Assassin's Creed Patch Notes
I really like Assassin's Creed. It's a technological marvel with impressive control features set in a world that is an absolute joy to explore. I recommend it to anyone with thumbs and a console. Hold this knowledge close to your heart as you read my imaginary patch notes containing the things I think would take Assassin's Creed into a whole new realm of greatness -- rather than a really good two hours of gameplay stretched out to about ten.
Fake, Imaginary, Totally Made-Up Patch Notes For Assassin's Creed
Thanks to all the fan feedback on Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft will be releasing a patch for the Xbox 360 and PS3 before Christmas. These changes will also be rolled into the upcoming PC version of the game.
- Added all new missions for the Kingdom area that take advantage of the open landscape and gives the area more purpose. This includes horseback chases, "hold the pass" missions, and even an actual reason to have horseback combat.
- Added an option to skip rescued citizen dialogue. We know, it gets a little tired after a while.
- Decreased the timeout period before guards will give up the chase once you're out of view. No more extended "danger" yellow periods until you find a roof-top cat box, bench or pile of hay to jump in.
- Added a picture-in-picture screen for main assassination targets allowing the player to move freely while the target delivers his speech rather than just pace around like a caged animal.
- Certain target missions have been redone to involve more chases and encourage pre-assassination planning by the player. Killing surrounding guards, finding a stealthy way to the target, etc.
- Players can now jump straight from the Assassin fortress to the target city, plot permitting.
- Added a full day/night cycle. At night, extra guards roam the streets and rooftops with torches. Some missions will take places at night.
- Some Templars now have horses in the field.
- The player can now run in "… the other area.
- Improved some frame rate issues on the PS3
- Pickpocketed targets will no longer do the "Oh noes I'm been pickpockets!" mime performance.
Added a higher difficulty mode with the following additions:
- Citizens will now run to the nearest guard if they see you climbing a wall for more than five seconds.
- More guards added to the rooftops and surrounding areas.
- All enemies require at least two throwing knives to kill.
- Guards will react immediately to any unusual movements by the player. Climbing buildings, knocking civilians over, etc.
- Completing a "rescue citizen" mission will not automatically return status to anonymous.
- Some "loyal citizens" can impede escape from the guards much like the vigilantes help the player by impeding the guards.
We hope that that these (pretend, totally made up by Gamers With Jobs) changes improve the game experience for our loyal customers.
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Good idea for an article.
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I'd say most of those would be great. AC was such a mixed bag of 'awesome' and 'meh' for me personally.
I was pretty borderline about it the first few hours of play, in spite of having those brief moments of sweetness. The next extended play session was much more rewarding, but all I was doing was running around the city, shanking guards, climbing buildings, and completely ignoring. After that, I felt I was pretty much done with the game.
This is probably the only thing that I would complete disagree with you on. If anything, I wish the guards were even a little more persistent, unless this is more of an end-game versus earlier game play issue. I probably had the most fun when I was trying to break a pursuit. That is, as rarely as I tried to run, considering that sticking around and just fighting it out was usually somewhat trivial.
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I thought this one might be a little confusing. I actually agree that quicker, more persistent guards would be fun. What I mean to say is, for example, when you trigger guards in the Kingdom areas and ride far, far away you still have to hide to get rid of the beeping alert noise. Same in the city at times, there's no guard anywhere near you and you still have to sit on a bench to clear the threat meter.
Yeah, it's scary. I'm staring into the abyss right now, and it's staring into me, which I think is kind of a dick move on the abyss's part. - Nyles
Ha! Nice. Sounds like this game has some issues.
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Yeah, a day/night cycle had occurred to me, though it would presumably be more work than just a lighting change.
I'd like a more sandboxy approach to the assassination targets, with the targets doing more than the single cutscene you see at the moment. Have them interact with each other, go to bed, nob their mistresses, go to prayer, everything. Then the information you get from the "information gathering" phase might tie specifically into the way you can choose to kill them. If a pickpocket mission throws up that the guard on the west tower is a drunk, then you can use that practically to gain access to the fortress. They can still add gates to the plot by having the presence of later targets predicated on the deaths of the earlier targets.
I guess we have to be careful not to overlap this game's features with either Thief or Hitman, which aren't really what the game is about. Though the death options of Hitman together with the standard stealth gameplay of Thief and the sandbox cities of Assassin's Creed does sound fun.
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Every game has some issues.
That so many people are nitpicking Assassin's Creed (and I'm seeing this with Mass Effect a lot too) seems like a good sign, that we can find specific criticisms, rather than "the whole thing is a mess" or "completely not fun." It's not the seemingly uncriticizable Super Mario Galaxy (which I haven't played), but it's at least the sign of a good game that we'd want to "patch" it instead of just throw it away for something else.
How about making the the worst element in the game something worth doing. I'm talking about the flag chase. No reason to do it in the game and all you get is an achievement unlock for completion. So instead how about at full collection you get new assassination techniques or history excerpts of the knights your fighting. A bing thing I love about Mass Effect is the Codex. So something similar would be nice.
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- Doing more than the minimum amount of missions (save the citizen, etc.) will give you other options on how to assassinate your main target.
- Flags have been replaced with memory fragments leading to addidional content and not just achevements
and a personal one...
- You can do battle/escape by jumping up onto the heads of the citizens like in Xena, Hercules (or any other riduculious TV show of the like).
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I'd buy AC if it were improved like this.
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I liked AC.
I think I would love this game.
*Legion* wrote:
Apparently you didn't go far enough in the Kingdom. Eventually, you do hit some imaginary distance requirement that drops the entire alert status and you're anonymous again. One thing that did bug the crap out of me though was the ability for Archers on the guard towers to always identify you, even if you were blending. It seemed rather arbitrary.
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How about no beeping, ever. Ever.
Danjo Olivaw Lives
Eventually, yes. I want that "eventually" to come sooner.
Done! I'll totally patch that in ... damn my dreams not becoming reality! Another good one for the list, though.
Yeah, it's scary. I'm staring into the abyss right now, and it's staring into me, which I think is kind of a dick move on the abyss's part. - Nyles
Umm...I can do this now. I'm not sure if it's because I've been doing things like climbing every "eagle eye view tower" in all the cities and the Kingdom area but when I got my latest targets, as soon as I left the town by the fortress, I was able to pick the city I wanted to go to and it warped me right there. I also immediately warp back to the guy at the fortress when I complete an assassination. It would appear something has to be done to unlock this though and I agree, that's dumb.
If by the "other area", you mean the Kingdom, I agree. It's ridiculous that when all you really have to do there is travel between cities, that the guards instantly become suspicious if you do anything but trot by them at the lowest possible walking speed. I even had them go into full alert for no apparent reason when I trotted too close to one. If you aren't running at full-tilt, balls out speed, they shouldn't care.
Despite this, I'm still loving the game and like Karla and others, I'm pacing myself and doing all the side stuff. Repetitive though it may be, I actually find the slower pace and exploring of the cities to be very relaxing which is strange for me.
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I want to get the mission and then go, no running out of the starting town even. That still takes a few minutes every time.
Yeah, it's scary. I'm staring into the abyss right now, and it's staring into me, which I think is kind of a dick move on the abyss's part. - Nyles
Agreed. I'm sure we all do the same route out of Masyaf now for the fastest way out (three jumps off of short cliffs, a leap of faith, then sprint to the gate), but it still would've been simpler and a lot less time consuming for there to be some kind of "Stable Master" in the courtyard next to the fighting ring, to allow you to train when necessary, and then just talk to the stable master and ask him for a horse to go wherever.
I was afraid the first time I had to go back to Masyaf after my first mission in Damascus. I walked out the city gate with the horse and though, "Oh crap, am I going to have to ride through the Kingdom every time?" Thankfully that fear was never realized, but it's still annoying to have to run through all of Masyaf and then down a long road to get the warp screen.
Oh, and you mentioned skip citizen dialog, but how about just a general skip cutscene? I've gotta say, going back after beating the game and going into Memory Block Six every time to flag/templar hunt, I've got that damned speech memorized now.
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But there's that guard just outside the fortress that's looking out over a cliff, just asking to be pushed over the edge every single time.
Danjo Olivaw Lives
I'm done with the main story and I'm running around the kingdom and various cities looking for flags and templars, and it's really annoying to have to start over with every reload--there should still be a save option that allows you to return to your last location.
It sounds like a buy when it hits the PC. I'm hoping they listen to your suggestions.
Curiously, was your review style influenced at all by Stanislaw Lem's reviews of imaginary books?
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I don't think so, since I have no idea what that is. I mostly did it this way because I thought the game was so close to being great, it wouldn't take much to push it over the edge. I'm also very lazy.
Yeah, it's scary. I'm staring into the abyss right now, and it's staring into me, which I think is kind of a dick move on the abyss's part. - Nyles
So what your saying Certis is the game needed another 6 months of polish. The city is great but the missions should have had more time in the oven.
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I'm not sure another 6 months would have changed anything. I agree with most of these suggestions, but in a lot of ways they address concept decisions in how to approach the gameplay, not flaws in the realm of gameplay bugs.
So maybe saying it needs a sequel would be a good way of phrasing it. Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of the game, twice.
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I would hope that a development team with millions in their budget would remember this stuff during the design phase. Who makes a huge overworld with nothing to do in it? In Shadow of the Colossus such a choice was artistic. In Assassin's Creed you feel like you are missing the "real game" somewhere.
I'm not 100% certain, but there is the possibility that this project was much smaller in the beginning, and Ubisoft saw potential and ballooned the budget. Perhaps these features were originally in the game and had to be cut or risk adding another 2 years to the game. With the level of polish on Assassin's Creed, I don't think the creators ignored the things we are seeing.
However, this is typical of Ubisoft, who likes to sell their various prototypes as full games. If Ubi owned Blizzard, then we'd have played Warcraft Adventures plus Starcraft Ghost 1 & 2. If Ubi owned Valve, then we'd be playing TF4 in the Orange Box.
We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.
There's a lot to be said about the comparison between Shadow of the Colossus and Assassin's Creed. They play the same in many ways. Unfortunately, Assassin's Creed was hyped as more of a "real game" and it takes a bit of adjustment.
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Right. Another thing I'm reminded of, when I think of the japanese, either developers of games or animae or manga, I am reminded of an incredible economy of use. They get a lot out of a little.
We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.
I think this is ignoring all the crap we don't get exposed to. There's countless drawn out, overdone, and terrible anime and manga floating around.
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