So I bought this in a recent Steam sale and I've not played an Assassins Creed game since Black Flag, but there's some shit to this that's really annoying the piss out of me and a lot of it is simply down to how convoluted the game has become.
Icons, icons everywhere
Holy shit Ubisoft, would you stop this? It's kind of always been a thing with Ubisoft games and becoming more prevalent; climb tower, synchronise / scan area, get bombarded with icons of collectibles, missions, sidequests, items etc but fuck me dead you can't even see the damn map. It's a damn mess.
Stop with all the collectible shit in particular. It's ridiculous.
Single player intertwined with Multiplayer
Just separate this stuff please. The game is already a convoluted mess, now I can't keep up with what is happening in the single player now I'm also trying to decipher what is supposed to be multi / coop icons all over the place. Just separate them.
Start menu items
Initiates, Brotherhood, uPlay, Companion and so on, I still don't know what half of this shit is.
In game overlays
I have been trying to do some of the Murder Mystery stuff and every fucking time, click on a clue, overlay about the clue comes up but is obscured by another overlay on top of that one with the more novelised backstory of god knows what.
This shit happens constantly, Character added to backstory data, area added to backstory data, groups, location, other tid bits.......I can't even fathom how much time gets spent writing all these pieces. Just put a tiny little note off center of the screen somewhere letting you know something has been added.
Does anyone actually read ALL of these things? I'm not a big reader at the best of times but this comes across as a damn novel at the best of times.
Arno the Velcro man
I've loved Assassins Creed since the first (I think the first may still be my favourite) because of the free running system, but as the time periods have moved on and the cities have become more complex it feels like the system hasn't really kept up. Arno just constantly feels like he wants to 'stick' to everything when running around on foot and where he goes when scaling the environment is so hit and miss, what you expect him to do he often does, what you think he'll climb he won't, what you don't think he can he will.
I don't recall having them many issues with the character traversing the environment and it means getting stuck in some really weird places and destroys some of the stealth areas when he inadvertently decides he'll jump off in a direction you don't mean for him to do at all.
The game just feels like they need to dial a whole tonne of shit back and just focus. The sheer number of ideas and other shit that gets thrown in is baffling at best and confusing as all hell to decipher, it shouldn't be so hard to understand the way the game is being played out; but I feel like I'm running around with very little understanding of what half of the shit they've thrown into this game is actually supposed to be.
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I am enjoying it still. The big thing for me has always been the whole 'Ancient Aliens' story line (though this seems it might have jumped the shark some after what was supposed to be a trilogy with Desmond), which is why I am now getting back into the series to see where they are going with the modern stuff, but I fear it too, is just getting too convoluted but we'll see.
The visuals are massively impressive even on my aging GTX970 @ 2560x1080 and there are still things about this game I am enjoying, the Murder Mystery stuff, the combat, the story, the setting but man have Ubisoft really gone out of there way to do some annoying shit.
Did they improve much of this with Syndicate?
