ads for it. Obviously a lot can still go wrong during development but we make the best decisions we can. We do not think of the ads you see on our page as ads. They are recommendations and we try extremely hard to insure that anything we put over there is worth your time. When Prince of Persia 2 came out and we saw that it was crap we said as much on the site. Ads for the game appeared right next to those news posts slamming it. Needless to say Ubi wasn't very happy and Robert got some angry phone calls but our loyalty is to our readers not the people paying the bills. We explained to Ubi that the reason our ads perform better than any other site out there is because our readers trust us and that means we have to admit when something we advertise doesn't turn out as good as we hoped. Obviously they understood because we're still advertising their games but like I said this isn't the way other sites operate. I actually give Ubi a lot of credit for not just telling us to fuck off and buying more ads on IGN and Gamespy with the extra money.

Now that's pretty shocking. I have no respect for the greedy pigs that work at Ubisoft, having wasted money on so many of their unfinished games, that they left to rot in beta state. Games like Might & Magic, R6:Vegas, Double Agent, Silent Hunter were all released in awful states, and some took nearly a year to be patched.

But for Ubisoft to call the boys at Penny Arcade for a bad review is certainly nothing short of astonishing. Again that would happen at a bigger company because writers are separate from the people who handle advertising, but still... come on.

I think the biggest complaint I saw was that the missions become repetitive and boring. I actually didn't understand this complaint at all until just the other day. I had gotten an early copy of the game just like everyone else in the media but I was just playing it for fun. I'd cracked into it over the weekend and when I got into the office on Monday I started seeing these negative reviews. When I saw the low scores I was actually really upset and I wanted to talk about the game here on the site. I wanted to tell everyone that these guys were full of shit. However, since so many of the complaints were based on the ending I wanted to beat it first so I was sure I wasn't missing anything. I attacked the game again but this time with the goal of beating it as fast as I could. I was determined to get a post up on Tuesday and I was pushing through the game as fast as I could. I went from finding every high perch in a district to only getting the ones I needed to advance the story. I stopped saving every citizen and avoided any unnecessary confrontations. The informer missions that I had really enjoyed before, I now avoided because I knew they took too long to complete. I did the bare minimum of missions to progress the story and anything that "hindered" my progress was frustrating. Monday night after skipping over another combat (something I used to really enjoy) I stopped myself. What the fuck was I doing? I wasn't playing the game because I wanted to I was playing it because I had a deadline and I needed to beat it. I stopped immediately and decided I'd write about the game whenever I got around to beating it. I spent another day and a half with it and during that time I hunted for hidden flags and explored the cities again. I came in this morning and finally did beat it but I did it at my own pace and I enjoyed every part of it.

Imagine what an open ended sandbox title must look like to a reviewer especially right now. How many games do they have piling up on their desks? A game like Assassins creed isn't meant to be played under a deadline. You shouldn't be trying to beat it as fast as you can so you can move on to Mass Effect or Mario Galaxy. As soon as I gave myself a deadline all of a sudden I understood all their complaints. It was like a fucking Escher painting. I had put myself in their shoes and suddenly  the landscape flipped and I could see games from their perspective. In the end I wasn't angry at them for their bad reviews. I actually just felt bad for them.

-Gabe out

I can relate to that completely. I think it is one of the main reasons why Sirean stopped reviewing.

Anyway that was a very good read. I might at least follow their blogs now heh.

[Xessive]

Ok, I haven't played the game myself but I just realized where all the "time travel" plot confusion came from.

It's not really a spoiler since it's right at the start of the game, but better safe than sorry:

(click to show/hide)

The game starts off in modern times, and apparently human DNA stores memories as well genetic information. So basically Altaïr is the ancestor of this dude in the future and they're reading his DNA memory to figure out his history, with each chapter being a "Memory Block."

[Pugnate]

Seriously? That sounds really bad.

(click to show/hide)

If it has already happened, why bother doing anything?

[Xessive]

Seriously? That sounds really bad.

(click to show/hide)

If it has already happened, why bother doing anything?

Well, think of it as active retroactive continuity

[iPPi]

That PA article was a good read and I think it's very true.  It would definitely explain why the game is getting some poor reviews.

[Cobra951]

Imagine what an open ended sandbox title must look like to a reviewer especially right now. How many games do they have piling up on their desks? A game like Assassins creed isn't meant to be played under a deadline. You shouldn't be trying to beat it as fast as you can so you can move on to Mass Effect or Mario Galaxy. As soon as I gave myself a deadline all of a sudden I understood all their complaints. It was like a fucking Escher painting. I had put myself in their shoes and suddenly  the landscape flipped and I could see games from their perspective. In the end I wasn't angry at them for their bad reviews. I actually just felt bad for them.

That makes so much sense that I conclude it's exactly right.  I'm going to get this game.  I just know it.

[Pugnate]

Well on second thought, I guess he also has to accept the fact that not everyone liked the game, and it is pointless to speculate why. Maybe he genuinely didn't like it?

[Cobra951]

You totally confused me there.

[Pugnate]

He says that IGN gave it a low score because they were rushing through it etc. While that may be true, it is entirely possible that the reviewer for IGN, Hillary, just didn't like it for purely gaming reasons. I mean it is one thing to disagree with a reviews content and the reasons a reviewer gives, and another to attack the reviewers motives or whatever. It is just a little immature I think. 

[idolminds]

Well, Hillary *is* an idiot...