Assassin's Creed 3 coming October 30, 2012

I'm currently playing through Revelations, which is also buggy in some places, but nowhere near what I'm reading in this thread.

I guess when the release date is set 8 months in advance, things like this are bound to happen. How many teams worked on AC3? AC:R credits six Ubisoft studios in the opening credits.

Oh man, if a sequel moves into War of 1812 territory, I would flip right the hell out. Can you imagine an international conspiracy, moving between the states and warring European nations? Maybe some epic fleet battles? Whoa, I need to sit down.

Just want to say that despite the bugs the game is playable and pretty fun. It's just sometimes it feels like you are dying by a hundred papercuts. I haven't had any system lockups or bugs that just flat out kept me from progressing on PS3.

The point of crafting is to eventually make upgrades to your pouches and to make special weapons. Although from what I've seen a story reward pistol you get is better than any of the crafted ones and only one of the knives you can make is an upgrade over one you can buy in Boston so that kind of sucks. Crafting the other stuff is used for Delivery Orders and not anything else that I can tell since it's just not profitable enough to export with the rising cost of crafting each time you make an item again. That stuff is also gated by craftsman skill and it's not until late game when you can make most of the stuff.

There are some crafted pistols that are better than the Pitcairns. Try the royal pistols...they have 2 shots per gun, not one, and same stats.

The war tomahawk is better than any other tomahawk I've found, and the replica swords are far better than the store ones. Crafted weapons work...you just have to find the right ones.

Pitcairn has +1 to short range but I hadn't noticed the Royal was a double shot so I will be using that I guess. War Tomahawk has -1 to combo over my Broken Sword knife so I won't be using that. I understand those who prefer the tomahawk due to the look and the fact that anytime an animation calls for it in a cutscene it looks super silly to be using a knife (a descent using the knife to hook onto a rope was my favorite) I can't abide swapping since I use the knife more than any other weapon.

Yeah, but i like the tomahawk animations more than the knife ones. Also the French Coat pistol is good and also a double shot. Craft a replica sword; they're quite good.

Ignore the flintlock pistols...they seem worthless.

I am still early in the game, (sequence 5). How the fuck do you stop the guards from attacking you? I can't figure out how to reduce my notoriety level and I don't see posters or anything that would reduce it, like in AC2. Just trying to get across Boston is a huge headache.

Why do you hate me, game?

e: lol, I just got to a cut screen where Samuel Adams instructed me on how to tear down a poster. Now posters appear allowing me to reduce my notoriety level. This game is awful.

Remember those random shitty missions I mentioned? This is one of the first that came to mind. It's just genuinely terrible from any perspective and I'm genuinely curious how it survived the cutting room floor.

Even my not-core-gamer girlfriend laughed out loud at the materializing posters, and how I needed exactly three, and how they blended in with the shit brown palette to the point that they're invisible, and how I had to kill 10+ guards just to clear a path to the last one. Ridiculous.

So now Sam Adams says he wants me to follow him to some tunnels. Except after telling me to follow him there he doesn't actually go anywhere. He just stands there, staring. I guess I'm supposed to go to the checkpoint? But there are guards everywhere, and if I climb buildings I lose track of Sam and desynchronize. What am I supposed to be doing here?

And that's my #1 choice for shittiest mission. Idk if it's bugged or not. You just have to walk to the mark and hop in the basement door. The guards weren't an issue for me -- I think I managed to dump my wanted level and just walked right in.

Eh? You are shitting on the game for tutorializing something just like they did in AC2? Don't be silly. All you had to do was play the story missions some more until it unlocked all of that stuff anyway. Everyone in the thread said play the story missions until Sequence 6 and then go do everything for a reason.

I did that last night... wasn't sure how that worked...

Tell Sam to follow you with "X".

I was just playing the story missions. My problem that was just getting to the next checkpoint. I was all the way across town, and traveling was incredibly annoying because I kept getting mobbed by huge strings of guards. In the previous cut scene Sam Adams had told me to basically lay low, so I ran around trying to figure out how to lose notoriety, not realising that the notoriety-losing mechanic had been disabled. Its OK if the game wants to tutorialize things (though I question the wisdom of that given they release one of these games every year), but it should at least be clear what is being tutorialized. And if they are going to disable whole chunks of the game mechanics for the purpose of forcing me through a lame 5-hour tutorial sequence they should make that clear, too. I mean, how was I supposed to know that the notoriety mechanic was locked behind a tutorial rather than stripped out altogether or just bugged?

I still haven't hit sequence six. It is taking me a long time because work is crazy and I can play maybe 20-30 minutes a day on average. This probably increases my irritation, because having to replay parts due to bugs or poor mission design sucks way more when time is limited.

Finished up all the naval stuff and got Kidd's treasure and it unlocks a pirate suit but not the cool looking one you wear while captaining the ship. :<

What did you think of the Pegleg's missions?

I liked them because they were a nice change of setting and didn't make you do a whole lot of needless busywork to get to the treasure piece.

I was able to get it to work but never the first time and unreliably. You can prevent taking damage for at least two downings by tapping the button prompt but it should work right the first goddamned time.

To be fair I think that since in the main game once I understood the timing of the QTE animal kills that I never got hurt by another animal again they were probably a bit too lenient (with the caveat that nobody want quick reaction qtes in any game) but something definitely feels wrong about the sequence. Nothing a pistol and little care for Full Synchronization didn't solve.

Quackers, I know you were wondering (I think it was you) who did Haytham's voice, it was Adrian Hough.

Finished the playthrough of the main storyline, kinda disappointed storywise compared to the previous games. Ending was disappointing, that's all I'll say.

Holy fuck the launch trailer for this game is dumb. I assume the story makes more fucking sense in-game, yes?

Yes.

The trailer suggested to me a great foundation for a story about a boy who, in seeking revenge, helps precipitate the westward expansion of US settlers and does more harm to his people than those he had sought revenge against. I'm interested to see what the game does with it instead, perhaps I should go read a summary.

There's actually several interconnected stories weaved together to form the main plot, which I thought was a nice touch. There's the main storyline, which is kind of what you mentioned, there's also the story of how the Assassin network is built in the colonies, and how a community is founded, and there's a naval story done via the naval missions (which I'm behind on, so not as familiar with) that has a separate but related narrative.

And I'll be clear here; while this is the buggiest Assassins Creed yet (and I've played all, being a huge fan of the series), I'm having a ton of fun with it. The naval missions are great; I like the change to the combat (no more holding down the RT to counter, which gave me finger ache previously); and I loved seeing the view from the other side.

Connor is just an extremely unlikeable protagonist.

Broteam video for this is out, has story spoilers.

I'll never be unable to think of Achilles as anything but Winnie the Pooh now.

I don't know if anyone has already said this, but you can fast travel from the homestead directly to Boston, or elsewhere. Pull up map, L2 to zoom out, move cursor over to new city, R2 to zoom in, select fast travel point, go.

Quoted because it bears repeating. Not sure why it's not overly tutorialized like so many things in the game.

Haytham is the best character in the whole game.

Matt, just now as we watch the credits roll: "That last gameplay sequence can jump straight up my butt."

I've heard complaints of an annoyingly ambiguous ending, but I don't know - it made as much sense to me as Assassin's Creed endings ever have.

I enjoyed it. Buggy as hell, strangely paced, missions ranging from absolutely incredible (Sequence 9) to so bad I wonder if anyone playtested them (Sequence 12 -- okay, a slight exaggeration, but I did not have fun playing Sequence 12 at all). I didn't try the Kidd stuff or the PS3-exclusive Benedict Arnold missions.

My most disappointing game of 2012, though. That saddens me greatly.

I feel like the promise of AC2 fell apart somewhere along the line, especially with the story. I'd love to know what the original plan was for AC3, before changes to console timelines and Desmond feedback came in.

If you are playing on PS3 don't be a doofus like me and not realize the Benedict Arnold dlc code is on the back of your manual. I guess expecting me to enter three separate codes out of the box was one too many.

Also I finished it and uh yeah that ending is going to make people pretty pissed off, perhaps not ME3 level angry since that game had so much of the player invested in it.

Random thoughts/tips:
The payoff for the carpenter if you talk to him every chance you get after doing his final mission is pretty great.

Horses actually have a use when you make the saddlebags, they'll refill some of your consumables whenever you call your horse.

Encyclopedia of the Common Man quest has all sorts of crazy bugs, either don't worry about it since it doesn't really matter or expect to drive yourself crazy if you run into one and don't immediately look it up.

Special Iron Ingot is obtained from doing the smithing quests and after those a chest will appear behind your house alongside the cliff wall (might require finishing all the homestead quests or beating the game first.) Apparently that chest will restock the ingots when you use up all of yours but mine never did so you might want to plan those upgrades carefully (don't make the cruddy Lincoln sword.)

I recommend doing the Captain Kidd stuff as soon as you get all the trinkets, it's worth it.

Holding your blades out like Wolverine has a use now - if you run while holding them out you'll stab-tackle anyone you run into.

Use a poison dart on fort captains, they just aren't worth trying to fight when you have 10 enemies also attacking you.

Also if this game had a random naval mission generator it would be GOTY.

They just needed to take the naval game and make a Pirates! clone. The rest? Take the best parts and make it the stuff that happens when you land. The goofy overarching Pieces of Eden story is more than welcome to just go away as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah found that one early on. Fuck stealth kills, some of those forts were made for Gears of War-style gameplay. Aggro everyone, whack a few, poison the cap.

Or use the rope dart, yank him down, then assassinate his ass face down in the muck. Works great on the big guys as well, Jergens or whatever they're called. lol

I put AC3 on the back burner because of the bugs and unexplain-ed-ness got to me. That and my girlfriend was a nonstop font of questions about the story which I couldn't really answer since I never finished AC2. Having someone who is unwilling to accept the basics of a storyline, in this case genetic memory and whatever the hell the animus is, can really illustrate how shaky the rest of a story can be. Out for a penny, out for a pound?

So I bought Assbro since I heard it was good and figured it'd be enough story. The first three minutes confirmed it was not enough story. So, I went all the way back to AC2.

Man, AC2 is way better designed than AC3. Going back to the second one really illustrates what a mess AC3 can be. Yes, in reality, Boston was (is?) shades of brown, impossible to navigate, and otherwise a shithole. And while I respect them for sticking with realism, that realism damages the fun. I can't help but feel that they could have kept the realism without sacrificing the fun.

The pacing in 3 is actually much worse than you think. Guess when I had my Assassin's outfit on in 2? An hour and a half. You know when I had it in 3? Seven fucking hours in. Three hours into AC2 I had smoke bombs, throwing knives, poison, various kinds of armor, swords, daggers, etc. Where was I in 3? Playing a character I knew wasn't the actual character I'd be playing, (because I can look at the fucking box and see it's not him), at the end of the tedious preamble that seriously has no good excuse for being in the game. Oh, and I got kicked out of the animus at least twice to do some absurd shit with Desmond that made no sense and only served as a hamfisted way to transition between time periods.

Assassin's Creed 2 assumes that I'm a big boy who can handle getting new stuff once every other mission. Hell, I didn't even realize some of the missions were essentially tutorials til I had finished them (like, we're throwing you at 20+ guys, here are some smoke bombs if things get bad). And there are no side objectives! I just do the damn mission and keep playing!

Assassin's Creed 3 assumes this is my first video game and was somehow lucky enough to figure out how to put the disc in the drive and manage to hold the controller the right way. It expects I want the first three hours to ease me into the game by making one minute of gameplay followed by thirty seconds of uninteractive cinema. And then another five hours of tutorials and wondering why I'm not dressed like the dude on the box yet. And combat that is so simple I'm effortlessly killing 20+ guards at a time as a 14 year old boy. And then my final payoff is an autistic half-indian man that openly slaughters redcoats or templars in broad daylight and then jumps in a bale of hay and everyone forgets about it, but for some damn reason can't kill the bad guy despite him being right fucking there at least three times because he can't do that in front of people. Like he couldn't just run to some hay and cause sweeping amnesia.


tl;dr

Things AC3 has on AC2:

-Naval missions.
-Fast travel.
-The homestead is slightly more interesting than the villa.
-VSync and graphics, though at a cost of performance.


Things AC2 has on AC3:

Literally everything else.