Assassin's Creed 3 coming October 30, 2012

A cart just drove straight through a house in slow motion and disappeared...Pretty sure that's not supposed to happen.

Speaking of ways to make money, my most productive source of income was spending about an hour in a bear-generating* area and then trading bear parts* to the furthest away naval trading port (I forget the name). The upside is since the naval missions are fun and awesome, it's worth your game time opening those routes up and taking advantage of the lowered risk factor.

* also: elk and fox
eta: oh yeah, definitely beavers too as Adree reminded

Beaver are worth almost the same amount as bears and you can find an entire line of them to kill about 2 feet from your homestead.

Just got the epilogue left to finish. And still, AC3 delivers with its thoroughly unhelpful tutorials. How do I hacks?

And the ending... Well, I'm neither shocked nor pleased, just confused. Same as any AC ending.

Good to know, thanks. I'm guessing I need to progress the story further. I'm still in Sequence 6, but there's no naval activities left and I don't have any other trading ports. Boston is the only destination for trading convoys in my game currently.

Going by memory here since work blocks "gaming related" sites, I think you have to craft a naval convoy in your crafting menu. This then instantiates the ability to trade on naval routes. It's confusing because you get a free land convoy (though you do use crafting to build additional land convoys or to increase their carrying capacities) and the tutorials in AC3 are almost as bad as the Desmond sections in AC:Rev.

FTFY, because at least Desmond sections didn't have many actions. I got through this entire game and I'm still learning how to play...off of websites and forums.

Wow, uh, you build convoys? This is news to me. The whole Homestead thing is looking less and less appealing.

I also randomly discovered that you can send assassins on guild missions last night. I'm sure the game will get around to mentioning that eventually, but it's weird to wander into a whole new feature by virtue of a accidental button-press.

They don't. At least, I didn't notice them mentioning it in my game.

Hey, I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here! Jeez!

But while we're confessing - did you know right away that Liberation missions = Assassin's Guild? I figured that out all by myself last night too. And I know the game mentioned it briefly, but for some reason I didn't catch the correlation that "liberating" sections of Boston would add a new recruit to my AssGuild. I didn't even know how I liberated the first part, it just happened.

These experiences lead me to feel that this game, like Dr Frankenstein, has some excellent and ambitious ideas. Unfortunately those ideas are often crudely stitched together, like Frankenstein's monster.

I think the game does tell you, but only as a one-off pop-up after you get the first little helper. At least I seem to remember that it worked like that.

I realized that the recruiting missions were like the guild because it worked exactly like Revelations, but I didn't realize that helping all those people lead up to it. And I didn't even FINISH those missions early on because I didn't realize that doing them would help me recruit more members. I thought the first one was just part of the main mission and I'd never have to do it again.

I got this for PS3 and the AC3 Vita game for Christmas. Anyone know what the crossover stuff is?

I just finally finished this game over the weekend, and the ending was (surprise surprise) more frustrating than engaging. The conclusion with Connor was pretty cool, but as a player it didn't really involve me. It was just something I watched happen. Occasionally the game would remember I existed and try to make me feel a part of the process by having me walk Connor forward 15 feet at an agonizingly slow pace, which was worse than just watching a long movie at the end. Just stop doing that, seriously. Walking your character on a fixed path through molasses is not 'playing' a game.

And then you get to Desmond's part, which was more drudgery than anything. I may have compounded the problematic Desmond-Platforms-Through-Ancient-Alien-Temple part by not doing any of it until the end of the game - presumably you could do parts of it earlier on? - but it was agonizingly slow and boring. You do some generic jumping and climbing, sit through 15 minutes of unskippable idiotically meaningless ancient alien babbling that spends forever saying nothing at all, and then it's over. Somebody at Ubi actually thinks that this ancient aliens nonsense is the reason players are interested in the AC games, which is kind of sad.

In summary: Naval missions are the best thing ever, and I would buy unlimited amounts of naval DLC and whole games that utilize that framework. Tree-running and the Frontier in general was cool. New York and Boston looked great. The fast-travel system was different, but not worthwhile in the end. Connor was... okay. The missions were wildly inconsistent. Optional objectives are the worst thing ever. The ending was obnoxious. By the time I finished I was just glad it was over, which probably isn't the feeling you want to leave players with.

Oof, my sympathies. Yeah, you can at least get some of the Desmond stuff out of the way--after you get back to the Atlantis Clubhouse with each glowie macguffin recovery as Desmond, you can plug them in after requisite platforming and Atlantis Hologram Jabbering right then instead of getting back into the Animus. There was enough babbling cutscenes even getting that out of the way beforehand.

Yeah, I figured as much. The unintentionally amusing part of that whole sequence was realizing that I'd completely forgotten about the glowie macguffin cubes until the moment I inserted one into the first babble-tron and endured the resulting asinine cutscene.

There's so much stuff I just did not do in this game. So many side-activities completely ignored, like LOLFRONTIER POSTAL SERVICE and other such compelling offerings. I never did much with the brawler stuff, the hunters, etc. I did fill up my Assassin guild and sent them on missions for a while (to liberate Quebec of all things, and really the Templars could just keep that) but lost interest pretty quickly. I don't know that I've ever played a game that offered such a huge quantity of activities without making many / any of those activities interesting or worth doing.

I did, however, play every naval mission multiple times and ace every optional objective in them. Sometimes I'd just fire up AC3 and replay naval missions for an hour and then just shut it off without doing anything story-related.

I completed the main game, 100% the Homestead and people in it, gathered all my assassins, did some naval missions, and then attempted a couple of those club things. Really though, none of it was particularly interesting (I liked the homestead and naval missions were pretty fun, that's about it). It's been a month and I still feel no urge to go back to traipsing around the Fontier, avoiding bears and guards, just to find some damn feathers and investigate a yeti myth and all manner of totally mundane things. I think Ubisoft is forgetting that I am not playing these games to simulate life in the 1700s, I am playing to murder things and generally disturb shit.

And I don't care at all about Desmond. Seriously. You lost me after AC2.

Screw that, I want to see how Desmond does shanking people with 30 foot leaps from the L-Train and jumping into hay stacks from the top of the Willis Tower in Chicago.

PREACH ON

I did do the Homestead stuff, actually. And I'm glad I did - that wrap-up with Achilles was a nice touch, and there were cool little stories in there about all your various people and their histories. The way they take part in the development of your settlement was cool, though fairly peripheral. (French Miner Guy and Strong Female Huntress were so cute!) Some of the associated missions were idiotic but the idea was sound overall. Just... kinda odd in an AC game.

That's what I keep coming back to - there are so many parts of other games inside this game. And that's not exactly shocking, that it's part of AC's reputation at this point, but this one was especially bloated with unrelated trivial content that someone went to the time and effort to develop and integrate into the game. Does anyone actually want to play Frontier Mailman Simulator?

However, you could almost say the same thing about NAVAL MISSIONS. And that part of the game actually improves the medium purely by existing in such a splendid fashion.

So is any worthwhile DLC out yet?

I'm slowly going through Dishonored when I can tear myself away from Crusader Kings 2, but I still like my Stabby Stabby Jumpy Jumpy.

My wife bought me AC3 because she got very into the story in AC2 and ACB, despite my telling that it's never a good idea to play a video game for the story. So last night I finished the game with her watching, and all I could say was "I told you so."

One sub-game that I liked that doesn't get a lot of mention was taking over the forts.

The trading game was just awful, as was the crafting. For one thing, nothing I crafted brought in as much money as an elk skin or a beaver fur. But to add insult to injury, unless there was a shortcut I missed, to fill the convoy with beaver skins takes way too much effort -- why do I have to put each one in the convoy individually? why can't I just add them all at once?

I could never understand how this part of the game was so fucked up. I just can't imagine a scenario where someone playtested that section of the game and didn't ask why a ship/cart couldn't be loaded with all 10 pelts at once.

The only reason I ever found to actually craft trade goods was because I didn't have enough pelts to fill up all my carts and boats. I bought the guide for the game and it kindly advised which trade goods were most profitable in each chapter of the game. I'd typically buy up and sell pelts and then balance out my convoys with whatever the most profitable trade good was. Of course the game doesn't communicate which goods are most profitable at any given time. Without the guide I have no idea how I would ever have known which were the best.

One thing that I don't like about AC3 is that you can't just randomly murder passerby like you used to. The colonists must be wearing assassin-proof tricorn hats or something...
I think they've caught onto me after all of these centuries.

I didn't do any crafting outside of weapons and container upgrades for myself. I had a hard time understanding why you could craft so much stuff - that whole system seemed like yet another part of a different, unrelated game that somehow got shoe-horned into AC3. The crafting system itself was obscure and felt bolted-on, given that there was never any real reason to use it outside of the item upgrades for Connor.

Once I understood how trading worked, the only things I ever sold were pelts. I had plenty of money from sending maybe 5-6 convoys loaded with pelts over the course of the whole game. Given that there's not much to spend money on in the first place - just upgrades for the Aquila, and most of those are conveniences - I couldn't see a reason to suffer through that awful trading interface. Adding those single pelts one at a time by scrolling through your entire Stockpile selection was just grueling.

I did the crafting and trading in order to acquire all the craftable upgrades for Connor and to get all the upgrades for the Aquila. Once I had accomplished both, I abandoned it.

I finally got this last week. I had no idea about the the, um, "surprises" during the first several hours of play, so those were genuinely cool to see. I'm having a lot of fun with it, already on sequence 7.

But: Man oh man, the game really gets held back by all the glitches. Even after Ubisoft's patch I regularly see pedestrians popping in and out of existence, cutscenes screwing up in one manner or another, Connor and NPCs/animals getting stuck on geometry or freezing in a location... and then there's the whole thing with some of the missions being very poorly designed.

Just now I was hunting this unique bobcat somewhere in the north-western region of the Frontier. He'd been able to outrun me three times before once I made it out of the caves, so this time I decided to chase him by running on top of the rocks and waiting for him to come out the other side and jump across. Sure enough, that's what he did, but I failed to stab him as he ran past me, and then once he reaches that soldier camp on the top, while being no more than 5-6 meters away from me, the mission automatically fails. The bobcat is still there and I can still kill it, but it won't count for the mission any longer. DUMB. I ended up planting trip mines in the gorge where he first appears, which killed him but also bugged his corpse so that it was jerking around on one of the logs. A skinless bobcat corpse flailing around is a bit weird.

And that's just a story of one side mission. I won't bother with the main ones, which I believe people have already complained about enough. I will say that I do like the setting and the story. The tree climbing is mostly great and the naval battles are fantastic, though I have a hard time seeing how some of them can be fully synchronized - one battle starts out with me defending another ship against 11 others, and the optional goal of limiting the other ship's damage to 50% fails in the first twenty seconds or so. Nice going, mission designers!

Royal Fool: regarding your spoiler, it kind of bums me out that people talk about this as if it's busted storytelling when it's one of the best ideas they've had in the series so far. You've seen Rashomon, right? Or maybe Memento? Put it another way, think about who you're playing, and therefore whose perspective you're seeing things through, when your companions seem like normal, reasonable human beings, and then whose you're playing from when they look like leering, vicious villains. It's worth bearing in mind that the Animus allows you to replay memories, which are of course colored by perception and not objective records of historical fact. I have actually been a little disappointed that the Assassin's Creed games haven't played more with this concept, though maybe they have and I just didn't pick up on it. Maybe that's how you've got this one superpowered assassin taking on hordes of enemies and walking out unscathed. And getting in a fistfight with the Pope? I mean come on, who hasn't wanted to do that?

I've never got the feeling that what you're experiencing through each ancestor is history as perceived by them but rather just the cold, hard facts of the game's reality. Whenever you kill one of the major Templars they explain their case, highlighting the fact that both the Templars and Assassins are the same, merely employing different methods to achieve the same goal. At other times, however, the game really wants you to know that those Templar dudes are totally evil. See: The Borgias in AC2.

Lol that's exactly what I ended up doing, because he's freaking annoying otherwise. Blew his corpse way over the hill.

Dan, there's a database entry that explains that the assassins exist only as a check on Templars, to keep them from running the world unopposed, and that they have no grander plans than that - probably because, as you suggested, they trust mankind to make its own way without their guidance. I think you have a point about the assassins being in decline because AC3 has a much greater disparity between a highly organized Templar organization and an almost nonexistent assassin group, but I didn't get the impression that the assassins were changing their philosophy to a much more direct kind of rule.

I also think you oversimplify Desmond's final choice - given that his only other option was letting most of the planet's population die and the remainder being thrown into a new dark age, I think his choice is slightly more defendable. Not a no-brained necessarily, but a little more nuanced than you imply.

But Dan, you're describing that final decision as if it's a bloodless theoretical exercise rather than potential genocide. Slavery is not a desirable outcome, but it's at least a problem with a solution.

OK, I follow you Dan. I guess I don't have a problem with taking a realistic position to the problem - live to fight another day and all that. Plus, I don't really consider a group with the motto, "Everything is permitted, nothing is true" to be all that idealistic.

Well that motto is interesting because a surface reading make it seem fairly nonsensical with the way the assassins group is presented in the games. I mean clearly they are not as easygoing about base villainy as you might expect from a group that permits everything. However, I think it is intended to be understood as a very strong statement of atheistic-style idealism instead. In that they are expressing the Nietzschean style challenge that if there is no god (nothing is true) and there is consequently no-one to reward or punish you for your actions (everything is permitted) how then do you act?

I see the motto as a reminder to the assassins that when there are no divine rules and no after-life you have to put the greatest weight and consideration on your actions here on earth because it is you that will have to live with them. It was was probably more resonant in an era when you could conveniently buy absolution from the catholic church with enough money.

I agree with your assessment, and it's another reason I think Desmond's decision fits logically to that credo: I think an assassin would say ideals are well and good, but doing the best good for the most people is preferable.

Hmm, I don't think it is as neat as that because that sounds like a classic utilitarian formulation which I would associate more with the templars than the assassins in the game series. I don't think Desmond made the choice he did because it was particularly consistent with the assassin life philosophy, normally I would expect them to reject consequentialist modes of thought. Instead he was presented with two options (via the will of the game designers) neither of which fitted neatly into the human positive philosophical framework of the assassins as presented in the series. Then of those options Desmond chose the least bad of them which in this case happened to be 'the templar solution'.

I think it's a mistake to think of the two options as having a Templar solution vs an assassin solution. I don't think there's anything in the history of the assassins that would indicate they would sacrifice the lives of almost everyone on the planet for freedom. It may also be true that the Templars might arrive at the same conclusion, there's no reason the two must have diametrically opposed viewpoints. In fact, AC3 seems to make a point of the similarity in the organizations and their near symbiotic relationship.

Damn that fucking bobcat mission. This was pre-patch, but I tried planting land mines and all that mess and never killed him over probably a dozen attempts. Finally I got lucky one time with the gun, accidentally shooting it like two seconds after the hopeless chase mess started and ending it. Damaged pelt? NO FUCKS TO GIVE.