The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

Pfeh. Doesn't matter what he says. I demand game-play footage!

If the AnvitNext is truly developed for the next-gen games, then that would explain SO much for ACIII.

Nice name for the ship, by the way.

okay, now I feel a whole lot better about this. Upgrading is good, I don't know what I think of first-person though..

Did I miss the first-person section? Where was that?

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/03/04/assassins-creed-4-black-flag-pushing-h...

Yes please.

Sorry if I sound too skeptical, but I'll have to say "whatever". If they truly believed that they wouldn't have had all those scene assassinations in AC3. So unless they fired everyone involved in ACB, ACR and AC3 I simply won't believe them.

Two things in those articles that struck a chord with me, in different ways:

1 - They mention that they've (again) incentivized stealth gamelplay. To me, this translates as "Hey, we're not a stealth game any more. If you want to try to stay true the series, have at it. But here's a ton of guns and swords so you can Rambo your way through the forest instead, because that's awesome."

2 - "The team hopes that it can incentivize hardcore Assassin’s Creed fans to step outside the world of pirates and explore the Abstergo facility, by providing a variety of unnamed activities and information as a means of reward." It's about damn time.

I'm having faith in this one because of what the creative director said and that it's being done by a whole new team at Ubisoft. Montreal isn't touching it this time and is under new eyes that, apparently, preferred AC1's original ideas more.

So I'm pretty hopeful until I see gameplay. Which will inevitably happen at E3.

"Just how the player will play through these modern day scenes, whether it’ll be a first-person experience like Desmond’s memories from Revelations, or something like a character customization suite that allows the game to maintain it’s more traditional third-person perspective, is yet to be seen, but something along these lines to help with the idea of being one with this new character was hinted at in our talks with Ashraf."
So it's not confirmed Joey, but I hope that it never is. The only time I want to see first person is lying down on the animus when looking up at Lucy/Warren/whoever and I could say the same about the blood messages left in Desmond's cell. That part gave me shivers. But, feel free to disagree, it could make you feel way more immersed.
From what they said about giving you more options as an individual player I automaticaly thought of Star wars...uh, the one where you can select what dialogue to use ex: 1 "Who are you?" 2 "Why am I here?" 3 "Are these examples necessary?"

That makes more sense in the modern time since you are the character in this game so there isn't any forced character traits you are bound to in that state, though I'd rather not have it in the past bit, Edward should stay his own character~

That's my opinion anyway...

Was looking into this a little more (bold added for emphasis)...

Apparently, Jackdaw's have quite the reputation for being thievish. Perfect for a pirate vessel... and even keeps the bird analogy going in AC lore.

Not all accounts are favorable to the Jackdaw's intelligence though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Jackdaw#Cultural_depictions_and_fol...

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Also, what are the chances that the Jackdaw and the Aquila are the same boat 50 years apart?

Since now we're apparently all about "Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Assassin's Creed IV", I present to you the derivation of the word "buccaneer".

A native Caribbean word for "smokehouse" was boucan. The French adapted the word to "boucaniers" to describe those who roamed in the Caribbean jungles smuggling untaxed meat. Eventually these people joined the teams of pirates, possibly to make traveling easier (rather than hacking their way through the jungle).

There you go. Brought to you by LisaMurphy, purveyor of random factoids since 3/20/2010.

You're much younger than I thought.

Looking forward to this! Also, I am glad this community is still around, and still awesome!

I had a thought about ACIV, desmond wise. They say desmond will return. But will it physically be him? My theory is that abstergo is going to try and re create desmond with their new animus.

Sounds pretty far fetched.....

Who said that?

All I've heard is that he'll be referenced (because he was kind of a huge deal). In this game, he won't be a character to interact with in any form. We're our own main character in the modern day working for Abstergo. The multiplayer storylines have backed this up, now that I look back at them.

Basically the modern-day premise of AC4 follows from the Multiplayer of AC3;
As an Abstergo Gamer, you become so good at Animus™ that they draft you into the company.
Presumably, that's who the protagonist of AC4 is and through the course of his or her journey, they'll discover that the Templars might not exactly be the peaches and cream good guys they thought they were.

Or we could always stay an Abstergo employee throughout the course of the new story. That's not out of the question. It would be a cool way to go about it; we are modern-day Templars learning more about our enemy through their history. Who says we'll betray Abstergo?

Still, Ubisoft will probably have us go with the Assassins via Erudito and kill a potentially unique premise.

Where does anything ever say that the assassins are the good guys in any of the games?

Exactly my point. Keeping us at Abstergo would better translate the blurry line of good/evil between the Assassins and Templars.

I'm gonna pull a really lame weapon out of my lame arsenal and say that 1) I totally understand and AGREE with the fact that Assassins and Templars are not "good" and "evil". Anyone that blindly believes such completely missed the point of all the game so far. However, Ubisoft has established the Assassins as protagonists and most players will be expecting that. Furthermore, the game's name is Assassin's Creed. I'm all for playing a Templar (oh lordy yes), but first they're probably going to want to wrap up what's already been started on the Assassin side. There's still more to find out after AC3.

I think it would be cool and innovative for Ubisoft to use this new modern day idea. We haven't seen what our Abstergo Analyst looks like, yet (who knows, they might force a default skin onto us for when we look into a mirror).

Ubisoft probably doesn't want their story to be fiddled with, so no "choose your own adventure" choices, but maybe giving us options to make our new main character visually customized by us would make us feel more involved. At first, I thought about having our Xbox/Playstation Home Avatars to be inputted into the game as our character, but that would be silly with so many people's avatars wearing crowns and Call of Duty gear.

Making the modern day character "us" is cool, but giving us some customization with that would be better. Otherwise, I'd feel like a camera walking around Abstergo until I became Edward again. Maybe see other players roaming around the Abstergo labs? So many possibilities.

If they don't use it that well, I'll be pissed.

I believe ubisoft is going to try to implement the kinect into modern day. To scan our faces, it can be done.

Not too sure about that. You'd think they would have mentioned it by now.

Well that would be a modern day feature. Anything pertaining to modern day is usually kept secret, so the theory isn't completely dead.

It would be unfair to the millions of players that DON'T have Kinect, though. Introducing a new element to the game on that level would make a lot of players bitch. Also, Ubisoft has done exclusives for Playstation only, not Xbox (every multiplayer beta, Benedict Arnold missions, AC1 for free from purchasing ACR, etc). It would be cool to do, but it's unlikely.

Point of clarification: As I understand it, with the new PC special edition releases... the Benedict Arnold missions are just an "Everything but Xbox" exclusive now... which really sucks and is a slap in the face to Xbox players when he shows up as a major person in the DLC...

i highly doubt that would ever be a gameplay element.
but it could be the next DRM mechanic

The PS3 has it's own camera. In fact they even announced their own Kinect variant with the PS4 announcement.

If Ubisoft is serious about the "you are the modern day protagonist" it would be great if they had some level of customization and some minor player choice but i'm not holding my breath on this.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OJT1EGcCelc#

^ gameplay trailer.

Ok, so in AC3, the bow was a silent, quick reload, long ranged weapon with a ton of ammo (once you upgraded it fully) and guns were loud short to long ranged weapons with long reload times.

Edward doesn't have a bow. What does that mean for the ranged weapon dynamic in this game? I would assume rope darts come back, but are they otherwise going to just stick you with poison darts and guns? Or will we see traditional throwing knives make a return?

Either way, ranged weapons will probably be less useful for stealth considering the more limited range of a knife/dart and the limited ammo capacity for them.

Bombs could make a return, considering the fact that pirates constantly dealt with temperamental, explosive ammunition. Perhaps dynamite? A guy living in the Caribbean can supply us some, or Haytham could steal some ingredients.

Man, I miss the throwing knives, though.

You should remember that I was talking about stealth ranged weapons. If you're going to use bombs then a gun would do fine, but not be very stealthy at all.

Guns won't do fine a they've said they are single use pistols (up to only 4 or 6, i don't recall)... Whether they stay that way or not in the final game remains to be seen.

I would hope for throwing knives, though.

"Single-use" means one shot in the clip. You can reload them.

So if you're at range and you don't care about being seen you can use them and then reload them. But I was just saying that that's NOT a stealth weapon, and neither are bombs.

(Edit: I know that it's not called a clip for those guns, but you knew what I meant, right?)

they've called them single use disposable pistols... which to me means they are too complicated to reload on the fly and it's better to use and drop and only reload pistols between missions.

these are pre-AC3 guns, mind you... so the reloading may not have been worked out... hell, they may not even be flint-locks... they are probably match-locks anyway...

I think I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that they are not going to actually be disposable pistols, since we've seen no disposing of them during gameplay footage, and since that would make melee-range counter kills with them incredibly dumb.

You're only going to start with one, after all, and have to earn the other holsters. one shot and then buy another pistol would piss people off and simply not work in gameplay terms. and they aren't going to redesign their entire firearm system for this game.

I mean, sure, we haven't seen definitive proof, but we haven't seen definitive proof that there will be no weapon damage, for instance, but that doesn't mean I'll believe it.

EDIT: I think I know what you're talking about in regard to disposable pistols. They were talking about the way you would realistically have used pistols in this time period. The people who threw pistols away didn't do so because they were useless and couldn't ever be reloaded but because it was the fastest way to free up their hands and grab their sword or another pistol.

In gameplay terms, you don't want to go around picking up your weapons all the time. So they'll just have used up their shot, and when you're out of combat or not in a hurry you can reload it slowly like in AC3. (maybe the reload times will be different since they're older pistols, but I was under the impression that that sort of tech was pretty stagnant then)

But...they've said that Edward throws away the pistols after the shots. >_>

That's what "disposable" means. It's easier to press the shoot button 4-6 different times during a free flow combo than waiting for them to reload. You'd just buy more guns. Or maybe get some from your ship. I'm sure you'll be able to do something like that.

We've never seen him throw away a single gun in-game.

I've given my reasons I don't believe it, but if you have the link to an article where they say that edward will throw away his guns after one shot each in-game, then I'll happily listen.

It's just that incorporating such a thing sounds like a whole lot of work and a balancing headache that they don't NEED to go through since they developed a perfectly fine firearms system in AC3.

I've only heard them discuss throwing away muskets when they talk about how actual pirates would fight, as in real life it genuinely would be the smarter thing, and real life is not designed to be balanced so that you can be at maximum possible strength when you proceed into the next engagement without needing to reacquire unloaded guns.

If it's in, kudos to them, because it means they're trying something vastly different than people realize, but I can't see any reason they would bother messing with the firearms system we've already seen in a way that would mean they have to design levels and key moments to account for the fact that you may have few to no pistols left.

One reason to revamp the firearm system has already been mentioned... they are likely matchlocks and not flintlocks... longer to reload, harder to reload, etc... this came from on camera interviews with pirate experts talking about AC4... and we know AC likes to stay true to the times... I don't recall if this was confirmed by ubisoft representatives or not in the same video

then again, on closer inspection, they are clearly flintlocks :-/

Gotta see those interviews. Not because of the actual topic, but because I really wanna know what a pirate expert looks like. I mean, if you're a really devoted expert, you gotta have at least two out of the following three: an eyepatch, a hook and a wooden leg.

i think it was a woman who studies the golden age of piracy at a university... so she looked like a regular college professor...

*CRASH*

Hear that? That was one of my dreams shattering....

Did she at least have a parrot on her shoulder?

So yeah, as I said, maybe it's not totally in line with history, but they've said before that gameplay comes first whenever it needs to.

Of course they're going to stay true to the times. Make it fun, yes, but they won't do something that's out of the ordinary for each time period. They're most likely matchlocks like McStab said.

From the trailer itself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=KRAn_8baQa4#t=60s

He literally drops his guns after using them. He uses two and drops them to grab another two to use. I think that's the best indicator that it's true.

Yes, I was not in ignorance of that, but we don't ever see him do that in actual in-engine footage. Remember how there was a crossbow in AC1's CG trailer? Remember how Ezio did hookblade rolls without the hookblade in Revelation's trailer? Remember how Connor stormed an entire battlefield using only a horse and a rock?

It's not wildly out of place for them to be using flintlocks. I'm fairly certain there were around at the time.

Also, from Mcstab:

I...I simply have no more words.

If you're right, then I'll give you a cookie. But I don't buy that ubisoft would implement free-aiming and simultaneously make you throw away guns.

Or how about I get a cookie no matter who is right (in other words, do we really have to debate something this small)? But seriously, if you used up throwing knives in previous games, how much different would it be with guns? I mean you could loot guns from enemies, would make sense since most enemies in AC3 had guns.