AC: Syndicate was announced a month earlier than E3, probably the same for this one, maybe sooner, given that the gap between releases is bigger now.
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[RUMOR/NOT CONFIRMED] Assassin's Creed Empire (Egypt setting) screenshot leaked
- Thread starter Galava
- Start date
AC: Syndicate was announced a month earlier than E3, probably the same for this one, maybe sooner, given that the gap between releases is bigger now.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
You literally can't climb or vault with just RT. You'd have a horrible time navigating either the world of ACU or ACS with just RT. AC3-Rogue was hold RT to parkour, ACU-S had a good amount of depth that had a skill threshold to understand since the game geometry was way more complex than the previous games.
and counters literally did no damage. You parried similarly to Batman which opened enemies up to attacks but on the whole had to be a lot more aggressive than past games.
How many open world games can you think of with more complex climbing mechanics and geometry than AC? Because the majority of open world games and games in general amount to literally press x to jump on clearly painted surfaces.
TimeEffect
Member
I know Egypt can get a good rep in AC because of how wonderfully detailed the games are, but I really just find the entire setting overdone. We have lots of games and media based on locations like Egypt.
I honestly feel two of the biggest cultures, India and China, have not only a fantastic world, but a beautifully special culture that would feel so refreshing. Especially for the gaming medium.
I honestly feel two of the biggest cultures, India and China, have not only a fantastic world, but a beautifully special culture that would feel so refreshing. Especially for the gaming medium.
More_Badass
Member
We haven't. We've had games that use the pop culture idea of Egypt, that have had pyramids and mummies
But what games have actually featured Egypt? Like as an actual place and not as a themed arena with some enemies with pharaoh crowns and staffs and maybe a crocodile, with a Sphinx statue and a pyramid in the background
Darkstorne
Member
Haha! Yeah, that's a pretty great analogy. There's a good reason I haven't finished the story of an AC game since 3 despite having bought them all. It starts to feel like completing chores far too quickly. Here's hoping that changes this year and I can finish Empire.
I mainly buy them for the historical tourism these days.
Mirror's Edge: Catalyst. That being said, nobody was talking about using open-world as a limiting factor. You said that the last two AC games had in-depth parkour mechanics, not "in-depth parkour mechanics for open-world games" so I'll also include the first Mirror's Edge, the PS1 Tomb Raider games and Free Running. Assassin's Creed never had particularly in-depth traversal mechanics but especially not since AC3 when the parkour basically became "hold one button, push the stick in a direction and watch the character do everything by himself". That may be complex from a programming and animation standpoint but from a gameplay perspective, it's over-automated, sleep-inducing bullshit. Sure, with Unity they made it a little bit less automated but it's still more automated than it used to be pre-AC3 and calling it in-depth is quite frankly a joke. It's marginally better than press-A-for-awesome.
Tomb Raider 4. Unless you're talking specifically about ancient Egypt.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
It's literally less automated than AC1-Revelations due to them having too little contexts and thus a more rigid climbing system and level design, AC3 was more automated for the sake of animation but ACU flew in the complete opposite and gave us the most complex climbing system in the series, if you attempt to let the game try to guess what you want you'll more than likely fail and constantly lose momentum compared to manually deciding what to press at any given time, case in point, watch people attempt The Tournament in ACU. Even ME:C has some issues due to the way the world is designed. Consider how few examples you were able to come up with, TR on PS1? and the first ME. If anything it's a shame that Unity lacked parkour challenges outside of the tournament, (aside from the time anomaly challenges). The system would work well with the dungeon like challenges of the Ezio games.
If Time Anomalies remain a thing they can get really creative with them.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Suppose this is a good time to go down the list of rumors
Jesper Kyd may be returning as he's working on two unnannounced games atm
The game will have "cause and effect" gameplay design where your actions affect the world according to one of Ubi's devs
Jesper Kyd may be returning as he's working on two unnannounced games atm
The game will have "cause and effect" gameplay design where your actions affect the world according to one of Ubi's devs
To be fair, it's been a long time since I've played the first few Assassin's Creed games so they may have been more automated than ACU (though looking at the other statements in your post, I'm more inclined to believe that they aren't and you just have an incredibly distorted view of reality). The fact that the game even tries to guess what you want to do and tries to do it on its own already undermines its complexity from a gameplay standpoint, though. If you actively need to work against the game to just get your character to perform the action you wanted them to perform or jump in the direction you wanted them to jump into, your game's control system is shit.
The reason I was only able to come up with those few examples is because there simply aren't a whole lot of actually good 3D platformers with "in-depth mechanics" being made. And what's wrong with PS1 TR or the first Mirror's Edge? Both of those had some of the best 3D platforming mechanics ever conceived and both of them are leaps and bounds ahead of any of the Assassin's Creed games when it comes to controls. (And yes, I know people will say how shit TR's tank controls were but if you took the time to learn them, they were incredibly powerful and reliable, two words that you'll never hear anyone use to describe Assassin's Creed's controls - unless they seriously overhaul them for future entries.)
BigBoss007
Member
I wouldn't call that "a leak" or "breaking news" since Ubisoft nearly announced in Watch Dogs 2 that the next Assassin's Creed would take part in Egypt.
Pretty sure we knew about Egypt even before then. The news isn't the setting but the screenshot.
What makes you think that?
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
You realize the reason that the Ezio games are more automated are not just because the controls were much more limiting but the level design as well? The parkour didn't feel like a true 3d space until ACU, since you constantly make moment to moment decisions much more so than the Ezio games because you have way more manual controls.
It's less fighting the game and more actually taking control of the character instead of letting an algorithm decide what you wanna do while climbing a shit ton of in-game geometry.
There's nothing wrong with either it just shows how far and few between games with complex climbing mechanics are, let alone one with the scale of an AC game.
If you take the time to learn about AC current controls you're a lot better off than the majority of players who actually believe the RT to parkour meme.
tearsintherain
Member
I'm ready for more AC, really hope they reboot the current day story and just make it simpler, lighter touch, and don't feel the need to build up to insanity - just a simple "Templars will fight Assassins throughout time, including the present".
(re)Playing Ezio Collection right now very slowly (~5 hours a week), on brotherhood right now and its amazing to me how much more I am enjoying the AC2 line than Syndicate or Unity. Hope they return back to a charming protagonist who has flaws and is passionate, instead of the Syndicate protagonists who just kinda felt ... boring.
(re)Playing Ezio Collection right now very slowly (~5 hours a week), on brotherhood right now and its amazing to me how much more I am enjoying the AC2 line than Syndicate or Unity. Hope they return back to a charming protagonist who has flaws and is passionate, instead of the Syndicate protagonists who just kinda felt ... boring.
Couldn't see if this had been mentioned already. His shield has Lambda on it, which is the symbol for Sparta (or Lacedaemon). That might date it better, since we know it is likely after the Peleponesian wars at the very least. Post Alexandra/Ptolemaic Egypt is the best guess.
Rumblebones
Banned
Ubisoft can miss me with this shit if the protagonist ain't black.
UnemployedVillain
Member
Doesn't a rumor, by definition, mean not confirmed?
All the people excited about "finally a good/boring setting" am I the only one thinking AC always has fantastic settings? It's the characters and what they do with it that let me down (almost) every time.
Crusades?
Medieval Italy?
American Revolution?
French Revolution?
Great settings, some really mediocre writing and tedious missions dragging a lot of them down though.
Crusades?
Medieval Italy?
American Revolution?
French Revolution?
Great settings, some really mediocre writing and tedious missions dragging a lot of them down though.
Frostman
Member
Should try Unity.
I am not that excited for the game right now,which might change by the reveal , but really excited for the Egypt setting.
Please be true!!
Yeah I can't hold all these games set in Egypt.
MeisterLeder
Banned
Until they throw away the awful repetitive gameplay i wont get excited.
Setting alone wont sell it to me...
Setting alone wont sell it to me...
I'm hoping they do PROPER "Hoplite" style combat. So few games do spear + shield properly. They usually just make the spear a 2 hander, if they even include spears at all.
Spear and Shield SHOULD be a fantastic combo for fighting one opponent, packing solid defence along with an excellent reach. With enough strength a sharp spear thrust will do serious damage and is a very precise strike. The big downside is that it's much less useful against many foes due to its lack of the larger, more sweeping strikes you could perform with something like a 2 handed sword or axe.
Yet so few games ever cater for this kind of playstyle. I'm hoping this screenshot shows that Ubi will let us do it in this, but I'm not holding my breath.
Spear and Shield SHOULD be a fantastic combo for fighting one opponent, packing solid defence along with an excellent reach. With enough strength a sharp spear thrust will do serious damage and is a very precise strike. The big downside is that it's much less useful against many foes due to its lack of the larger, more sweeping strikes you could perform with something like a 2 handed sword or axe.
Yet so few games ever cater for this kind of playstyle. I'm hoping this screenshot shows that Ubi will let us do it in this, but I'm not holding my breath.
Well if you want to believe the rumors, I guess there's a reason for you to be excited.
F0rneus
Tears in the rain
If only it wasn't a boring setting. Then we'd have a ton.
Lord of Castamere
Member
Interested to see how much they're taking from The Witcher 3, and how much it improves the series. It's honestly felt a little lost since Unity, a reboot of sorts was needed.
yurinka
Member
Maybe you can customize your character.Same kind of design, skin is lighter now though.
I think Egipt is a very cool setting, and it's perfectly ok to have a male character if devs want this.
In any case, there is nothing pointing to the absence of a Evie-like females character or the possibility of choosing gender when customizing your character, if it has a character editor.
http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/articl...ns-en-moins-de-narration_5031610_4408996.html
They said that in future games including the next AC, they want less and less traditional storytelling, players playing together can build their own stories bla bla.
Also in a seperate interview they said that they are migrating towards a business model where with all their games they can retain players into their ecosystem through online gaming and microtransactions.
So yeah not a good sign for fans of traditional story based single player games....like me :/
We'll see though, if they are making this like The Division or For Honor I don't think I'm going to buy it sadly.
Filthy Casual
Member
Fake
More_Badass
Member
Just like we had tons of WWI games, right? And Nam and French Revolution and so on
You do? The way I remember it, most of the controls in ACU/ACS are incredibly contextual meaning you can never be entirely sure what you're gonna get, whether your character is truly going to jump in the direction you indicated, for example. In a game like Mirror's Edge or classic Tomb Raider, you've got a fixed, unchanging set of mechanics which you can combine and chain together in different ways to overcome different obstacles. The moves don't change, the mechanics don't change, only the way in which you use them does. In Assassin's Creed, your set of moves and mechanics is an ever-changing, evasive, ungraspable mass of animations, movements and manoeuvres and you don't have full control over which the game is going to pick for you in any given situation. In Mirror's Edge and classic Tomb Raider, the same chain of inputs will always give you the same chain of movements and this kind of reliability is what facilitates complexity and depth in the first place. How can you expect a player to pull of complex manoeuvres when they themself cannot be sure what the game is going to twist their input into at any given moment? Sure, Mirror's Edge and classic Tomb Raider had to impose limitations on their level design to make sure their environments worked with their movement systems and you can certainly point out the ways in which those limitations negatively impact the visuals or the environmental design but we were specifically talking about the movement mechanics and these two games have such impeccable movement mechanics precisely because they put them first, above visuals, above environmental detail, above realistic level design. Assassin's Creed does things the other way around. They impose limitations on their movement mechanics in favour of their environments and visuals. They bend and change and twist moves and animations around the levels they create rather than the other way around. Sure, that results in incredibly detailed visuals and levels but it also results in unreliable, unpredictable and overly automated movement mechanics. They're certainly not manual.
That dumb algorithm shouldn't be there in the first place. And yes, it is fighting the game when the character constantly does shit I didn't tell them to do or want them to do.
Well, that meme was very true at one point in the franchise's recent history so it's not like people who subscribe to it are entirely delusional. But you can't have your cake and eat it, too. You can either implement a proper, manual, consistent and complex movement system that takes some effort to master and is actually skill-based or you can have an over-automated press-A-to-awesome two-button "system" to appeal to the braindead part of your audience. What they've seemingly tried to do with the last two games is use the latter as a base and sprinkle some of the former on-top and that's just not going to work. If you want to achieve complexity, you need consistency and you need to give players a certain minimal amount of manual control and even the current AC games don't have that.
The control scheme argument always seems to be on shaky foundations to me. If you want the kind of game that AC actually is then you're probably going to have to have some automation in the controls. The game is not a platformer; it's a stealth/action game. If you don't want that kind of game then that's fine, but I think it's unrealistic to think that you could put something a la Mirror's Edge's controls into the game and then, on top of that control scheme, ask people to play Assassin's Creed in that way.
Sure
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
That's how it works in AC3-Rogue, in ACU-Syndicate, the controls have defined actions so you ALWAYS know what the character is gonna do whether that's jumping, vaulting, rolling, etc. here's a video of this in action. Everything in this video is a direct result of the player's understanding of the controls.
That's literally not the case as outlined in the video and post above where I explain how the system works.
As is the case with AC in it's current form.
Because the game doesn't. It only follows inputs. The contexts never change. RT+B=vaulting/sliding over obstacles, RT+A being tapped=a single jump, etc.
Sure, Mirror's Edge and classic Tomb Raider had to impose limitations on their level design to make sure their environments worked with their movement systems and you can certainly point out the ways in which those limitations negatively impact the visuals or the environmental design but we were specifically talking about the movement mechanics and these two games have such impeccable movement mechanics precisely because they put them first, above visuals, above environmental detail, above realistic level design. Assassin's Creed does things the other way around. They impose limitations on their movement mechanics in favour of their environments and visuals. They bend and change and twist moves and animations around the levels they create rather than the other way around. Sure, that results in incredibly detailed visuals and levels but it also results in unreliable, unpredictable and overly automated movement mechanics. They're certainly not manual.[/QUOTE]
Yes they are:
The way it is now there's way less limits on what counts as climbable geometry and thus they added a bunch of manual inputs.Yep, it's insane how much control you have in the last two AC games. Quick tips OP, pick and choose when to tap or hold X or O while running. DO NOT just hold X at all times. You need to think of the level design as a 3D space and constantly decide what move to make next to keep your momentum going.
This is just using R2
This is what happens if you hold R2+X after as you're swinging from the first monkey bar
This is what happens if you hold R2+O as you swing from the first monkey bar
A bit more complex.
This is what happens if you hold R2+X for the first jump and then hold O as you grab the monkey bar followed by double tapping O to roll, which negates fall damage.
And this is what happens if you slide and use the parkour down control followed by just holding R2
Always remember that R2+O while running=vaulting to get over obstacles to keep your momentum going
You'll notice in all of these gifs that he's stopping on a dime as soon as the player lets go of the controls too instead of walking forward a little bit like in say GTA, the game absolutely has very little animation priority and will even interrupt finishing moves for a parry. They absolutely depend on you to be able to think on your feet, (or like an assassin), to figure out what to press at what time in order to make an escape, cross a rooftop, or close the distance between yourself and a target.
The algorithm is literally just the game responding to inputs being held down, which they shouldn't be. So RT to parkour, exists in the fact that it's the run button, and the parkour on a 2d plane button, but the character won't be predicting what you want to do. They'll get caught up on geometry in the same way that you'd get caught up in Mirror's edge if you ignored rolling and wall running.
If people are still following a meme from literally four years ago then they're being quite unreasonable with their criticism and ignoring the game in it's current iteration. You being a relevant example as you're literally ignoring multiple examples of the bolded.
This whole discussion started mainly because Crossing Eden claimed that the last two AC games had incredibly "in-depth" parkour controls, not because I tried to argue that AC should become a proper third-person platformer. (Though personally, I certainly wouldn't mind if it did.)
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
In depth relative pretty much every else on the market which is heavily automated. I made a really good post on how Uncharted 4's platforming is automated due to being based on context.
In the same way that the rope is designed to always work as long as there's a prompt the game is programmed so that if Drake even slightly extends his arm he will literally magnetize to a the nearest handhold during a jump even if the player is farther away than normal, even if he slightly reaches out the player is safe, even at the exact moment he starts to reach his hand out=safety. You can actually see it in some of the animations if the player isn't technically at the perfect distance. I loaded up the game and made some gifs to illustrate this.
It's purposefully designed that the player has as the smallest possible chance at failing and it never expands on the mechanic. Calling them challenges is stretching the definition of the term. These were all first tries. Ծ_Ծ.
That's what automation looks like...this is all accomplished with the x button. The paths are clearly marked. Etc. etc. It's very brain dead.
Damn, that doesn't sound too encouraging. I didn't really enjoy The Division or For Honor either, so hopefully it's not too similar.
Hopefully this game brings the series back into good standing. I believe in Ismael and the Black Flag team.
As for people complaining about Parkour being hold RT/R2 I think its the right design for this type of game. AC is not a platformer, the movement needs to feel as natural as walking. Unfortunately the algorithm can get you caught on other things than intentended... but a pure momentum into jump system seen in platformers would be a hindrance to the type of game AC is supposed to be.
As for people complaining about Parkour being hold RT/R2 I think its the right design for this type of game. AC is not a platformer, the movement needs to feel as natural as walking. Unfortunately the algorithm can get you caught on other things than intentended... but a pure momentum into jump system seen in platformers would be a hindrance to the type of game AC is supposed to be.
Wait...
This seems really unlike Assassin's Creed. I guess them going this far back was to enable the possibility of player choice influencing the story since they don't need to worry about historical accuracy since not much information is present about the time periods actual historical events.
Loved ACU/AC:Syndicate. Thought it was an incredible comeback from ACIII.
I really hope it is Egypt and not as something modern day.
I loved some of the settings like French revolution, English turn of the century, the crusades, just because they were so different. I feel like going to Japan/China would be just another game set there instead of something different.
I really hope it is Egypt and not as something modern day.
I loved some of the settings like French revolution, English turn of the century, the crusades, just because they were so different. I feel like going to Japan/China would be just another game set there instead of something different.
You know it won't be.
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