I got the feeling that might be the end of that thing, but yeah, not worth the time. The DLC sounded kind of interesting, but not interesting enough that I want to buy it.
I liked running around London, but after 35 hours of it, I'm pretty much ready for the next thing.
Collecting the flowers gives a nice little scene with Evie that you can probably just look up on youtube. The Jack the Ripper DLC was sort of interesting but frustrating to play. I really enjoyed being in Victorian London so I really sucked the marrow out of the game. If you don't feel the same, feel free to move on.
Collecting flowers was the first and only thing I 100%’d, but I did that pretty early on. I bought the map with the markers though.
The Assassin's Creed We're Vikings Now announcement made me realize that while I'd picked up Syndicate in a Steam Sale, I'd never actually played it, making it the only AC that I'd skipped.
Scattered thoughts:
I can't run the highest settings in this game, even though I built my computer several years after this game came out, and while it's still able to handle some pretty serious settings on modern games. Wth, Ubisoft?
London feels more real than pretty much any other AC city I've seen, including Origins and Odyssey. I suspect that the time period meant that there was a lot more reference material to use, as well as more cultural touchstones to draw on. Also, something about London's 19th century architecture is really distinct in a way that even Paris or Rome was not. Maybe it's the 19th-c advertisements, maybe they're just using better textures. Either way, it was kind of a surprise. I don't have any particular attachment to London, or to that time period, and usually don't find either all that compelling.
From the marketing materials, I was expecting Jacob to be sort of a dandy. The original images made him look like a pickup-artist with a steampunk fetish. It's been great to discover that he's actually sort of a himbo.
Evie getting little crushes on every other major scientific figure in Britain is delightful.
Somehow I had it in my head that Alexander Graham Bell was American. His actual allegiances according to a brief wikipedia rundown are more:
1. Canada
2. Scotland
3. England
4. The United States, if there's nothing better
Some of the story transition can be a bit jarring. Suddenly Jacob is in charge of a gang. Who are the gang lieutenants? Who is this guy in a top hat who periodically shows up to announce an appointment for a brawl? Who was leading the gang before Jacob dropped by? Not really covered. Also, the motivation behind this whole thing seems to be, "Brother, let's take over London! What a grand idea, dear sister, let us depart forsooth!" The narrative so far is still much better than in Unity, but that's not saying much. Really feels like this generation from Rogue through Syndicate the writing team just had no idea what to do.
Not really feeling the combat so far. Maybe the engine is just starting to show it's age, but it's just not interesting. Also, for some reason guns are woefully inadequate. I can instakill almost anyone with a knife, so why would I ever pull out a pistol?
I think we've finally banished the "stealth follow within x radius" missions that have been the bane of the franchise up to this point.
Syndicate was the game that turned Teresa into a psychopath. She really liked this game, but mostly, she just marveled at her bodycounts. She would call me in just to see the pile of death she created, with dozens and dozens of bodies in the street.
I can’t remember if it was Origins or Odyssey, but It was her next next step into her evolution into the baddest ass in all of virtual worlds.
She would call me in and say
T: You like my new horse?
J: Yeah. Where did you get it?
T: The last motherf*cker I killed. I always take their horse. Always.
Syndicate was the game that turned Teresa into a psychopath. She really liked this game, but mostly, she just marveled at her bodycounts. She would call me in just to see the pile of death she created, with dozens and dozens of bodies in the street.
Heh. I found a fun bug when I played Syndicate.
We were going to have a serious problem if you hadn't gotten to 75 before the end of the video. Very serious, indeed.
Thank you.
According to a comment on that video, that bug has unfortunately been patched.
Winston Churchill: If you could put your considerable talents to use, you would have the thanks of a grateful nation.
Lydia: I would settle for the right to vote.
I have been testing out my SteamLink that I finally have a use for with my new living situation and one of the games I never completed was all the side missions in Syndicate. Sadly I feel the Darwin/Dickens missions were stronger at the start and seem to be... I'm pulling out my hair with a few of them.
As a whole I absolutely loved the steampunk/old London feel of the game and enjoyed the story to a large degree. If I ever got tired of story missions, I'd go rob a train or a boat. I'm really hoping they do another AC game set in the steam era because I'd love to see something like this again.
I think my biggest fantasy for an AC game for next gen is 1890's South Africa, the British power is waning, their railways are their might in the region, and it'd allow us to have unique landscapes and missions. Plus if they add ray path tracing to the game, the smoke,foliage, and lighting would look spectacular.
Finished the main quest today and I'm glad I did. It's arguably one of the better games of the last generation of Assassins.
Scattered thoughts:
I didn't seem to have the same issues with the bounty missions as other people. You just had to do a little bit of setup beforehand where you murder a pathway to your carriage. The one exception came with a bounty in the middle of the park, where you would try and stalk into position, and inevitably some completely unrelated fight would break out between the templars and the Rooks or the cops, the target would hop on a carriage and would get out of range before you could give chase. Even more infuriating was chasing down a target on their carriage. I'm not sure it was possible to throw the guy out of the carriage, dismount from the carriage, catch up to him and hit the kidnap button before he could jump on a carriage and restart the whole process.
I had forgotten how bad the controls were in the previous AC games. I'm not sure I've ever played a big tentpole franchise where the contextual button presses would just plain fail to fire sometimes. It's not even about climbing. Often you'd be behind somebody hammering the B button to kidnap them, and nothing would happen. And if I recall, the controls here and in Unity were greatly improved!
AC has the weird late nineteenth century all-is-well-ending problem wherein it implies that the heroes are responsible for the leadup to the World Wars.
This probably wouldn't have been a great game coming off of Unity. I finished Unity with a long break in the middle, and it may be my least favorite of the ACs. In retrospect, I think I finally succumbed to AC fatigue. This was a really fun one to come back to after a long hiatus. I suspect it was not a fun one to jump in on at the end of a relentless release schedule of similar games.
AC Syndicate was released in April 2015. In the year of our lord May 2020, they are asking $27 for all story based DLC plus the $5 Dreadful Crimes DLC that is not included in the Season Pass. This is more than the actual game is selling for. Unless it hits a sale pretty soon, probably not gonna do any of that.
This is maybe a bit out there, but I have to wonder if the decision to give Jacob a top hat impacted the way this game was received. The design was just plain bad, the Victorian coat looked really chunky, the hat always seemed out of place and looked more Mad Hatter than English gentleman. And it received a lot of shade when they started rolling out promos. I don't know what a better design looks like, but there had to have been something better than what they ended up with.
This was better written than a lot of the other games of this generation, probably the best one since IV. Evie and Jacob are great characters who play off each other well, the overall plot makes probably more coherent sense than any Assassin's Creed before or since, and the Evie/Henry romance is really good. There's still a lot of bits that are just plain missing. It's kind of odd. Who was in charge of the Rooks other than Jacob? What were the rest of the Assassins doing while Evie and Jacob went rogue and marauded through London?
Henry and Evie adopted Clare and made her into an Assassin, right? Do I have to write this damn fan fiction myself?!
Glad Ubisoft took a hard stand on the burning question of Disraeli vs Gladstone.
The WWI sequence undercut a lot of the dramatic tension in the finale. Like, we've already seen the future on these people. We know how a lot of this has to happen. But besides that, it's probably the best part of the game. Really made me want them to set an AC during WWI. Talked about that a little bit in the Valhalla thread.
Excellent write up, thank you for posting. I’m currently playing through this in between other things and it’s been really great so far. Evie is probably my favorite AC protagonist at this point, and even Jacob is starting to grow on me. I have to be honest, I really didn’t care for the top hat to start out but it’s growing on me too. It totally fits with the time period, and based off his personality I could definitely see him wearing something like that.
As far as the season pass goes I couldn’t believe it was still 30 bucks either, but luckily I caught it on sale and bought everything for about 18 bucks.
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