The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

You need to open the link in another tab. Apparently Photobucket doesn't think we are privileged enough to embed pictures for free.

Wow, what a deal! Sign me up now!

That's so much just for sharing images. Not even worth it.

http://i694.photobucket.com/albums/vv301/stabguy/Abstergo/LastReply.jpg

Try this link and wade through the ads. I'm so done with Photobucket.

Is there a better alternative to photobucket? We need to do some collective searching.

Right now for me it's uploading the pictures to Facebook. At least until net neutrality goes bye bye.

It's hard to beat Imgur for convenience. You don't even need to create an account. Traditionally Photobucket's chief competitor was ImageShack. I haven't tried it lately so it may have gone downhill also.

Chilling awake in bed at 2:39 AM on this fine morning and I just thought;

"Dude, holy crap. An Eagle Strike is basically a Weaponized Leap of Faith. It's a Leap of Faith that's been converted to Lethal and applied to an enemy. That's insane."

Cue, "Go to sleep Leo, you're tired, what you just said makes no sense." Zzz.

Actually that makes total sense! THB turned possibly the most "peaceful" mechanic in the game and made it one of the deadliest.

I've been setting aside a little time each weekend to play Assassin's Creed Origins. This week I made it to a present day scene and decided to interact with the laptop. An hour later... time's up. Damn there's a lot to read on that laptop!

Plan for next weekend: less reading, more stabbing.

The good thing is... not much changes on the laptop... there's a ton of content at the first scene, and small bits get added after big story beats... so you'll always have plenty of time for stabbing later!

Anyone have any suggestions for stage fright? I have to present some updates for an AR project to a large class and I am the absolute worst speaker in the world.

If it's a project you've been working on alone, maybe make a pre-recorded video representation of yourself.

Pretend you're presenting it to two or three close friends. Try to be as relaxed and flexible as you would be with them. If you're not confident, honestly just pretend you are. No one will be able to tell the difference and your delivery, allure and presentation skills will definitely benefit.

Know your material, but not your lines. You know this project inside and out, so you should be able to come up with a number of ways to present certain things. Don't constrain yourself to one of those options, but think about the message you want to convey and smoothly work your way into one of the options you came up with earlier. If you're confident enough and you know your stuff, you could even improvise the exact wording you use on the spot.

That's probably one of the biggest reasons that I'm nervous about this one. The client we're working with keeps flipping their ideas about what they want from it, so my knowledge in the topics aren't 100% clear. I know what we've done so far and what we are planning to do on a technical level. As far as the client's intentions with certain things, it's not all nailed down, which is frustrating myself and my team.

The fundamental center in a good presentation to me is the idea. What do you want the audience to walk away with at the end of the presentation? Make sure this is something that is both appropriate for the audience and for you as a speaker so you are authentic and interesting.

For instance, I was asked to do a presentation about coding style for an internal department. These were not "developers", they were actuaries who did some model building. So I went into the model, looked at the code, and was absolutely horrified.
The list of things they can improve on is endless. But they're not going to remember and implement a list of improvements. So you have to go back to the idea. The fundamental idea of good code is that good code is readable for humans. I took this idea and spent the first 20 minutes of my presentation on it. Then we did some code stuff (making things a bit more concrete, entering into some discussion about readable and what that means for different people, always keeping sight of the goal), and then I ended by telling them to code for humans.

The second thing is energy levels. You have to rapidly build up energy for the initial part in order to get them hooked (in my example, I did that by asking them questions rather than telling them stuff, sort of "tickling" them intellectually), then you can go into technical details and stuff (the coding part), where you will probably lose some people that you reel back in as you finish with a strong message (I showed them [this comic](http://www.osnews.com/images/comics/wtfm.jpg)).

So that's where I'd start: what do I want to get across?

Update: It went well! I went over everything I had on the project throughout the week and even took a couple of days to relax myself so that I could get rid of at least some of the stress. What helped was playing Shadow of the Colossus on my PS4 and did some meditating (which I don't really do). My teammates are the most supportive mother f*ckers I've worked with so far.

One mistake I unintentionally made was what you suggested, Phi, which was what message I wanted the audience to get. I went into detail about what the project consists of, what everyone's jobs were, but I guess the central idea of it escaped me due to nerves. However, I got a question asking about this afterwards and was able to explain it right then and there, so it was still all good in the end.

Anyways, I really appreciate your guys' thoughts on these methods. It gave me some confidence in just going for it and feeling more prepared. I'm grateful no one said, "Just don't worry about it", as if that's as simple as an on/off switch (I've been told that countless times).

"You're feeling depressed? Haha just cheer up it's not that hard!"

Also, good to know your presentation went well. That means you can use that confidence for the next time you have to do any public speaking.

According to a buddy of mine (AlphaDog) who makes AC1 content, if you successfully become Anonymous during Maria Thorpe/Fake Robert Assassination Memory, the Animus will forcibly Desync you. Straight-up. Can someone go in and take a look at that for me? See if we can find something neat with that?

Tagging: Aurel, Stabguy, Phi... Myself. x'D And anyone else who wants to explore this.

Alpha's channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/Th3A1ph4D0g/videos?disable_polymer=1

Did he give any details on how he successfully became anonymous? I do recall being able to get on a bench at the end of the pre-assassination cutscene, but was exposed as soon as I got off.

Wouldn't it be possible to just run and hide? I don't think I ever have though. Earliest I can test is next week.

At the very start you are exposed under city alert (from my understanding it's normally not supposed to be possible to become anonymous when a target has detected you in AC1). Even if it's only yellow, Altair will get ejected out of hay bales/roof gardens, and characters on benches will get off when you approach. Trust me I've tried before waaaaay back.

The way he did it was by having Line of Sight Broken for a long enough time that the Animus automatically set him back to Anonymous. I forgot that you don't actually need to be in a Hide Spot in order to go Anon again. It just makes it instant, whereas hiding from guard vision for a long enough time still ends in Anonymity, but it takes longer.

Weird, I didn't think it was possible to become anonymous in AC1 simply by being out of sight long enough.

It definitely works after an assassination in lieu of hiding in a roof garden, hay, bench, or scholars. Your status goes directly from Unseen (flashing yellow) to Vanished (green/white), bypassing the 8 seconds of Vanishing (flashing blue) that you experience in a hiding spot. It's hard to tell what the conditions are for this to happen. One time I concluded it required both broken line of sight and distance from pursuers.

I'm skeptical that this game mechanic will apply before Maria's assassination because at that point you're Exposed (flashing red).

UPDATE: Here's one example of not hiding after an assassination. Most of his HUD is off but you can see the screen flash at the moment he becomes Vanished (7:16): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfsGK0TVwXw

50 metres between you and the pursuers. That, or 80, I dont' quite recall.

You can test it on the William assassination. All the guards get stuck in the fortress.

Good idea. You can also confirm that it has nothing to do with duration of broken line of sight by hanging around outside the Citadel for a few minutes.

What do Mel Gibson, Sam Kinison and stabguy have in common?

Last week I went in for an ultrasound (no problems, I'm healthy) and the technician got excited because she had never seen a horseshoe kidney before. It's two regular kidneys that fuse together at the bottom during fetal development. I prefer the term "super kidney" because it sounds like a superpower.

There are no symptoms and it usually isn't discovered until autopsy. My doctor asked if I already knew about it. "No, doc, I haven't had an autopsy lately."

Had my senior thesis presentation today. I created a completely visual comic book (no words) in a uniquely drawn style (heavy on inking and lighting effects for moods) that was about accepting both your good and bad qualities and what you plan to do with those.

I also included the speed paint video DAZ helped me with. And yes, business cards were there, too.

Overall it was a fun experience and I actually really enjoyed seeing people react to my work. I got a lot of "wow" and "this is really good" reactions, which I honestly did not expect. One guy even said I had a "striking style" and wants to see more of it in a published format.

One thing that bugs me, though: We had an awards ceremony afterwards. People could vote for different categories. One of them was "Best Comic". Now, I never expected to win anything, but this is why I'm scratching my head; the guy right next to me in the presentation room won the "Best Comic" award. To explain the oddness, he didn't have a comic. He had a few printed excerpts from a novel he was working on (not a graphic novel, but a novel). He didn't present anything comic-related.

It's just a strange situation. It's not something I'm going to fight for or anything, but I'd like to know if that's actually a mistake. Weird to anyone else?

I disagree with that purely based on principle. It doesn't seem right that you followed the parameters of what was requested, and worked genuinely hard on that to produce something in fitting with them -- while somebody who didn't even tick the requirements is considered over and above you. That's not okay, and I would dispute that if it genuinely matters to you. A comic is a comic and there's pretty much no room for misunderstanding the difference between one and excerpts from a novel. I write novels. I would know.

(Not that it's necessary to actually do any of this stuff to realize the situation is wonky; I feel like Common SenseTM would serve just fine for our purposes here. )

The trouble with common sense is that it's not all that common.

This thread reminded me of how much work goes into a website. I appreciate it but haven't pulled my weight to help out. With my new job, I'm in a better position and reached out to Stabguy to support the site a little more. Think of it as a thanks for the past 6 years.

As part of this, I have a special note for Aurel, DAZ, and Joey. Even though activity on this site has dropped precipitously over the last few years, you guys keep me coming back. You continually post new content to the site, whether it be art, game mechanic videos, or game exploit videos. The only thing left to say to each of you is "Thanks." Oh, and also, "Enjoy your 1 year premium subscriptions to THB."

I can only agree with these words. Still check this site minimum once a week!

That's very nice of you, Mcstab. Also good for Stabby because I've considered holding my next year's subscription hostage until a certain video finally made it's way here.

Certainly has slowed down at THB. In truth I never planned on slowing down with the videos. First spent a lot of time for Eleven Man Blitz 3.0, which caused a huge burn out. Then when the videos had started picking back up, I had to get into an online multiplayer game. Now I'm playing lots of Origins and enjoying every moment of it, but can't decide what kind of videos to make. With the whole RPG style implementation, players are far more interested in how to farm xp/legendary items than creative gameplay.

Even if players were interested in Creative gameplay, it would be nigh-impossible to craft with any degree of regularity, not only because there's no official mission replay function but also because [Reload Last Quest Objective] (analogue to Restart From Checkpoint) is inconsistent as hell, and guard patrol patterns change on each reload. A degree of improvisation is always going to be necessary and there's only so much of that we can do before stuff just starts to look sloppy. Ubisoft did me super dirty with this game in terms of content creation, even if mechanically and overall it's pretty good. :/

You're on PC now, right? Is there anything from the modding community that makes what you want possible?

Assassin's Creed has never had mod support and no one has successfully managed to hack Save-States into these games, so unfortunately, no.

There's that new PC-only mod tool that Ubisoft released. I'm not sure if it's that extensive, though.

It is not. It's basically a "Cheats" Menu, of little tweaks that you can do. It's not quite official modding support by any means.

That's going to be a nightmare for speedrunners.

Random guard patrols are good for hardcore players (like me) that want challenge, but the bad side is that it can ruin speed runners and skill videos. So I'm on the fence with features like this. It actually pushes me away from wanting to get back into the THB fold of making those videos again. I only made a few, but I always wanted to do more.

But hey, I'll have a lot more time now!

Welp. The volcano hasn't taken down THB. Are stabguy and stabgal okay?

We're fine. Thanks for asking. From where we live on Oahu, we didn't feel the earthquakes and so far the trade winds have kept the vog (volcanic smog) away.

I see Ubisoft is picking up on player terminology.

I like that this thread was started by FLAE... because it's appropriate to this comment...

Tomorrow I get to check something off my bucket list....

I'm going to a falconry lesson where I'll get to to fly hawks.

Senu Hype!

Don't hate me guys, but I'm more excited about Spider-Man on PS4 than the new AC. I feel like I'm committing a sin.

Odyssey is a double edged sword for me. On one hand the game will probably put as much effort as Origins and be a great experience. On the other hand bringing back yearly releases isn't a good thing. Now lets hear more about this Spiderman game...

That's kind of how I'm feeling. From what I've seen, it just looks like a dlc for Origins and it's back to yearly releases like you said. Plus it's not really an Assassins vs Templar story and no actual hidden blade, which I feel like you need that iconic weapon in every AC game. It's like making a Mario game where you can't jump.

Seeing as how Origins tried to downplay the weapon that you had to work a lot harder to use normally and now Odyssey just has a short spear in its place, I'm wondering if Ubisoft is just trying to phase out the brand in place of historical-jumping games? Like how they're making that pirate game that's essentially Black Flag without the Assassin parts. It's worrying me for the brand.

Regardless, I'm sure it will still be a great experience. I just think the fact that it's back to a yearly release is hurting any hype it could get if it waited another year. It looks like it needs it, still; any footage I saw of dialogue cut scenes looked very rushed. Lip sync was way off, there were awkward body animations. No one would get mad if it got delayed.

The first game in a few years that I've been massively excited for. The guys that made Sunset Overdrive are making it, and it looks awesome. So far, anyone that's played the E3 demo has said it's up there with God of War for game of the year quality. I also hear the stealth can be fun to play with, too.

Most AC Players: "Wow, no Hidden Blade?"
Leo K: "Wow, my stealth weapon is a Piece of Eden? There are numerous ways to stealth-kill people I'm technically 'not supposed to'? Hype."

Having said that, Spider-Man PS4 looks soooo goooodddd aaahhh.

I find that interesting as well. But I haven't seen every single detail about it or how it will be implemented in a unique way. I've really only seen it as a stealth kill "dagger", throwable projectile, and I think a melee weapon? So I could be missing the hook that makes it worth the hype of replacing the usual blade. From just that, it sounds like it takes a few regular tools and rolls them into one item.

I think it's just franchise fatigue for me personally. Or that it looks too similar to Origins' Alexandria and other areas to make me want to check it out. Going from Acre to Venice in two games was a huge pull for an audience. I feel this won't be as successful. I hope I'm wrong, though!

If anyone happens to be in San Diego for Comic-Con, let me know. I can take you to my favorite burrito place.