Assassins Creed 2 - The Truth is Written in Blood...

DarkCrawler

Well, this OP is going to be pretty short, but Ubisoft just released a very short, very vague teaser trailer of Assassin's Creed 2. Watch it here.
http://assassinscreed.uk.ubi.com/assassins-creed-2/teaser/

It does give us some pointers to where the story might be set into...

Renaissance Italy?

Not much to go by, but I thought we might stir up some discussion here. I for one loved the first game, even if some of the content was a bit lacking.

EDIT:

Cinematic trailer:
http://e3.gamespot.com/video/6210655/

Gameplay trailer:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-09-assassins-creed/50252

The_Scarab

We know it is set in Venice iirc.

Bearcat

Looks like there's going to be a wing suit.
Yessss.

Lucascraft

I loved the historical period that AC1 was set in. The 3rd crusades made for a very interesting game.

The one thing that annoyed me above all else in the first was that they kept taking you out of this fantastic game setting and progressing a "who cares" storyline set in a quasi-modern setting with a sci-fi mind reading device. I would have been much happier if the game was set 100% in the past with no flash forward intrusions.

UnbreakableVow

So hard for this already.

Assassin's Creed was one of my favorite games of 2007, flaws be damned.

Kiwi

Has anyone gone through the website yet? It apparently wants you to have a webcam, but mine doesn't seem to be working.

Shadowfire

Lucascraft wrote: »

I loved the historical period that AC1 was set in. The 3rd crusades made for a very interesting game.

The one thing that annoyed me above all else in the first was that they kept taking you out of this fantastic game setting and progressing a "who cares" storyline set in a quasi-modern setting with a sci-fi mind reading device. I would have been much happier if the game was set 100% in the past with no flash forward intrusions.

I actually liked the whole "quasi-modern setting with a sci-fi mind reading device." I was just pissed that it was all a cocktease - why the fuck wasn't half the game a modern day stealth game featuring similar moves to the medieval settings?

Honestly, I loved Assassin's Creed, but the modern part was a complete tease for me.

Rust

I got through the game, but it destroyed my brother. He was so looking forward to it and the insipid gameplay mechanics had him giving up in frustration after just a little ways into Damascus.

I don't blame him, either. It was just not a very well-developed piece of software. Way too obsessed with its own writing and skimpy in every respect that mattered. I just managed to squeeze fun from it because I got so good at shanking people, but, well:

"That will cost you your life!"
"A crusade for what!? Ignorance? Vengeance? Madness!"
Help, please, someone!"
"That will cost you your life!"
"I'll hurry home. Don't think I'll leave it anytime soon, either."
"Help, please, someone!"
"A crusade for what!? Ignorance? Vengeance? Madness!"
Help, please, someone!"
"That will cost you your life!"
"I'll hurry home. Don't think I'll leave it anytime soon, either."
"That will cost you your life!"
"That will cost you your life!"
"That will cost you your life!"

THIS WEARS YOU DOWN AFTER JUST A LITTLE WHILE DON'T'CHERKNOW

The_Scarab

That will cost you your wife.

You dare steal my presents?

Lucascraft

I never finished Assassin's Creed 1. I keep meaning to pick it up and play it some more, but a few things just keep preventing me. As mentioned above, I hate getting jerked out of the Crusades and stuck in a white laboratory while some doctor and hot chick nurse run experiments on a guy. It breaks the immersion of the game to get pulled out after each mission.

Another thing that bugs me is how little support Ubisoft put into the game. With the various bugs, glitches, and other issues, the fact that they never really patched it or supported it at all really bothered me. Also, this would have been a prime candidate game for some DLC. I would gladly pay 10 or 15 dollars for some new missions with a bit of variety to them.

Overall, the game was just too formulaic in its missions. Go to town, use eagle vision to scout. Pick pocket a dude. Beat the hell out of a dude. Eaves drop on dudes, and then kill a guy. Every time. There was no variety to the core gameplay. Honestly, the best part of the game had nothing to do with story progression. Running, jumping, and exploring was the most fun aspect of the game.

Sadly, on the PS3 version, there was no reward at all for exploration. Finding all the flags, killing the templars, etc had no payoff at all in the PS3 version. At least on the 360 the people got achievements.

I am a big GTA fan, and I love that Rockstar rewards exploration with goodies. Especially in the older games. Collecting the hidden packages and building up a personal armory in your base was a lot of fun. Sadly, there was no reason to collect the flags in AC. None at all.

PeregrineFalcon

Assassin's Creed 2: More of the Same?

TK-42-1

so they want you to print the symbol and then hold it up to the webcam.

thats a little too much

captaink

I need to buy this game.

My roomate borrowed it from his brother and played it on my xbox, but there wasn't a good way to make a second save.

agoaj

captaink wrote: »

I need to buy this game.

My roomate borrowed it from his brother and played it on my xbox, but there wasn't a good way to make a second save.

New profile...

durandal4532

I hope they abandon all pretense of storytelling and focus on the fun bits. Shanking people. Watching people bleed to death. Shanking people who attempted to help the shanked people. Shanking families, villages, townships, cities.

It's just that so few games capture the joy of the shank.

captaink

agoaj wrote: »

captaink wrote: »

I need to buy this game.

My roomate borrowed it from his brother and played it on my xbox, but there wasn't a good way to make a second save.

New profile...

I'm not good at xboxing and this didn't occur to me at the time.

Plus his save game was on my profile to being with.

bombardier

Stupid ipod is autorotating that PDF and I don't want to print it out!

temperature!

I loved AC, by far my favorite game of 07, and I for one cannot wait to run through Venice. Hopefully you can swim this time around, and water kills will be incorporated in the game.

DarkCrawler

Rust wrote: »

"That will cost you your life!"
"A crusade for what!? Ignorance? Vengeance? Madness!"
Help, please, someone!"
"That will cost you your life!"
"I'll hurry home. Don't think I'll leave it anytime soon, either."
"Help, please, someone!"
"A crusade for what!? Ignorance? Vengeance? Madness!"
Help, please, someone!"
"That will cost you your life!"
"I'll hurry home. Don't think I'll leave it anytime soon, either."
"That will cost you your life!"
"That will cost you your life!"
"That will cost you your life!"

oh god I can hear the voices in my head

Criticism of repetition is certainly a valid one. I liked the free-running and fight system though, so it wasn't a problem for me. I hope that now that they have the engine and basic gameplay systems down they can focus more on the content.

Sorenson

Bearcat wrote: »

Looks like there's going to be a wing suit.
Yessss.

And then we're only going to get it like half an hour from the end of the game.

Give us all the basic-but-functionally-awesome shit you promised us at the beginning and reward us by making it even more awesome, not be a cocktease by flashing it for five minutes and taking it away via plot point.

Antithesis

Okay, etching the image onto a post-it with a pencil does not, in fact, work.

Imma go print this out in a few hours.

Marikir

On the topic of AC1:

Better on 360, PS3 or PC? I heard about the crashes on PS3, but didn't know if they were fixed.

xzzy

The printout thing is actually sort of neat, it's doing that 3d/real world integration trick that's been popular lately, like this:

http://www.boffswana.com/news/?p=392

I didn't have a printer available, so I just took a sharpie marker and drew out the symbol. It worked okay.

This one just shows the forearm of an assassin, with the little stabby wrist blade extended. I'm not sure if there was something I was supposed to be doing with it, or it was just a fun tech demo.

Operative21

I liked assassins creed but the repetition mentioned above was a definite minus, as was the save game/unskippable cutscene setup that made replaying the game an incredible pain in the ass. I'd be replaying missions right now if it didn't mean sitting through some incredibly boring dialogue with the old man. It was okay the first time, but when you want to replay the game, being forced to sit through it again is unforgiveable.

As far as the setting for the second game goes, rennaisance italy? Awesome. Hell, the cloak and dagger stuff pulled by the Borjas alone would make perfect material for an assassin game.

Marikir wrote:

Better on 360, PS3 or PC? I heard about the crashes on PS3, but didn't know if they were fixed.

Not sure about the 360, or PS3, but the PC did have some improvements on gameplay with the added mission types. In other aspects though it came across as a poor port, particularly given that it used the console style save system, and had issues with hardware sound acceleration (I actually had to turn down my sound acceleration in order to get the dialogue sound to work).

Lucascraft

PS3 is a poor choice for AC. I have it for PS3 and I sorely wish I would have bought it for 360 instead.

xzzy

Antithesis wrote: »

Okay, etching the image onto a post-it with a pencil does not, in fact, work.

Imma go print this out in a few hours.

It seems like you have to get the proportions right... such as the black border around the edges. I just eyeballed it, didn't work on the first try. Filled in more black areas and it went okay.

DeMoN

Sorenson wrote: »

Bearcat wrote: »

Looks like there's going to be a wing suit.
Yessss.

And then we're only going to get it like half an hour from the end of the game.

Give us all the basic-but-functionally-awesome shit you promised us at the beginning and reward us by making it even more awesome, not be a cocktease by flashing it for five minutes and taking it away via plot point.

Good thing they didn't do that in the first Assassin's creed!

Elendil

I will state outright that I adored Assassin's Creed

Adored

Flawed, but I was absolutely in fucking love with the concept and the important shit was done well

I want this so bad

MichaelLC

Marikir wrote: »

On the topic of AC1:

Better on 360, PS3 or PC? I heard about the crashes on PS3, but didn't know if they were fixed.

There was a patch released that cleared up most of them. Don't think it was 100% though.

Lave II

As an experience I look back fondly on AC.

Certain games can survive their poor mechanics by successfully creating a realised world to explore. GTA IV, the new-PoP and Bioshock are all games which as games crumble and fall as awful broken things, but the world (not plot, world) they create is so real and interesting that I can't help to love exploring it.

Games can do two things that other media can't. One is create wonderfully exciting mechanisms to be played with. (For example Outrun 2 being nothing but a sliding round corner game, and Rhythm Tengoku being nothing but connecting a switch, and both being better for it)

The second is creating worlds that can be explored which are liberated from a narrative. The satire of GTA's fake adverts and, hell, culture to my mind are the first examples of social commentary and reflection which can be freed from the need to tell a story.

And sure, Assassin's Creed wasn't a classic that managed to combine the two sides, because it's mechanics are broken (aka hold 'a' and forward -> complete game) but fuck me did it give me an amazing world to explore.

Instead of Space Marines invading Space Aliens in Space it's given us the fucking crusades.

And now it's giving us the fucking Renaissance?

I'm interested even if the actual 'game' part is still as broken.

Racist Joke

Elendil wrote: »

I will state outright that I adored Assassin's Creed

Adored

Flawed, but I was absolutely in fucking love with the concept and the important shit was done well

I want this so bad

Same here. I just devoured this game whole and wanted more. The flags were pointless, didn't bother looking for them, only got them if I happened to run into one.

I am waiting for this game with bated breath.

xzzy

For those that don't care enough to try it out:

Johannen

By far the most annoying bit of the first game was the fucking beggars asking for shit. I used to kill them out of sheer rage at how annoying they were.

ArcSyn

I had it on my blackberry screen and it worked pretty well. The actual arm/diagram thingy wasn't really worth the effort though. Would have been cool if they had made it do something if you held it there for a while and if it was less "flashy" and "glitchy". (the flashing and glitching seemed like it was on purpose)

Fashionist Pig

xzzy wrote: »

For those that don't care enough to try it out:

I commend you sir. Mainly because although I have every peice of technology availible for playing games and general timewasting, cameras and webcams have evaded me. I find their ability to capture you in some sort of 2d box isn't healthy.

I'm also hoping this game is going to be great in all the ways AC 1 wasn't. It's to be said though that I loved AC1 even with all it's fairly minor flaws and repetitiveness, if only because I enjoyed the story otherwise and the gameplay was very exciting to me. I just feel that I needed more of a reason to want to stay hidden, as once I got good at fighting, I was a tank with a deployable blade at the end of the barrel.

One thing I didn't enjoy and skipped as much as possible was the area between cities. Mainly because I didn't enjoy having to sneak around and wait for the right time to climb up a tower. I mean, i'm sure they were looking out for my safety when they throw things at me and knock me down to prevent me from almost killing myself in the nearby hay cart, but really, how much harm am I doing exactly by climbing to the tops of your tower, guards? Are you keeping your porn collection up there or something, don't want anyone to see or know?

Lucascraft

Maybe I just sucked at the game, or perhaps the "perfect kill" was more of an ideal than a reality. But I think I completed maybe the first 4 assassinations before I got tired of the repetition, and not a single one of my kills was really all that spectacular.

I distinctly remember that I put all this time and setup into clearing the archers in one area. I think it was the hit on the doctor surgeon guy. Probably number 3 or 4. And I did all this pre-kill setup and then I drop down into the hospital for the kill, and a drunk guy NPC gets agitated, shoves my character, and my cover is blown. It alerted the mark, he took off running, and instead of getting in close and jacking him up like I had planned, I ended up chasing him around with 20 guards on my back.

DeMoN

Yeah, just did the symbol thing.

Pretty fucking cool.

Mei Hikari

That webcam trick was impressive. And I can't help but notice he has all his fingers.

xzzy

Fashionist Pig wrote: »

I commend you sir. Mainly because although I have every peice of technology availible for playing games and general timewasting, cameras and webcams have evaded me. I find their ability to capture you in some sort of 2d box isn't healthy.

This is the downside of my employer buying me Mac hardware.. it comes with this shit whether I want it or not. Usually a piece of electrician's tape covers the camera, just in case something turns it on and the entire planet gets a broadcast of me picking my nose.

Sorenson

xzzy wrote: »

For those that don't care enough to try it out:

::snip::

Please tell me that was your arm in the pic and that the site just superimposed the blade and cloth and stuff

because yeesh that thing looks shittily-placed.

And while AC was certainely an interesting game and damned fun once you got down to the art of running along architecture stabbing assholes and retards, all that forced plot bullshit and repetitive "climb this, kill this, snatch this" stuff killed it. Just tell us who we have to kill and let us loose on the streets; put in some cutscenes if you want to try and flesh out the characters, but let us break them if we think that's an awesome time to strike.

Santa Claustrophobia

Fashionist Pig wrote: »

xzzy wrote: »

For those that don't care enough to try it out:

I commend you sir. Mainly because although I have every peice of technology availible for playing games and general timewasting, cameras and webcams have evaded me. I find their ability to capture you in some sort of 2d box isn't healthy.

I'm also hoping this game is going to be great in all the ways AC 1 wasn't. It's to be said though that I loved AC1 even with all it's fairly minor flaws and repetitiveness, if only because I enjoyed the story otherwise and the gameplay was very exciting to me. I just feel that I needed more of a reason to want to stay hidden, as once I got good at fighting, I was a tank with a deployable blade at the end of the barrel.

One thing I didn't enjoy and skipped as much as possible was the area between cities. Mainly because I didn't enjoy having to sneak around and wait for the right time to climb up a tower. I mean, i'm sure they were looking out for my safety when they throw things at me and knock me down to prevent me from almost killing myself in the nearby hay cart, but really, how much harm am I doing exactly by climbing to the tops of your tower, guards? Are you keeping your porn collection up there or something, don't want anyone to see or know?

I would've been happy if those fuckers on the towers didn't automatically spot me as an assassin EVERY FUCKING TIME. That shit got old by the second time they spotted me.