The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

Looks awesome...

But what's with all the stupid ballerina twirls in the free-running? I've never seen someone doing parkour dismount from a roof by doing a 360 spin followed by a drop to the ground.

the "ballerina twirls" aren't flourishes. he's clearly using them to precisely change direction.

we've seen a lot of stuff like it in the CG trailers, none in the game. so glad the first bit of AC's reveal hasn't involved any CG.

"The Phantom Blade" is a really cool name. I'm surprised they showed up at the microsoft conference, but I'm glad they did. I'll definitely be buying Unity. lockpicking, more precise free-running, what looks to be deeper and more involved combat, and exactly the kind of Co-Op I wanted!

so much new stuff to talk about, I'll have to wait a bit to get it all sorted out in my head

Here's the version with Ubi commentary

new movement looks great, phantom blade is an awesome stealth weapon and fits onto the assassin without being distracting or conspicuous, co-op looks great, that building looks amazing and like it has a lot of routes to go, game itself looks really pretty, crowds are crazy as heck, they really didn't flinch away from the violence of the revolution, I LOVE the hints at upgrading your assassin to suit your playstyle like in splinter cell (it's on the official website in the co-op section) and they mentioned "upgrading eagle sense to tag targets from further away", so that idea we had about that upgrade path seems to be in in some sense, holy shit I'm really excited.

only downer: no playable women, at least so far. hope there are character select options that let you play as one in co-op.

want to see more at the ubi conference. single-player and hints at the story.

Now this is what I'm talking about. Animation is much more smoother - virtually they're no hiccups or odd transitions. The physics on that tailcoat is amazing! I love it how he simply just drops down on the ground.

And the crowd. Look at all those numbers...

I just hope co-op doesn't allow people to screw each other over. What happens if I want to go in all ghost-like, and some jerk accidentally causes the guards to panic and be alert? Although there would be an appeal to that sort of dynamicism.

Lets hope that it isn't going to be visually downgraded.

A bit baffling that they speak with an English accent when the game takes place in Paris. Hopefully, we get the option to change the dub into French. Makes it much more immerse.

I was able to get off work early, come home to Watch Dogs in my mailbox, and able to watch Unity's co-op walkthrough. It's a good day. It gave me the same feelings I had watching AC1's William demo back in 2007.

sad there appears to be no investigation mechanic, but who knows, maybe they skipped the buildup so they could show off the side content. I must say, it finally looks like the "systemic events" thing is living up to what they promised it would be back in revelations. (lol at how that turned out in-game)

worried there might be too many random side missions and icons. I hope they feel like meaningful content, not just padding

so what precise change of direction was needed at the 47 second mark?

oh, you were talking about that? that was a pretty basic move, I wouldn't call it fancy. it's a way of dropping quickly but without taking all the impact directly. the spin is to push down with their hands while falling, so they land on their feet lighter. I will say, stuff like that seems to have been sped up a lot, beyond what is realistic. (at least some of this is justified by having a hero who's light and lithe enough to move quicker than any previous Assassin) I get the impression that the focus is on making it play smoothly first, look realistic second. hope it feels as good to play as it looks.

I should say, looking at it with fresh eyes this morening I do notice hints of spider-man/other superhuman agility in there in the style, but I don't feel like it's too overboard in terms of what you can actually do.

Superhuman? It was already superhuman when Ezio can fall from a 2 story building and not take any damage whatsoever. Not to mention Eagle Strike.

Still, it does a bit faster/elegant compared to Ezio/Connor's moveset. Whenever they dropped down, it was always with an ungraceful slam on the ground. Here, with a spin, you can transfer some momentum and continue walking normally.

Yeah, as I mentioned in the other topic it doesn't look like they're sticking so closely to the brash point-to-point economy of parkour, and thinking more about grace, precise control, and stealth.

Yeah - I read it.

sorry, i post too much when hyped.

Literally my entire life in one post. I feel as if Calvar and I would be really good friends if we lived in the same city.
I also feel as if me and everyone on this site would be pretty good friends if we lived in the same city.
I ALSO ALSO love how our Brotherhood is spread around, globally.
We have members on THB from a variety of countries and locales. We are not many... But we are everywhere...
*straps Hidden Blade to arm*

*puts up hood*

What the hell do you think you guys are doing, making yourself conspicuous like that?!

Sorry, Brother. *pulls sleeve over arm*

Rest, prepare, cry in the corner. do whatever it is you do before a post.

I usually cry a lot. Not necessarily in a corner.

In JoeyFogey's bushes in Indianapolis, can confirm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iPUNtnyjjw
good talk about murder mysteries and other side content. apparently murder mysteries aren't about following clues to get to a target, you follow the clues, find suspects, accuse one of them, and they get sent to jail.
not exactly sure how it will work, but you can accuse the wrong person. which sounds like the game expects you to actually use your brain and figure out the killer instead of just telling you who it is after gathering a certain number of clues.

the jail is an actual building that you can visit, and see the people you sent there.

It sounds very sherlock holmsey, which super appeals to me. the main NPC associated with these missions is a real person famous for advances in french criminology during that time, apparently.

Holy sh*t, that's a lot better than I thought it would be.

Sounds promising. I also thought it would be "collect 3 clues and we'll mark the target". That's essentially running around and pressing a button to read a clue and then running around and pressing a button to stab a dude.

Holy crap, are we going to have a ton of fun sending innocent people to jail and then visiting them. It'd also be absolutely hilarious if we could accuse targets of the crimes, visit them in prison, and kill them there.

ha! on a second playthrough, once you know all the targets, run around and accuse them of all the crimes before doing anything else... then they can all hang out together in prison and you don't have to do anything all game because you've already locked away the 'bad guys!'

well, the murder mysteries are just side content, not alternate ways of taking out normal targets. I doubt any of the people you're accusing will even be Templars. (since if they were you'd just kill them) Also doubt you can make an accusation without finding the clues first.

also, in slightly less cool news, there's no longer going to be a time of day cycle. time of day will instead be determined by what mission or part of the story you're on. Which explains why the lighting in this game is so markedly improved. Never really cared much for the cycle, as long as there's an unlockable cheat to change time of day when I want, I don't mind.

Dat Dishonored-style non-lethal playthrough idea...
*licks lips like a creepy man*

don't think that could ever really work with templars. they usually have enough connections to get anyone out of jail.

Yeah, that's kinda the thing I was thinking of.

"Some men suffer from corrupted wills. THESE men must be DESTROYED."
- Al Mualim (Assassin's Creed)

Kind of a part of what makes Assassin's Creed Assassin's Creed. Same thing for Wanted. "Kill one, save a thousand."

question to pc gamers : is it possible to choose the written language of the AC series?
on consoles, changing the system's language will set the games to the same one, but what about the computer versions?

When you're installing the game, it will ask to choose a language that the setup will use. This is also immediately the language for the game, both in menus and in subtitles. When the language is set, the only way of changing it (AFAIK) is to delete the game and re-install it. That's what I did for AC4 at least. For future games, I've decided to set it to English right away, because I've not been happy with the Dutch translations and I don't want to have to re-install my game to change it once I've set it.

Thank you, I'm not a fan of the translation either so that's good news. I have a prehistoric computer and an old gen console so I'm still wondering how on earth am I going to play Unity

Probably only with an upgrade or new console purchase. a game like this without old-gen holding it back is gonna have insane system reqs. giant crowds w/ individual AI, crazy lighting, textures, and animation...

This is probably the game where I need to upgrade my GPU. I doubt a GTX 560Ti would run it smoothly or at least the way I want it to run. Either way, this game looks sick, first actual gameplay I have seen (I never bothered to watch Microsoft because... eh) and so far it looks amazing. I'm excited for the co-op, just thinking of messing up friends as they try to go all sneaky beaky like.. hehe..

microsoft's press conference was the best imo. EA showed almost nothing + spent too much time on uninteresting stuff, didn't think Ubisoft had anything good besides AC and they had no real gameplay of far cry until Sony, and Sony lost its way with like 30 minutes of talking about tv and services and other crap.

Nintendos was even snappier than microsoft's but it wasn't really a press conference so I don't count it.

but that's off topic I guess, lol.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/08/08/the-new-gamepl...

New video discussing the gameplay. There are a lot of references to AC1 as far as mission structure. They keep talking about making combat more difficult (to encourage stealth play), which I am not sure about.

Then they talk about how they will continue to do their own thing despite industry trends of action games selling best. I couldn't keep a straight face during that bit. I mean, really? They annualized the franchise, and what was Black Flag if not favoring combat to stealth? They even earlier in the video used Kenway as an example of being very aggressive. *sigh* Ubisoft... But these "Black Box Missions" look so intriguing....

I posted this in the other thread.

And you're misunderstanding. Alex wasn't saying that they never ever ever favored combat. he said they made the game they wanted to make, regardless of what the market said, using combat as an example.

he never said that the game they wanted to make was always the same, or that none of their goals ever coincidentally aligned with what was popular. obviously black flag had different goals from Unity, set forth by the unique team that was working on it.

nothing he said was contradictory. And I'd definitely say that if you look at the series compared to the rest of gaming, it really has been doing its own thing in a lot of ways.

just the fact that it's stuck to being a primarily historical series is in itself demonstrative of a willingness to be unusual.
then there's the level of freedom of movement and traversal system, which is rarely fully imitated (most of the time it's Watch_Dogs level or less) social stealth (most things are splinter cell-inspired, Hitman is the closest cousin I can think of) the framing device of the animus (a weird but cool thing that they stick to even though they could probably broaden the appeal by removing that layer) and stuff like naval battles, which I can't think of an action/adventure/stealth game that's ever done.

They really do seem to have a lot of creative freedom.

I must have missed that post.

I see what you mean. It doesn't go all Call of Duty; they actually build new features trying out new things that their gameplay designers are curious about trying.

yeah. another thing I kinda like is how it doesn't really feel like employees are very afraid of speaking their mind, even if it might be contradictory to the official company line. just looking at the response on twitter from ACU devs to the playable genders controversy, none of them seemed overly defensive, many made comments implying they'd predicted this and had been ignored, some supported those who were upset and laughed at the jokes being made about the game.

or just the kind of fan-teasing or industry commentary that someone like Darby Mcdevitt does. obviously PR isn't super happy about when they don't perfectly toe the party line, but as I said, they don't seem incredibly afraid to say what they want compared to many devs.