Assassin's Creed 3: It's A Question of Motivation, Bob

Yes, I am indeed alive.  All of my procedures went off without a hitch and I now have two new teeth, missing my wisdom teeth and I now have experienced the sound of a tooth shattering inside my mouth.  All in all, not a terrible experience.

But I highly doubt anyone came to hear about medical procedures, so here's AC3.


After all the shit I've talked about uPlay, I do have to make the concession that their screenshots are a hell of a lot easier to get to.  The default position is a folder that's named properly after the game in my Pictures folder.  Very easy to access through the blogspot interface.  The only problem is, the screenshots do no ignore the overlay when taking them so half of my damn screenshot have "Screenshot Save" text box floating over them, completely ruining them.  You had one damn job uPlay and you fucked it up.

This is a better screenshot of the title ruined by the damn overlay

I really wanted to like Assassin's Creed 3.  I've been defending the series ever since the first iteration.  My patience was rewarded in spades when Assassin's Creed 2 came out which is, by all accounts, a fantastic game.  So I shoved my fingers in my ears when people started saying that AC 3 wasn't that good.

I had heard the exact same criticism for AC 1 and figured that people were going to complain for the sake of complaining.  People still seem to be upset that it's an action game.  Nothing in an assassin's job description says they have to be subtle, just saying.  I had a really hard time coming up with why I didn't like AC 3 as much as the others, but I think have it nailed down.  Before I tell you what it's problem is, I'll touch on the mechanics since there's quite a bit of change.

Combat works

They changed a lot.  The combat system only appears on the surface to be familiar.  But if you take the route I normally did with previous iterations, meaning you simply counter everything, you're going to have a rough time starting about a third of the way into the game.  I feel the changes to the combat systems are great.  It's a more dynamic feeling system that has more depth.  The counters now require some quick thinking on your part instead of a glorified quick time event.  The guns are insanely satisfying and I ended up using them just for the sake of using them.  It's rare for a game to capture a weapon's power in any sort of real sense, but AC3 does it rather well.

The running is about the same.  There's a few new contextual movements, but in general it's the same.  There's always this weird feeling to the controls in AC games, there's some sort of lag in the movements.  It kind of feels like controlling someone walking through mud.  They work fine for the most part, but there's something very odd about a lot of the animations.  Flipping 180 just looks odd, but I don't want them to slow it down so not sure how to fix that one.  But the big one is when you stop running you just kind of stop.  The animation just halts in the middle of the cycle, it's always been rather odd.

All in all, it's actually fine.  There's one mission near the end where you have to drop on a dude that's running and not kill him which is probably the single most frustrating thing I've ever experienced in a game, but that's a design problem.

I know the story has gotten a lot of criticism and I'm not sure why.  In the context of the problem of this game, which I'm saving until the end to keep people reading, I can see how the story would come off as a bit strange, but I rather enjoyed it.

The guy you initially play as is an excellent addition to the story and provides a surprising amount of context.  And he's the first established assassin in the series that I actually liked.  He had his shit together, he was calm, cool and collected and excelled in getting shit done.  And the events that involved him made you question your actions and how justified your anger truly was.

I also rather like Connor.  I think it's partially because he was Ezio 2.0, but he also had motivation.   Connor's character has garnered a lot of criticism for being overly dramatic and childish, but that's the point.  He's supposed to be the child.  The growing up is considerably more heavy-handed than Ezio, but I don't feel it was unwarranted.  Connor's character seemed human and was interesting.  His story seemed a bit rushed in parts, and lagged a bit longer than it should have in others, I could have done just fine by losing about half of his childhood section, but for the most part I think the pacing is fine.  I supposed if you rush through the game nothing is going to seem right, but it's AC, go collect shit.

I actually gave part of a shit about Connor which should be commended because I'm a callous asshole and don't generally like main characters or gain any sort of connection with them.  There was even a part, near the end where I got a little misty eyed, pretty tough feat unless you're Up.

Did I mention it's really pretty?

But here it is.  Here's the problem that essentially wrecked would could have been the best in the series.  The world is boring as shit.  Man, did I want to like this world.  Colonial America is right up there in the best time periods you could put a game like Assassin's Creed.  Meet the founding fathers, find out which of them rose to power using questionable means, climb on colonial America.  I was so excited, but it's awful.

The problems with the word extend out much further than just setting problems.  The world was very, very difficult to get around.  This is bad for a sandbox type game.  The trading and village system was really cool in my mind, but once I started filling it in, it all fell short.  Trading seemed incredibly shallow, even more so than the investments in AC2.  I figured out about 20 minutes into sea trading that one type of shipment to one port would give me enough money for everything, so that was the end of that.  Getting to side missions is a pain in the ass.  Walking anywhere off the beaten path, especially in the fucking winter, fucking slow ass snow, is a gigantic pain in the ass.

The way upgrades worked also made me angry.  There is no clear path to get any upgrades.  The upgrades in AC2 made sense, you deciphered them from codex pages and they had progression.  "I want more upgrades, therefore I need more codex pages."  And then you got them in a predetermined order that made sense with the progression of the game.  In AC3, the second you get trading opened up, there's a slew of questionably useful upgrades with zero indication of the path you need to follow to get them.  The only one I wanted was dual holsters which would have made much more sense if someone made them for you.  Why exactly do they need a specific type of wood?  Seems like anything would work.  A system like this can work, FarCry 3 did it just fine.  It didn't make sense why you needed a specific leather for a pouch, but at least the progression was straightforward.

Getting around in AC2 was enjoyable, in AC3 it's a chore.  You interaction with historical characters is shallow and limited, although I really did like Samuel Adams, he was awesome.

It's just a little astounding how one could mess it up, the game writes itself.

It's just disappointing, I guess.  It had everything it needed and somehow put the puzzle together backwards.  I wanted to like it so, so very much, but I don't, at least not nearly as much as AC2.  It's technically okay, the writing, despite it's distinct lack of founding fathers is fine, even good at points.  I liked the characters but it all falls down being placed in the world as it is.