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For me, it isn’t even any of this stuff. It’s almost totally that the games are too big and take too long to get any enjoyment. Most of the time spent playing the games isn’t fun. It’s just traveling and maybe collecting garbage that doesn’t add anything to the enjoyment.
The old games were fun for every moment with the traversal. I don’t think that can carry a newer game, because it isn’t as unique anymore, but it was always more fun than riding a horse from point to point.
If they condensed the story and game down to tens of hours, I would consider it. I’m not going to play a typical Ubisoft game that takes hundreds. Even Elden Ring took me just about 100 and it was getting to the point of being too much, and it was far more interesting and fun.
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Yep. Open world games usually feel like they can’t have any blank spaces, and so they waste resources filling every inch with something, even if it’s just a waste of time. You’ve always been able to run past enemies in FS games, but it took effort and you had to pay attention. The open world of ER wastes so many resources filling the open world, but also makes it trivial to not engage with. Even when there’s a collectable you want, you just ride by on Torrent, grab it, and leave. You don’t engage with it, but they expended time and money creating it.
The open world gives you a lot of distinct options, but do you really have more real ones than DS1? At the start of DS1 you have three paths (4 with the master key). In ER at the start you have three obvious paths (Stormveil, Weeping Peninsula, and Cailid) and one less obvious (going around Stormveil). I’d argue the paths of DS1 are far more interesting to engage with. The Catacombs are a design mistake though because it’s so hard to get out of. The reward for that path is very interesting for a new start (and it’s balanced for a new player, which is why Pinwheel becomes a joke at the mid-game when most people fight him), but getting out without the Lord Vessel is a huge challenge. It needs to have a TP or jump or something at the bottom to get back when you’re done.
I agree woth everything you said but want to add that leaving big open spaces can be an effective design choice. Compare botw to totk and the ambiance changes drastically due to this.
But you could always run past enemies in Dark Souls, and it was a much more relevant gameplay pattern in those games that didn’t put a Stake of Marika right in front of the boss door. I think the open world adding nonlinearity to the Souls system was really elegant, since getting stuck on a boss meant you usually had something else interesting to do while improving your skills and/or grinding for stats. You still can bash your head into the boss over and over until you finally solve the skill issue, of course, and Stakes of Marika make that a lot less frustrating. But if you were in the situation in DS1-3 and decided “no, I want better numbers before I try again” you just had to go grind trash to level up and that’s it. At least the “go fuck off and farm souls” option in Elden Ring is fun when doing so is clearing minidungeons and evergaols and maybe seeing new loot.
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I do 100% see where you’re coming from too. I just think that people shouldn’t include Elden Ring when listing trend-chasing games that lazily slap “it’s a big open wooooorld!” onto an existing linear franchise. Elden Ring’s systems were designed really well around the bigness and openness of its world, unlike something like Sonic Frontiers or any of the MMO-single-player UE5 stuff coming out of AAA studios. And they even had the decency to build a whole IP around this new, distinct gameplay formula instead of making it Dark Souls 4: This Is What Dark Souls Is Now.
Like, maybe you don’t like red wine, fair enough, but at least Elden Ring is serving the red wine alongside a steak instead of alongside a bowl of Lucky Charms or fettuccine Alfredo.
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Unfortunately, “Elden-likes” will likely end up like 99% of “souls-likes” where all they do is copy the surface level stuff (“hard boss fights! Bonfires!”) instead of actually iterating on what made From’s games so well designed.
I’ll buy another Ubisoft game when they get rid of microtransactions, pre orders of multiple different collector’s editions and all the other anti-consumer monetization schemes. So, right after hell has frozen over.
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I have been a huge AC fan since AC 2. In fact, I am currently replaying AC 2 to recapture the good times. But, Valhalla was the last straw. AC games have become too bloated for their own good. I gave up on AC for good.
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Tired inner gamer. The original AC got boring for me. Just lots of repetitive uncreative climbing to complete collections. They they came out with Uplay with AC2 and i keep going back to “is this game worth creating an account and giving up my personal information to play, when there are multiple other games available with a better value proposition for my time, money, and privacy?”
The answer (for ubisoft) is invariably no. So i’ve effectively been on an unintentional Ubisoft boycott since 2008 since i refuse to create an account.
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“Who fucking cares? I dont play videogames to learn about history.” - frustrated inner gamer that doesn’t give two shits about what color the pixels are.
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I would like to add “stop with the marathon cutscenes!” - Maybe then I’d buy it on a deep sale
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You think you can finish the game in 8 hours? Or you think without all the blathering it would be 8? 😂
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🤣🤣🤣
I have the same problem. When open world was new it was different but now open world just means generic and boring more often than not. The Zelda games kept me interested, Cyberpunk 2077 did as well but I used to play a pen and paper RPG a lot like it so I was going to like it no matter what. Otherwise I’d rather something unique and different.
I put a ton of hours into Astroneer if that counts. A hundred hours on my own and about the with my son which was a blast!
50+ hours
No AC game should be that long, the formula gets old after ~20.
have a tendency to drop overly long open world games randomly, even when I’m actively enjoying them. It’s a problem.
That’s not a problem. That’s a solution. If your game doesn’t actively gain anything by being open world then it just makes it tedious. I have pretty much sworn off open world games at this point. Elden Ring did alright with it, but I honestly think it was a detriment to them compared to, for example, the world of Dark Souls, which still had a lot of options but the encounters were more controlled. It sold better though, but they have become increasingly more well known with significantly more marketing, so it doesn’t mean it’s the better design.
I got used to not owning their games.
Enemy of my enemy doesn’t matter to me here. Fuck Ubisoft and Elon. They can all gargle my nuts.
Correcting course is a good thing. If elon were to change course and spend all his energy ending world hunger or something, I wouldnt shit on him for it. I dont think it will happen with him, and if it did it would take years before I’d believe it was earnest, but we should allow people room to grow and change based on prior mistakes.
All that said I’ll most likely not play shadows. Assassins creed as a whole is somewhat stale. Ive ridden that ride so many times.
Ubisoft has made many of my favorite games over the years. Their actions these last few years have cemented them as a company I will never give another penny to.
I never gave Elon any money as I don’t own any Tesla and I never use Twitter, but I don’t think that he will ever see a penny from me either.
It won’t. I still hear Gamers™ complaining about this game being “woke.” Which makes me want to throw money at it except fuck Ubisoft.
I read some really racist xit yesterday on here, under the pretense of “my historical accuracy is so offended!”
It was almost hilarious, like a really average greentext on 4chan.
So I guess that’s nice to see such rabid reaction. And just for that I appreciate the game being there and not bending over.God I hope all this backlash backlash about owning the people that are complaining about a black guy in japan doesn’t end up translating to “buying this Ubislop is praxis!”
Who am I kidding, of course it will.
In this damn thread there is a lot of this.
Everybody in here buying Che shirts from Hot Topic.
What a perfect analogy.
I think the real end to the culture war nonsense came after Thomas Lockely was caught red handed fabricating the words of people who allegedly met “black samurai” Yasuke to embellish his story, rewrite Japanese history to be more “diverse”, and sell books, which was a while ago. Or in other words, it was proven beyond any doubt that the very premise of AS:S was, itself, “culture war nonsense”.
It should be pretty clear which side was in the right.
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Next you’re going to tell me the alien artifacts in the AC games don’t have any historical grounding?!
Dude no way I just saw the templars using the apple of eden the other day
Damn! Was a dude in white spidermaning up a wall around them too?!
Interesting article. Disappointing to see that it’s likely Yasuke’s role in history was greatly embellished just to sell books to the Western world. And disappointing to see that Ubisoft didn’t do their due diligence in researching him.
That being said, the game is a blast to play. Historical inaccuracies aside, I’d say it’s the best entry in the Assassin’s Creed series since Black Flag, which was also fraught with historical inaccuracies.
I hate to break it to you but the cyclops in AC Odyssey isn’t real either. They’ve never been historical accurate. They are loosely inspired by past events at best.
Before I begin my retort, I feel I should preemptively defend myself against those who only assume the worst in others: The only dog I have in this fight is the dog of objectivity. Dogjectivity. Objectividog?
Anyway, comparing a real person to a fictional monster is missing the point. I love the game and I really like Yasuke’s part of the story, but it’s inconsistent with Ubisoft’s previous approach of keeping the events and characters as true to history as good gameplay would allow, while throwing in bits of embellishment here and there to keep things fun.
I honestly wouldn’t change anything about the game, but there should maybe be a disclaimer that Yasuke’s real role in history is not truly known, but they chose the most fun version of events, even if it’s likely untrue.
It’s not missing the point like you claim. It’s you applying an expectation of realism on a series that never had it.
it’s inconsistent with Ubisoft’s previous approach of keeping the events and characters as true to history as good gameplay would allow
In pervious games they mention DaVinci and his creations for the Assassin’s. He was a real person. But he didn’t craft weapons for a league of Assassin’s. Plenty of their games have historical figures, acting like this is the first one to take liberties is silly.
but there should maybe be a disclaimer that Yasuke’s real role in history is not truly known, but they chose the most fun version of events, even if it’s likely untrue.
As they have done with many events and figures in past games. Someone has already taken the time to break this down in great detail. The TL;DR is they never had historical accuracy like you seem to think, ever.
Look, I’m not really that invested in this, and yeah, the disclaimer idea was dumb. I just love Assassin’s Creed for many reasons, one of which is its historical accuracy. Sure, it’s no replacement for a real history lesson, but every game has been one of the most accurate portrayals of its respective slice of history in pop culture.
It’s about expectations. There are obvious embellishments in each game - Da Vinci’s inventions, the cyclops & minotaur, Norse gods, etc., and those are fine because they’re obvious fantasy in otherwise-mundane worlds. The only reason people care about the whole Yasuke thing (or the only reason they should care) is because his story is not obvious fantasy; those not versed in Japanese history would assume his story in the game to be mostly true to historical records, because it’s all mundane.
I get that you like it for historical accuracy but I’m just saying it wasn’t there. The link I gave shows how it never was. It never was accurate man. AC Shadows is just more if the same, not some departure from it.
Yasuke isn’t special. They’ve done this with tons of people, they did it with Cleopatra for instance. They did it with lots of real people, just look at that link that breaks it down.
