The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

It does look pretty fun! I saw this an hour ago on Reddit and watched it immediately.
On the flipside to your promise, I'll be the dude streaming it on Twitch Day 1

let us know if the jungle gym-ey level design holds up once you reach the "proper open world" part in london. the stuff in the video could basically be from a level-based AC game but seems cool as that.

Will do. After Unity, I aim to be quite critical of Syndicate so I'll be taking a look at things like that. If anyone else has got questions or things I should be mindful of/on the lookout for while playing it, I guess they can be posted here too.

thing I'm most interested in is if the building interiors in the open world seem better designed for navigation and less samey in their layouts. In Unity being inside a house basically meant that stealth was limited to a single plane of elevation, and finding paths between floors and ways to move around sneakily was pretty clunky.

AC games haven't ever had to rely on interiors for level design as much as in Unity, previously you were generally inside a warehouse or factory rather than an actual dwelling. Wonder how they're approaching it this go around.

welp.

i guess this marks a time for me to leave THB for a bit.

after moving into a house, i need to get my financials back in check (meaning, fewer trips to home depot) before i can afford to get new games, so it's time for me to go dark to not spoil anything.

i've done a decent job of avoiding things to this point, only coming to this forum, so it should be easy to go in mostly blind by avoiding THB.

later!

Watched this about five times today just trying to gather my thoughts. I really want to like Syndicate but Unity really rubbed me the wrong way. Being that Syndicate is running on the same engine as Unity makes me both hopeful and skeptical simultaneously. On one hand, they've had another year to properly work out all the kinks in the engine allowing for a better expirence in Syndicate, on the other this is the same engine that Unity used!, lol, I'm sure they're still lots of those lingering problems in Unity are still present here.
Gameplay-wise I still don't like the fighting animations they look very choppy and out of place. Otherwise I do love the Interior level design we were shown.

On the narritive side I think they got things covered with syndicate. It already seems much more interesting than Unity with the Arno/Elise love story. What I take from this 40 minutes is that the game has that fast-paced, hollywood summer block- buster feel to it as well.

But you know...I'm waiting for a playthrough...

I would rather animations LOOK choppy and FEEL good in your hands, than LOOK GOOD and FEEL like garbage in your hands. Unity is the second one. Syndicate, according to early testers, is the first one. In a game, interactivity is more important. So, I'm happy with it so far.

it looks like the good version of the typical hollywood historical thriller thing. Closer to AC3's approach, which was my favorite. Good writing, good comic/dramatic timing and pretty good voice acting.

Some footage I saw of someone running around in the open world looked fairly what-I-expected. I think my metric for getting back into the series will be the random messing around looking new and interesting, rather than just the level design of the missions.

EDIT: or if they cut the open world altogether. I'd also be stoked for that.

I once suggested something like that; Ubisoft could make Assassin's Creed a mission-based/open-level but linear progression game. Glad to see at least one person saw the merit in that. We'll see how Syndicate's open world goes. If it's great, great. If they're clearly having more and more trouble justifying its existence, then yeah. You could design a tighter, more focused experience with Hitman/Dishonored-style levels.

I feel like Ubisoft identifies themselves and Assassin's Creed so much with open worlds that it's impossible to realistically expect the main series to go that way: I'm just dreaming, basically.

That's why my actual detailed suggestions are all about how to make the open world work, use its advantages. Wheras for my argument about going level-based here I'm just like "hey ubi, stop it" cause I don't really expect to be listened to at all : P

oh, also i'm interested in how ranged weapons handle now. gunplay still looked awkward in those vids