The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

I'd rather eat a good burrito than go to Comic-Con.

You and me both! But I know some people around here might go to conventions...

I may be a comic geek, but I'm not a convention type. Everything is priced insanely high, the lines are long for brief encounters, and it always has a stench to it.

San Diego Comic Con is kind of a big deal that I plan on going to at least once just as a bucket list thing, but I'm pretty fine waiting for Youtube to show me all the exclusives that show up there within minutes.

Also, I haven't been able to get on here much lately. Life has been crazy stressful with the new job and a possibility that a coworker might be out to sabotage me (people are selfish as hell). I never understood the point of that behavior.

I recently decided to go into my hard drive vault and do some video editing. About a year ago, my roommate and I tried jumping on the let's play bandwagon for fun. We didn't exactly try that hard, but here's a video that we were able to record, but not publish until today. I figured it would be easiest to view on my JoeyFogey channel, so there it is. I had a lot of fun cutting it up for the funniest parts, so I hope you all get a laugh out of it.

P.S. - We never got around to sound-proofing the room or getting a great microphone, so there's a slight echo in our voices. Hope it's not too annoying.

7 and a half pages of spam bot posts... must be some kind of record for this site!

Ha. I have a test site where I'm bringing up a Drupal 7 version of The Hidden Blade. It was open to the public but unadvertised. The spam bots found it. 16,000 forum posts from just 3 bots.

I know it's sort of a given, and the expected thing, or whatever. But.
Thank you, to the mods and admins who routinely nuke bunches and bunches of bot-spams from orbit.
I love you.

99% of the time you're so fast and responsive too. Good stuff.

Lately the bots have been spamming while I'm asleep. It's as if they learned my schedule.

With Hurricane Lane bearing down on Hawaii, I may be without power this weekend. Joey will continue the battle against the evil bots.

Stay safe, Stabby!

It's my calling.

Good, I'm winning...

no you're not you scallywag

On one of my recent streams. Had a good grin at this.

Any thoughts on AC Rebellion?
https://www.facebook.com/assassinscreedUS/videos/2802257049799664/

I like the game and the idea of it a lot, just... It lags pretty bad on my current phone. Which sucks :/ I wish they'd put out a Steam release as well, or something, even a main console game if they wanted. Fallout Shelter did that, and it worked out pretty well.

I might have time to play such a thing even with a newborn. I'll let you know.

Site Wide FYI.

For those of you on YouTube (e.g., DAZ live streams), I've changed my YouTube display name.

It used to be scottishduck88 - similar to my xboxlive screenname.
It is now valarHODORis. this is the name I use for PSN, as well as on Twitch. Since most of my YouTube commenting is on Twitch streamer videos for streamers I also watch live on Twitch, it makes sense to have a common screen name between the two platforms

Thanks,
Double McStab with Cheese / valarHODORis / the commenter formerly known as scottishduck88

Happy Turkey day, everyone.

Welp I'm insanely sorry for going MIA for this long. Work has been busy since it's heading into the holidays (shipments and design work involved), my roommates' choice of internet has been awful so getting on here was next to impossible, and I finally moved into my own place (with better more reliable internet).

I seemed to have missed a lot, so let's see if I can sift through it all and keep up a better work/life/THB balance.

I've had some time to think about THB and how I miss our community interactions. Since AC had some divisive entries the last decade, users have been backing off the site. After getting back into the swing of things and settling into my own life situations, I've grown to enjoy listening to podcasts and other topical content, even thinking about investing in something like audio books.

Anyways, the idea I have here is to make something new here as a community. We'll give it some time to catch on with the sporadic members, but I was thinking we could have an audio/video THB podcast and other similar things. The podcast idea would be pretty standard; weekly or monthly get-togethers through Skype (or whatever we can use) with established topics to start passionate discussions by members that want to share their opinions about it.

Ex: "What era should AC go next?" "The impact Ezio had on the franchise" "Is Ubisoft a new EA?" and other clickbait ideas.

Another idea I had was a review system. We can bring up an entry in the AC franchise (or any game series; we don't have to be exclusively AC) and multiple users can talk about what was influential, what needs major work, etc.

My favorite idea is a "let's watch" format where multiple users are live viewing video content and simply commenting over it for criticism or comedy. So if you've ever wanted to roast the Assassin's Creed movie with other THB members, that's our chance. This can even be worked around past THB classic videos as we react to iconic clips, or even viewing old gameplay demos of past games and discussing how far things have come. Hell, it would be a kickass time to do this live viewing during events like E3 and geek out over all the previews.

Let me know what you guys think. We're all a bunch of fairly intelligent people and I think this could go somewhere if given the chance.

I would love to revisit old THB videos made by various members of the community. We essentially have our own on-site Lore and Mythos and it would be really fun to celebrate that. Like, people remember 12 Ways To Wield The Hidden Blade. People remember The Bleeding Effect, they remember the crazy exploits Aurel figured out and the Bear Kill stabguy recorded for me, among dozens of other iconic moments that could totally deserve refreshing in the mind. Community get-togethers and cool stuff would be really awesome, and I'd totally help out with production.

One thing I've wanted to do is narrate my experience with the series, but I'm terrible at rehearsing dialogue. Group chatting however works fine with me. Just have to figure out what kind of voice chat we'd use. I work fine with PS4 party chat.

Awesome! Glad to see some interest with this.

Going back and looking at old videos that started it all is a really interesting idea that I'd love to do. We can talk about how we were introduced to AC and THB during those and go from there. I love it!

I'm currently available on weekends.

Most weekends I'm available later at night (EST), but I sometimes get a Saturday to myself.

Most likely I'll be on the PS4 Saturday afternoon. PSN is hiddenblade_com.

Probably wont be able to get on today, but maybe tomorrow or next weekend.

Wow, I've been out of the loop once again. Half of our team at work is either out for medical reasons, quit, or put in their 2 weeks notice to quit and aren't doing their part for the time being. It's been up to me and the rest of our team to pick up the slack and work longer and more days than intended.

I still think we should set some time to make a few recordings of that "podcast" idea we had before things get too wild again. Anyone up for an evening/late night chat sometime? I seem to only have nights off for a while.

I might be available Saturday evening. You still play on PS4?

Yes, still on PS4. Anyone else wanna join?

Wow it's been quiet lately, huh? Everyone give me some life updates!

I finished university and am hoping to get to work translating literature from English to Dutch. For my thesis I translated this short story and my supervisor was very pleased with the quality of my translation. He advised me to apply for a program to help young translators get started in the business by working with an experienced translator on a project of your own choice, aiming at getting the translation published. The deadline for these applications was September 1st so I'm expecting to hear from them soon about whether or not I've been accepted.

I also started driving lessons. Haven't hit any cyclists yet so that's good.

That's amazing! Sounds like you're getting a pretty good start right out of the gate. Let us know if you hear back about the applications.

Not hitting cyclists is good...but GTA taught me different...

I wanted to apologize to everyone for not getting on here basically at all for what may be months. I can't remember the last thing I even posted, but I had gotten a new job that is extremely physically demanding. It's not difficult, but it makes me feel 40 years older than I am every night.

I've picked up art again. I have a new art desk set-up with emphasis on more natural lighting. My girlfriend and I are moving in together in a few months, which will help with the sudden financial crises I've been recently hit with. Sooner or later, I'll be creating actual art content. I have 2 main things in mind: A web comic and writing my book. The comic having to do with my senior thesis that I wanted to expand on (angels, demons, mixing mythologies, morality and immorality, etc) that can be ongoing as long as I have fresh ideas, and my book being a politically-charged/10% superhero conspiracy story.

Again, I'm sorry to everyone for not being active. A lot of things changed in my life and I still have yet to get a handle on things. I've missed coming on here and talking with you guys. I hope to see more of you back.

Very recently I upgraded to a gaming computer. First thing I did was buy Skyrim Special Edition off Steam and load up the Creation Kit, which allows you to change or add things to the game.

The whole purpose was to make mods, which I've been interested in doing for quite a while despite not knowing a single thing about modding. Just today I officially became a mod author, releasing the mod "Rings of Ghost Form".

What I wanted to do was enchant rings to give you a ghostly appearance, an effect that exists ingame. After finding the right spell effect to put on the enchantment I soon found out why no one else had done this before: After unequipping the ring, the game forgets to remove the transparency effect.

So now I had to find a way to make the mod work right, otherwise players will not be pleased to have their characters stuck visually. Luckily my years trying to find exploits in games got me thinking of ways to remove the effect. Eventually I thought to add potions that have a temporary ghost effect (only two of these potions exist in the game, that's where I got the idea for this mod) in the hopes that the game will restore normal character visuals when the effect wears off. Well it worked!

https://youtu.be/baGaUdgRCdA

It's amazing how you're able to use your experiences with exploits in a modding format. That's so cool! Makes me want to play Skyrim again.

Things like that are more important than an internet forum. Don't feel pressured to keep posting if you're already too tired from your day job.

Either way it's good to hear from you and it sounds like your life is heading in an exciting direction.

Nice job on your mod! Man, just hearing the sounds of Riverwood in that video rekindles my desire to play Skyrim. There's enough unplayed games in my Steam library as it is, but it's always nice to come back to Skyrim. That game holds up incredibly well, especially with mods.

Didn't get it, unfortunately. They don't communicate their reason for rejections, but I think it has to do with the weakest part of my application: my chosen language. Part of their selection process is judging how much demand there is in any particular language, and English->Dutch is extremely common, so there is a lot of competition.

I'm currently learning Swedish and Spanish (God bless Duolingo) so maybe in the far future translating from either of those languages could be an option. Swedish (crime) novels always do exceptionally well.

I'm going to look into the possibilities of getting my translation published some other way, and getting properly started as a translator (setting up the financial/business side of things).

It has been literally years since I last posted here. Probably back when Black Flag was coming out. But I have dropped in every now and then to see the posts around. Not sure why I'm deciding to finally post again, but, why not?

I see you trying to sneak in for the win here... it won't work!

We all know it'll be me that wins this.

Nice to know someone can pronounce my name correctly.

https://youtu.be/Lo4CZ-96m8M?t=4550

What you said right after that was aimed at the guard, not me, right?

Yes hahahaha, it was aimed at the guard I was currently in the process of throwing off the rooftop x'D
Nothing but excitement and appreciation for YOUR presence.

You once said it was pronounced "R L" (which happen to be my initials). I usually think of it with the emphasis on the first syllable like Leo said it: AR-ul. Sometimes I doubt myself and consider emphasizing the second syllable: ar-EL.

That's how some people like to pronounce it but I recall saying ah-rell.

I figured the way Leo said it was close enough for anyone who wanted to know.

Side note: Leo's streams always work best when I'm trying to be creative (like with inktober whenever I actually had time for it). I always get sad when I miss one by a few minutes. You've got a good way of wording your ideas while supplying entertaining gameplay.

Caught red-handed.

To think I'd see the day DAZ would consider I'd troll him:

https://youtu.be/rN2Z7Jb-_MM?t=1502

I learned the quickshoot trick in VR training, it was used for the last target in Stealth Hidden Blade 1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykVZCkcSFYI

And then as if to add salt to the wound DAZ called you "Oral".