Assassin's Creed 3 Catch-All

Thurgrim wrote:

And then there's Connor. While the concept and setup of a Native American Assassin is awesome, what a terribly boring and poorly voice acted protagonist. He just has zero personality, especially compared to Ezio.

Spoiler:

Haytham was way more interesting to play as, and I found myself really missing him after the extended prologue.

I agree -- I'm mostly really enjoying the game, but Connor is just such a dull cipher after playing Ezio. My wife has been watching me play some, and has nicknamed Connor "Not-zio."

You really need to play through all the Homestead quests to get a feel for Connor as a human being. For the main story, he's mostly just "Rawr! Kill! Freedom! Shut up old man!"

I played through all the homestead missions. I still feel he has the personality of a snail. Or a rock. Maybe a piece of grass?

BadKen wrote:

You really need to play through all the Homestead quests to get a feel for Connor as a human being. For the main story, he's mostly just "Rawr! Kill! Freedom! Shut up old man!"

I think the Homestead missions were just awesome, really one of the best additions to the franchise.

SallyNasty wrote:

I think the Homestead missions were just awesome, really one of the best additions to the franchise.

I'm enjoying the homestead stuff more than I expected to. The crafting stuff is wayyyyy more complicated than I'm interested in, though. I'm just making money by selling furs instead of figuring out what crafted goods are worthwhile.

And the naval missions are loads of fun.

SallyNasty wrote:
BadKen wrote:

You really need to play through all the Homestead quests to get a feel for Connor as a human being. For the main story, he's mostly just "Rawr! Kill! Freedom! Shut up old man!"

I think the Homestead missions were just awesome, really one of the best additions to the franchise.

Rounding up pigs.... best addition to franchise... um.... I... er....

We played the same game yes? :p

BlackSabre wrote:
SallyNasty wrote:
BadKen wrote:

You really need to play through all the Homestead quests to get a feel for Connor as a human being. For the main story, he's mostly just "Rawr! Kill! Freedom! Shut up old man!"

I think the Homestead missions were just awesome, really one of the best additions to the franchise.

Rounding up pigs.... best addition to franchise... um.... I... er....

We played the same game yes? :p

Come on, they weren't all rounding up pigs. Some of them even had combat!

BlackSabre wrote:

Rounding up pigs.... best addition to franchise... um.... I... er....

Got to that one a little while ago--my favorite part was how I had no indication of how I might accomplish that, so I ended up thinking "Well, in Red Dead, it worked this way."

I did laugh at applying assassin skills to match-making, though.

LibrarianX wrote:
SallyNasty wrote:

I think the Homestead missions were just awesome, really one of the best additions to the franchise.

I'm enjoying the homestead stuff more than I expected to. The crafting stuff is wayyyyy more complicated than I'm interested in, though. I'm just making money by selling furs instead of figuring out what crafted goods are worthwhile.

And the naval missions are loads of fun.

The only crafting that is worthwhile is the 'Special' category that crafts upgrades for Connor (weapons, pouches, convoys, etc). Outside of that, yeah, just sell furs. Beaver seems to bring in the highest amount.

BadKen wrote:
BlackSabre wrote:
SallyNasty wrote:
BadKen wrote:

You really need to play through all the Homestead quests to get a feel for Connor as a human being. For the main story, he's mostly just "Rawr! Kill! Freedom! Shut up old man!"

I think the Homestead missions were just awesome, really one of the best additions to the franchise.

Rounding up pigs.... best addition to franchise... um.... I... er....

We played the same game yes? :p

Come on, they weren't all rounding up pigs. Some of them even had combat!

You're right, that Break-up the fight between Godfrey and Terry mission was awesome. The way you had to wiggle those sticks to try and hold them back. Man, I was thrilled. Glued to my seat. Like real exciting stuff. You know I think of the developer just busting out of his chair at the design meeting to tell everyone his idea for that. I bet he got a real big round of applause.

Oh and the playing bowls one. I figure that's what an real assassin would do in his spare time. You know, when he's not scaling cliffs to pick flowers to give to Norris's crush.

Yes, I'm being an ass.

There was some level of fun to be had. The combat was actually pretty decent when you got into the flow of it. I actually worked out that the y counter was brutal. You could use your bow, pistols, heck even the animal snare if it was equipped as an instant kill counter. That's good stuff. That's kinda what you expect when you play a game called Assassin's Creed 3. I'm passionate about it because I really love the series and just don't think AC3 hit the mark. Not even half way. Bring back the guy who did AC2. He knew how to lead a team and create some really fun gameplay and an interesting story.

nel e nel wrote:

The only crafting that is worthwhile is the 'Special' category that crafts upgrades for Connor (weapons, pouches, convoys, etc). Outside of that, yeah, just sell furs. Beaver seems to bring in the highest amount.

Whoa. I have not been paying any attention to the upgrade crafting. I'll get on that.

I would enjoy an entire game

Spoiler:

with Haytham as the protagonist. He had an 18th-century master secret agent vibe that I enjoyed a lot.

I would recommend the Saddle Bags! At first, you're like "wtf? when do I use these?"

Then you call your horse, and all your stuff gets refreshed when you walk around your horse!

Free snares! Free arrows! Was certainly helpful before they patched the naval-missions-emptying-your-consumables glitch.

I really like Haytham Kenway. Quality voice acting. 18th century secret agent indeed. I anticipate I'll be sad to see him go following his inevitable exit.

I'm still real early, obviously. Coming into this straight from Revelations, they sure have made the climbing even easier. As someone elwsehere said about AssLib, it's like you're suspended in world of easily-moved-through gel. I figured that was just the case for the handheld, but it carries over here too.

LibrarianX wrote:
nel e nel wrote:

The only crafting that is worthwhile is the 'Special' category that crafts upgrades for Connor (weapons, pouches, convoys, etc). Outside of that, yeah, just sell furs. Beaver seems to bring in the highest amount.

Whoa. I have not been paying any attention to the upgrade crafting. I'll get on that.

I would enjoy an entire game

Spoiler:

with Haytham as the protagonist. He had an 18th-century master secret agent vibe that I enjoyed a lot.

You can also scroll through which vendors to sell your furs to. They are grouped by location: NY, Boston and Frontier. Each vendor gives different prices for items you sell them.

nel e nel wrote:
LibrarianX wrote:
nel e nel wrote:

The only crafting that is worthwhile is the 'Special' category that crafts upgrades for Connor (weapons, pouches, convoys, etc). Outside of that, yeah, just sell furs. Beaver seems to bring in the highest amount.

Whoa. I have not been paying any attention to the upgrade crafting. I'll get on that.

I would enjoy an entire game

Spoiler:

with Haytham as the protagonist. He had an 18th-century master secret agent vibe that I enjoyed a lot.

You can also scroll through which vendors to sell your furs to. They are grouped by location: NY, Boston and Frontier. Each vendor gives different prices for items you sell them.

And once you have the Aquila, you can sell to the 4 different destinations (and significantly lower their risk by doing the Naval missions).

CRAFTING FOR MONEY: As far as doing it for money goes, it is pretty easy to make more than you need by just sending a bunch of Beaver and Deer pelts out (Bear when you can get them late in the game). If this game was made by teams sitting in different rooms not communicating, then the crafting team should be fired: they made a really complex system that offers almost no reward for pursuing it. The only reason to dive in to really complex crafting is a few optional and hard-to-find collection quests where people want you to bring them certain rare items; these quests have no reward except a tiny amount of money and completion percentage.

The only real use for large sums of money is upgrades to the Aquila. I eventually bought them all because Why Not?, but fire shot and hull were the really compelling ones.

CRAFTING FOR UPGRADES: It seemed like you get a very limited amount of "special iron ingots," which all of the crafted weapons require. Go for all the pouches and stuff right away, but weigh which weapons you actually want, instead of getting every pistol as soon as you can craft it (like I did) and then having no ingots left for the best sword in the game.

There still isn't a lot of depth to this crafting either. Homestead missions open in later chapters, doing these missions make advanced resources available, these resources are required to craft the good weapons. It's just a subtle gateway to not let you get the great weapons too soon.

I enjoyed AC3 immensely, but in a better realized and collaboratively developed game, they could have done much more with crafting. More complexity (craft ingredients used to craft other ingredients which are then used to craft the final product), more branching crafting paths with limited resources, more rare materials Conner has to personally go and hunt for, perhaps the ability to sacrifice a useful weapon to craft something better or at least different/unique...

beeporama wrote:

If this game was made by teams sitting in different rooms not communicating, then the crafting team should be fired: they made a really complex system that offers almost no reward for pursuing it.

+1 The one system that was over-engineered and under-utilized.

Meanwhile, in Skyrim, I'm having a blast with crafting and alchemy (it does help that iron ore is so prevalent, and I made a bee-line for the Transmute Ore spell early on...)

beep: the special iron ingots are - I believe - rewards from doing quests. I noticed them popping up on my rewards when I would complete them. I don't think ALL missions reward them though, possibly only main storyline ones. The game ultimately gives you enough to craft all the weapons in the special category, but honestly, the disparity between the different weapons is so unbalanced that I ended up only buying 1 gun and 1 sword from the stores and just using those for the rest of the game.

There's also a chest near the Homestead that always has a special iron ingot or two in it if you don't have any.

I actually have fun with the crafting. It's fun to me to figure out what I can make from all the junk I get from sending my Assassins on missions and all the bits I get from hunting animals. It also helps that I love the hunting part of the game, which is weird, because I'm not usually a big fan of farming junk for the sake of farming.

It does seem like the crafting is sort of hanging off a corner of the game. I suspect they were really rushed and didn't get a chance to make any decent side missions. The Assassination missions are certainly an example of that. Those missions were SO much better in Assassin's Creed II, with their mini stories and their sometimes elaborate settings. In Assassin's Creed III it's just "Please go kill this guy that is walking back and forth next to this house."

So, the map. I've done all the Eagle points, yet there still seem to be massive sections of the city still under shroud. Do more show up? Is this a peculiarity of the PS3 version? Am I mad?

SpacePPoliceman wrote:

So, the map. I've done all the Eagle points, yet there still seem to be massive sections of the city still under shroud. Do more show up? Is this a peculiarity of the PS3 version? Am I mad?

You're not mad, some can only be revealed by walking through them. Being up high allows you to reveal a larger area as you travel.

Demosthenes wrote:
SpacePPoliceman wrote:

So, the map. I've done all the Eagle points, yet there still seem to be massive sections of the city still under shroud. Do more show up? Is this a peculiarity of the PS3 version? Am I mad?

You're not mad, some can only be revealed by walking through them. Being up high allows you to reveal a larger area as you travel.

Thanks. That's...really annoying.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:
SpacePPoliceman wrote:

So, the map. I've done all the Eagle points, yet there still seem to be massive sections of the city still under shroud. Do more show up? Is this a peculiarity of the PS3 version? Am I mad?

You're not mad, some can only be revealed by walking through them. Being up high allows you to reveal a larger area as you travel.

Thanks. That's...really annoying.

There's also some in-game challenges tied to revealing 90% of each map. AC3 is the first time I've seen them not reveal 90% of the map just through eagle points.

McIrishJihad wrote:
SpacePPoliceman wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:
SpacePPoliceman wrote:

So, the map. I've done all the Eagle points, yet there still seem to be massive sections of the city still under shroud. Do more show up? Is this a peculiarity of the PS3 version? Am I mad?

You're not mad, some can only be revealed by walking through them. Being up high allows you to reveal a larger area as you travel.

Thanks. That's...really annoying.

There's also some in-game challenges tied to revealing 90% of each map. AC3 is the first time I've seen them not reveal 90% of the map just through eagle points.

My favorite was discovering just how much space there was north of New York proper when I was goofing off in the underground and ended up at an entrance like up in some church near the transition to west point.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:
SpacePPoliceman wrote:

So, the map. I've done all the Eagle points, yet there still seem to be massive sections of the city still under shroud. Do more show up? Is this a peculiarity of the PS3 version? Am I mad?

You're not mad, some can only be revealed by walking through them. Being up high allows you to reveal a larger area as you travel.

Thanks. That's...really annoying.

The reason for this is so that you have to go find the forts. They are all located in the areas not revealed by high points.

Also I think the achievement for revealing the map requires less than 90%. I don't know the exact amount, but I've heard 75% and 80% mentioned in various places.

"The Infamy" dlc is out today, the first in the three-part Tyranny of King Washington story, and... It's set in an alternate universe? One where Conner is never recruited by the Assassins and must stand alone to protect his tribe from the mad George Washington, King of the United States.

Supposedly it's going to tie back into the main story somehow. Hopefully it's not all just a dream, or some similar 80's tv trope.

IMAGE(http://www.cinemablend.com/images/sections/51769/_1359047983.jpg)

Connor shot JR?

I don't know that I'll be able to resist this.

The barrier that stops me from fully buying into multiplayer, the season pass, and so on is the idea that I'd be playing with people who spent additional money to unlock all the abilities from the get go. If that were part of the season pass, I guess I'd say f*ck it and join the dark side, but it's not even included.

I got the season pass and all, but screw multiplayer. I don't do multiplayer. Even though I got the online pass free for buying new. They are two different things, Slumberland, so maybe you can get the season pass without doing multiplayer too? Might as well if you're pretty sure you want to do The Madness Of King George or what have you.

Storywise, I'm guessing this will all tie in as being some kind of animus training exercise to try to unlock latent powers that Conner will have in this "alternate reality" in the candidate using the animus. Curious to find out. But I think I'm going to wait until the whole enchilada is released before playing this...