The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W61pq_1kPC4
{front-paged: Lisa}

Assassin's Creed III - Silent Extermination - Fort St-Mathieu

First, a request. I play this game through a Steam shortcut to get the Steam overlay in game, but the latest Uplay update unfortunately seems incompatible with the Steam overlay. If anyone knows a way of fixing this without cracking the game, please tell me.

This was another extremely challenging run, but one without compromises. SSI is on again, for the same reason as before, and it doesn't give me any real advantage. I would have had to wait for the Captain to come around again before moving to kill the pair of soldiers at 4:45 to stay safe, but that would have been the only big change.

The lead in is the same as my previous runs at this Fort so you can skip to 0:40 if you don't want to see it again, but in case you do watch it, the soldier isn't talking to me (or the cougar for that matter) at 0:26; that threat is meant for a Patriot on a nearby cliff. If Patriots are in this area that will happen most of the time.

It takes a long time to make most of these videos, but I'm afraid the break between this one and the next might be especially long. Fort Duquesne and Fort Division both seem like monstrous challenges, and I'm purposely saving Fort Monmouth for last. I hope you've enjoyed what I've done so far, and stay tuned. I'm not done yet.

And here are my continued comments that I couldn't include in the description but are linked:

The pair of soldiers that come into view at 0:43 have an animation loop where the soldier further away alternates between looking at his buddy and the nearby barrels. When he looks at the barrels he'll either bend over to check on them closely or simply look over at them for a moment, seeming to count something. Since his actions are accurately modeled in his sightline, the bending over animation makes it easier to take the pair down without being detected. The point at which the animation loop starts is randomly determined when Connor enters the restricted zone, but I got lucky this time. The other opportunity is shown in the demo section after the main run, and is also used to demonstrate something else, which I'll get to later.

Unlike the earlier pair, the sightline of the soldier I kill at 1:08 isn't modeled with his movements. This is what makes approaching him from that angle possible.

The soldier that appears at 1:16 often stutters in his approach to investigate the corpses, preventing me from killing him when I need to. Very annoying. I have a use for the other one that was just checking the hide spot, so I won't kill him yet. Leaving him alive makes things tougher in the short term though.

Killing the soldier at 1:36 is tougher than it looks. Moving in high profile before getting on the ladder would result in instant detection by the soldiers at the gate, and getting into the hide spot afterward quickly is difficult, since the jump has to be hit just right to become a leap of faith. However, like the one at 1:08, his sightline doesn't match his animation.

The soldier turning away only to turn back again at 1:50 happens every time with this strategy. I lost focus and left the hide spot early a couple of times, resulting in me being seen. Ha ha.

I need to get to the point I reach at 2:12 to stay out of the sight of the soldier I left alive when he reaches the hide spot and turns back around, and at the same time also avoid the sight of a pair of soldiers patrolling above to the east. The place I stand is out of their range even if they look right in my direction, but if they don't move on at the right time the other soldier will spot me on his return trip from the hide spot.

I finally get to mercilessly kill the pair of soldiers next to the powder reserve after working so hard to save them in previous runs. No one's in range to be alerted when I kill them in high profile either, so it's a breeze.
Up the stairs I go for a pair of super fast low profile kills. You'll notice that I seem to come into the view of the second one I kill as I kill the first. Wondering why I wasn't detected? Just like that first double low profile assassination, I'll explain at the end.

I need one of the two patrolling soldiers on the upper level to be the first to reach the corpses of the pair I killed. Whoever reaches them first always heads to the hay bale I hid in after investigating. Unfortunately, this duo is often afflicted by the stuttering bug, so one or both of the soldiers that come from the bench to investigate can end up beating them there. To make things worse, even if one of the soldiers I want comes to the hay bale he might end up turning back before he comes within assassination range.

I hide in that stalking zone to wait for the now single patrolling soldier to get back to the stage of his patrol where he heads east. I need all the time I can get to kill that soldier on the southeastern scaffold and hide. That soldier is another one whose sightline modeling and animation don't match, by the way.

That ledge on the other side of the cannon parapet (the low wall) is precarious (you can't grab hold of the edge of it, you'll just fall if you approach it), but also very useful, in an obscure way. I've read many comments online about how a crouch move would be a big boon to the Assassin's Creed series' stealth mechanics, and the funny thing is there's been a stationary crouch since the first game, even though it requires the player to hold two buttons and isn't officially referred to as a crouch. Even so, it allows you to hide behind objects nearly as short as waist height, and that's exactly what I do using the parapet to hide from that patrolling soldier. To "crouch," prepare to jump by holding the jump (or foot if you're playing a game earlier than AC3) and high profile buttons. You can return to a neutral pose without jumping from "crouching" by letting go of just the high profile button. Be careful while using this technique though; if you do it while close to and facing an object you'll climb that object instead of crouching behind it. I wonder if this technique was truly meant to be used this way. It certainly does make your character's shape change from his neutral pose in the eyes of enemies, allowing you to use it to hide, but it's awkward enough to make me question.

The movements of the soldiers sitting at the bench aren't modeled in their sightlines, thank goodness, so I can approach them from the side even though it looks like one of them looks right at me. The Captain is out of visual range when I kill the soldier that comes to investigate their corpses.

Now it's finally time to make use of that soldier I ignored earlier. There's a pair of soldiers at a campfire in the northern part of the Fort, and killing them unseen is impossible unless I lure them away. The one I ignored makes excellent bait.

Only three enemies left now. The most difficult of them is the soldier on the ground level. I need to wait until both the Captain and the soldier on the scaffold above are looking away, and the soldier only looks away for a couple of seconds. Once the one on the ground level is gone, killing the soldier on the scaffold is a matter of picking just the right moment. The gaps in the scaffold's floor reveal his position, making things easier.

I take my time killing the Captain, and his death isn't all that spectacular. Killing him in high profile would have alerted the soldiers at the Fort's main entrance, so I had to be conservative. That sound at the very end is them rushing to investigate his corpse.

Ok, now I'll talk about chaining low profile assassinations to eliminate multiple enemies that are very close together incredibly quickly and stealthily. If you've seen my Fort Washington Silent Extermination you've already seen this kind of technique, but I use it three times in this run, and the example at 2:26 in particular is special. If you didn't know already you can probably guess that a low profile assassination can be performed as soon as another finishes, and that you'll home in on targets that are close enough to you. You also might know that any detection an enemy has built up is canceled at the moment the assassination begins. There's also a slight delay before an enemy is alerted when another enemy is assassinated in their view. The combination of these factors is what allows me to kill the one on the left at 2:26 in direct sight of the one on the right. Had I hesitated to kill the one on the right he would have been alerted, but mashing the attack button allowed me to kill him at the earliest opportunity and silence him before the delay period ended. The demo just illustrates this more clearly, since I'm in the second soldier's view for longer. This technique is one of my favorite additions in AC3, and another little thing I'm not sure was intentional. The amazing animation blending makes it hard to tell when one kill ends and the next begins, but the ability to move quickly from one kill to the next is the critical element, and it does strike me as intentional. It's brilliant.

Until next time!

Just one additional note: I've got another ACIII video coming up that isn't a Silent Extermination, but I think people here will appreciate it a great deal. I'll be putting it up soon.