Assassin’s Creed: Origins is the deepest, most sprawling, visually gorgeous, technologically advanced repackaging of the same old shit we’ve gotten yet.
I don’t necessarily mean that as a dig… or a compliment. Actually, I’m not really sure how I feel about it yet. On the one hand, it’s an Assassin’s Creed game, so you pretty much know what you’re getting at this point. Nobody buying an AC game in 2017 is surprised by what’s under the hood.
At the same time, this one again feels like they almost made some big changes. The setting is amazing; I have no complaints about playing a game in ancient Egypt. The game looks fantastic. They cut way back on the present-day/animus stuff, which I always thought was a drag. And the combat? They sort of kind of made it better.
But it still feels like it falls short of any of a half-dozen third-person slashers I can think of off the top of my head (Souls, Nioh, etc). It’s better than what we had in previous AC games, yet still not as good as some other games are doing it.
Despite the many improvements (and there are many improvements, credit where credit is due), a few hours in when the gloss wears off, it really started to feel a lot like every AC game I played before. There wasn’t much I hadn’t already done in earlier AC games. Stealth all felt the same, enemy AI felt roughly the same which made the fights feel the same despite the mechanics being different. Climbing is still both incredibly cool when it works, and controller-smashingly frustrating when it doesn’t (which is always at the moments when you most need it to work).
As I said at the start, whether that’s a bad thing depends entirely on how much you like Assassin’s Creed. Most people buying the games at this point have already decided one way or another. Personally, I still tend to kind of enjoy them, for some reason, even though I never finish them anymore, and the entire time I’m playing them I’m thinking “I’ve already played this game.”
It’s not so much that I keep hoping they’ll surprise me and magically fix all of the game’s hereditary repetitiveness, turning out something drastically different and fresh compared to what has come before. They do keep making strides forward, though, that feel like just enough to show me the hazy shape of something new and exciting in the distance without ever actually getting there.
It is kind of like the new versions of all the sports and racing games(and call of duty). Every year they improve it and make it better, but they are still basically the same game. I think having a new one every year is a bit much. It is even more than that if you count dlc, spin offs and stuff like that.
Haha, fate is brutal. Isn’t it? That is a good dig at the universe of Assains Creed and we, the audience can plainly see it. Why couldn’t one of Desmond’s ansestors be a farmer who got drunk on weekends and had 3 children with two different women? I guess we will never know.
Because that would have made for a shitty stealth game.
Clearly you don´t know whats involved dodging two different women then.
Lol
Sounds like an argument for a Leisure Suit Larry reboot to me!
They dropped the direct descent of Desmond after either 3 or Black Flag (can’t remember which now). They can now use historical DNA and anyone can ‘witness’ the history (I think Rogue was from perspective of someone playing on an Abstergo game console).
I think after 3. 4th was the employee thing, and unity (which i’ve only just started) is the guy in front of the TV or something.
And this is why, on a day that Super Mario Odyssey and Wolfenstein 2 came out, I just laughed and laughed and laughed at Assassin’s Creed. Why on earth would I buy another damn Assassin’s Creed when two new, exciting games are coming out? It doesn’t matter that they took a year off, with alternating teams and supporting studios, no Assassin’s Creed game was being developed in just a year and now suddenly they had more time to make this one better. It just means people didn’t play a bog-standard AssCreed last year before playing a bog-standard AssCreed this year.… Read more »
Both those games look like trash. AC:O looks like trash. I think I’m just getting sick of the same bloody games over and over again….
“The same bloody games?” Super Mario Odyssey is fairly different from anything Nintendo’s released with Mario in a long time, Wolfenstein 2 is only the second damn game so you can’t call it “the same bloody games over and over again.”
You do have a point with AC:O, though.
This is actually the 11th Wolfenstein game.
2.1 Castle Wolfenstein (1981)
2.2 Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984)
2.3 Wolfenstein 3D (1992)
2.4 Spear of Destiny (1992)
2.5 Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)
2.6 Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (2003)
2.7 Wolfenstein RPG (2008)
2.8 Wolfenstein (2009)
2.9 Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014)
2.10 Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (2015)
2.11 Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017)
I have at least one of each pokemon generation barring gen II. Sometimes I’m bored and then I bust out Black 2 and go ravage the PWT. Or maybe I’ll get out Heartgold and enjoy Battle Factory. Sure they are at the core the same old games- but if you wait some time in between, they feel new again. Many, many games are almost the same as each other. And yet they are incredibly different.
Though AC does get to “bland and boring” far quicker than most others.
Well, I’ve left this franchise after AC3. It already felt “more of the same” at the time, despite the improvements on each iteration, notably on AC3 itself. But I also liked the story on AC and all that past/present stuff, and they f***** it up BAD on AC3. It was the last drop for my abandon of the series. Yes, I heard that Black Flag was good, I do believe these recent games look gorgeous, but after 5 games, I think I’m done with the series. Also, as @Lily already noted, this is a “milk the money cow” franchise, they… Read more »
they are practically giving them away nowadays like McAfee on new laptops.. I ordered a blue Yeti microphone yesterday and it came with it for free.
I never got the appeal of assassin’s creed. I played the first one in 2009 for 30 minutes and thought to myself, Batman does all this as well (stealth and fighting lots of mooks) and it feels way better. Never touched a single AC ever again.
So you played AC 1, which was made five or so years before Asylum, and thought Asylum was better? Good for you!
If your going to try and make him feel bad about his comment, at least get your facts straight. AC 1 was in late 2007 and he played it in 2009. Asylum came out in August 2009, not 5 or so years after he played AC 1.
I dare to say that without AC 1, there is no way Arkham Asylum was half as good as it is, it even has its own “eagle vision”. This being said, i believe it is normal to consider that B:AA is better than AC 1, even if a little unfair to the fact that AC 1 brought so many innovations to the genre, but it will always be shortsighted to judge the AC games without playing the Ezio trilogy
I never completed the first one, because i found it to be tedious and at best felt like a concept work. The second, Brotherhood, and Black Flag are easily the ones to go to if you want to see what the deal is with people liking Assassins Creed. The others are passable for the most part.
The first one is a pretty bad example for the series as a whole, tbh.
Then there’s Unity.
I’m not sure I would call it passable.
It’s not that bad fully updated, but even then…
If they had focused on a multiplayer story, it wouldn’t have been too bad.
But, in singleplayer, the combat just feels off, and the story…
Oh the story…
Eesh.
So you want an Assassin’s Creed that’s not Assassin’s Creed. Also, they cut back on the present day AGAIN!? Fuck me, what, is there only one scene now!? Christ, the whiners have utterly ruined that part of the game. We don’t even get to play around in it anymore, now it’s just a short video…. That’s part of the series’ lore. I get you don’t actually like AC (You hate an integral part of it, and don’t actually like AC being AC by your own admission) but many of us do….
From what I understand, the sections are still there, they just aren’t as intrusive.
I haven’t actually played it, but I have felt like the present day stuff was a little off after AC3.
Wasn’t bad, but it seemed more drawn out than it needed to be.
The main issue I had with the present-day stuff was that it was basically walking exposition with no real gameplay.
Difficult to do AC-style gameplay in first person, but still…
(That said, other than Unity, I have liked every AC game so far. Hoping a “complete” version of Origins is eventually released.)
No one like Unity. I bought it after the fact, thinking everyone was exaggerating. NOPE! Even patched it was atrocious. As for the present day stuff, what’s wrong with exposition? Plus they were getting better after Brotherhood, wherein there was finally stuff to do in the present day, stuff to collect. Now I just watch a video that I have no say in, and it’s lame.
The whole appeal of AC is the switch between present and past, and the hunt for the real story. Black Flag did this almost perfectly. Cutting back on that part sounds to me like a setback. And, the changes… Why do them? It is, and should be, a story driven game. The technical aspects are pretty well founded already, and don’t really need that much of an improvement. Yes, I get that it is “the same game”, but, as I said, as long as they do the story right, I don’t care.
I rather enjoyed the Desmond storyline and felt that the AC games started doing less and less with that.
Anyone can make an FPS or a slasher title, but adding the additional intrigue of an overarching story made it stand out for me.
I agree on some aspects… A AC game looks like and feels like a AC game… but doesn’t Wolfeinstein, Call of Duty, God of War, etc. doing the same thing?! When I play a God of War… I’m slashing my way through hordes of creatures to achieve a goal… and I do that for every new game of GoW that somes out. I think that people complain more about AC because the game came out every year for so long that people grew tired of the game play. And now, many other companies have just copied they gameplay (think Shadow… Read more »
When you’re on the 10th(?) iteration of the game, there’s not much you can do but change up the story unless you totally redesign what kind of game it is. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My biggest complaint with Assassin’s Creed is that 10 games in, the thing I was most interested in, the story of what’s happening with the Templar/Assassin war, is largely unimportant now. They dribble it out a little bit at a time to the point where I just don’t care anymore. When AC came out I was enthralled with the universe and wanted to see… Read more »
The game is the same and yet not. The first AC was extremely repetitive. Climb the output, synchronize, do missions, find flags, lather, rinse, repeat. They progressively got better (and worse), but with Black Flag I was worried they’d jumped the shark. I played the hell out of that game. I no longer cared about the future pieces or the animus itself. I was a damn pirate. It took me forever to finish the story because I was too busy sinking ships and upgrading my toys. I didn’t play Unity (because, you know, aaarrrrr), and while I felt Syndicate was… Read more »
Still gonnna play it. It’s a comfort thing at this point. Not looking for groundbreaking, just an enjoyable story in a nice setting.
You want something different and interesting, try Senua’s Sacrifice, I just finished it yesterday and it left me feeling raw, tense and emotional. It’s a very simple game, short, too but the story is where it got me, it’s depiction of psychosis. The music was great, too. I haven’t looked for a soundtrack in a while and I might for this one.
Where else on the Internet can you go to see such a beautiful, moving art piece, framed by intelligent philosophical questioning on the meaning of life and one’s destiny, all to essentially poke at the fact that a video game series is getting a bit stale and repetative?
I love this.
I think that the biggest problem of the series is that its really repetitive… and I don’t mean between iterations… I mean that in every area you basically do the same thing – climb the tower to get a map, grind virtually the same quests, etc… it’s the same system they have in Far Cry and Watchdogs and most “open world” games lately… and these games don’t feel “open” precisely because of this… Open world should be about immersion but repetitive gameplay makes them more of a chore.
I really wanted to like AC. (I tried to play Unity) I enjoyed the story, the historical aspects, and found the controller scheme easy to work with. But I just couldn’t get past the part where he doesn’t LET THE FUCK GO of the wall. Or, you want to sneak along the wall, but he wants to hang on a door frame. And then when I did want him to climb, he’d just jump against whatever it was. Plenty of other games have climbing down pat, I don’t understand why this was such a stumbling block for AC. In the… Read more »
If Unity was the only AC game you played… you should try some of the other games in the series before you write off the series as a whole. The last gen games have all been remastered for the current consoles. Unity was all in all a bug riddled mess with the least likable protagonist in the entire series. Probably the single worst installment in the franchise to try and jump into the universe with. AC2, Brotherhood, and Black Flag were my personal favorites. All amazing. The new one has been pretty slick so far though!
Thanks, I’m kind of relived to hear that the one I started with was the buggiest. I’m not quite ready to write it off, I just don’t want to spend the money on something where I’m going to get driven off by bugs. So the others don’t have that “can’t let go of the wall when I want to” thing?
Well I mean… no… that will happen still. It’s the hazard of playing video games while intoxicated. Definitely less frequent than Unity though.
Souls and Nioh are TERRIBLE fucking games. I’ve never understood the love for that trash. And the modern day aspects of the AC series was the BEST part. The mystery, the conspiracy, all that stuff, was why I played. When they started cutting back, I got bored. That said, I’m not too excited about Origins. As Pawel said above, every game like this is JUST like the one before it. They’re all to samey, making me half bored before I’d even got into the meat of the game. Even Shadows of Mordor was too much in this vein and I… Read more »
What does Nioh and DS have to do with AC
For me, it is never the game play that is the main focus for the game, but the story and legacy that lies within the series that I look forward to. Controls and mechanics are always going to be what they are. Sure, I want to be sure I can even play the damn game of course, but the selling point is the story, the visuals, the way you can feel about a character, be it protagonist, antagonist, or support. How well does the story tie in with the region and era? How close to historical can the game get… Read more »
I love the AC series. I beyond dig it. I get that it’s the same tropes with a new skin, but the tropes are fun. On the reverse, how you described your feelings towards AC is how I feel about Pokemon. I get burned out super quick on Pokemon nowadays. After the third gym, I think “I’ve already played this a few times now” and just shut it off, feeling immense guilt.
Yeah, I thought the formula got old after the second game. Didn’t help that the “climb really tall thing to uncover more areas to climb” gimmick started to spread to other games and became very tiring to encounter. Mostly because it rarely presented a challenge and often showed me collectibles I could get.It was even worse in Far Cry 3 and so on, because it offered free weapons, which made me want to unlock all the towers, but couldn’t because arbitrary story barrier. That also made the store economy pretty much useless, since I could get by with the weapons… Read more »
On the climbing stuff to reach more things to climb issue
The most terrifying thing about Monster Hunter is when you realize that once you get rid of the monster causing a horrible catastrophe (Earthquakes, Frenzy Virus, etc) you are really just massacring rare and elusive wildlife to get items to make you more efficient at massacring rare and elusive wildlife. I enjoy the games, but I rarely make it to G-Rank without my attention shifting to something else entirely.
Megaman Battle Network. I remember how quite some time ago a friend gave me an emulator with the 6 games on it. I played them for hours. Except for 4. 4 sucked. 5 was alright but I used save states way too much to actually get anything done, so much of it was reliant on getting the right set up on your first turn. Later, I checked the reviews and saw that the biggest problem with the games was stagnation. People felt that the games simply were the same thing with a different story and minor improvements to a battle… Read more »
Started playing AC at Syndicate didn’t mind it, played Dark Soul 3 while waiting for Origins to come out. Now the AC combat is….. less then fulfilling. Still like assassinating people tho….. for climbing, near the top of the light house of Alaxandria is a horrible place for the climbing controls to decide that you wanted to let go of the wall.
I’ve had a love/hate thing with AC since 3, like a lot of people. I honestly liked AC Chronicles China the best. The switch to 2d made it feel a lot fresher than anything recent.
I never get this argument. Isn’t every game all about repeating the same stuff? That’s what a game is.
You want a game that doesn’t make you repeat any gane mechanics? Fine, it’ll be over in less than a half hour.
Not to mention the DRM debacle…
As soon as it was announced I knew it was just another cheesey re-package of the same old crap, which is why i haven’t rushed out top buy it. Black Flag for me was by far the best of the series and part of the reason for that is because pirates. and we don’t have enough good, pirate games. Pirated, yes. but not featuring pirates. I’ve never like the stuff in the AC games with the present day, always just felt boring. in the first AC it was kind of vital to the story of understanding what the animus was… Read more »
It may be that I played only AC3 before playing Origins… but I loved Origins. One of the best open world games out there, second only to Bethesda games.