Le Roi est Mort - The Hidden Blade / No Tools, No Combat
[Front-paged. -JoeyFogey]
Game: Assassin’s Creed Unity (PS4 Pro)
Memory: Le Roi est Mort (Assassinate King of Beggars)
Style: The Hidden Blade / No Tools / No Detects
Arno Dorian has no need of extraneous devices or gadgetry. One blade, one Assassin, against the King of Beggars’ entire “royal” guard. Many of the King’s subjects stand in vigilant defense of their sovereign. It is not enough; as if by a phantom, Regicide is carried out.
As I’ve already done Ghosts and Reapers of most Memories in Unity (save for certain Main Assassinations, which are still coming, worry not), I decided to continue pursuing Hidden Blade-only gameplay, as it’s quite rewarding and fills me with a kind of inner peace. Just, me and the Blade.
SSI Trick, patience, and knowing when guards are about to turn around via prior observation are the names of this particular game, and having a decent wield of the movement mechanics helps a bunch as well. The way the King’s throat is cut is probably my single favorite High Profile Assassination animation in the entire game, and that applies to Syndicate as well. So, so satisfying.
This mission is one of the most linear in all of Unity, and it’s interesting to look at the way the guard layouts work. When playing this way, there are definitely moments when you can feel what the level designers were going for, and it’s quite interesting to see it laid bare the way I’ve shown here.
Unfortunately, that means there aren’t any of my usual blitzkriegs of stealth gameplay where I rush from foe to foe and harvest them all in quick succession, but if you’re into a more relaxed, tense kind of gameplay (where you can still be assured that there will be zero detection/shattering of that tension), you may enjoy this.
Thanks once again for your attention and support, and I’ll see you all next time, whether I post about game design, or up some vids. I’m pretty excited to see what I can do for Origins, I just hope that the game’s got a Replay Mission feature that spawns you right at the beginning of the mission area, instead of not having one at all, or worse, making you move ridiculous distances just to replay a single mission like in Ghost Recon Wildlands.
***
Discussion Questions:
1) What did you think of this memory, if you’ve played it yourself?
2) I’ve gone on record to say I don’t enjoy the indoor gameplay too much, there usually aren’t a lot of opportunities to be a traditional Assassin within indoor environments, and they tend to exacerbate the clunkiest aspects of the gameplay, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Certain indoor missions like this one and La Halle aux Bles are pretty cool, I feel. What do you think of indoor missions?
3) While this is somewhat of an exception to that due to being broken up into “checkpoints” or a series of rooms, a huge, huge number of Unity’s stealth layouts are notoriously guard-heavy, thereby borderline necessitating use of a player’s Tools/Gadgets. I personally feel that allowing a player to have huge amounts of Gadgets and many different types of Gadgets is a bit of a dev “cheat” and a band-aid solution for low-quality stealth design. Hearing that in Origins we’ll only have two or three gadgets that all have a multitude of functions if we deploy them creatively is a breath of fresh air. Your thoughts?
Dammit Taylor (if that's even your name, you bot, you), if you don't have anything cool to say about this badass, minimalist showcase of Unity's stealth mechanics, then why're you even here?
Funny thing about Taylor: She had an account for over a year and this was her first comment.
Yeah. Notably, in the part where Arno needs to move the planks aside to enter the underground, the three guards there cycle too fast for a Non-Lethal takedown. Also, for some ungodly reason, Non-Lethal takedowns make noise. The idea is, so does the Hidden Blade kill, but the noise only happens once the body crumples to the ground, and by that time the Assassin is already gone. (Which is the very fantasy of doing Low Profile Assassinates 
) But with Non-Lethal Takedowns, the body hits the floor as soon as Arno finishes the animation, and every guard who can hear it instantly turns around, making NL Takedowns absolutely worthless for Stealth against guards that are too close to each other.
THB PROTIP: If you click "Reply" then your comment will be nested on front-page stories, like this one is!
As I was front-paging this video, I was puzzled that it already had the correct tags: "Paris", "Sequence 4", etc. JoeyFogey had beaten me to it.
I assume non-leathal takedowns take too long on many of these enemies.
“Force has no place where there is need of skill." Herodotus
Yeah 
Ubisoft doesn't value Ghosting / Non-Lethal Stealth at all. So much of it is just kind of incidental, the maps aren't really designed for it, so I'm happy to grab those victories where I can. Even getting INTO the underground isn't possible to do Ghost-like.
When I first saw the "no combat" I thought you had managed to pull off a no tools ghost run. Which would be near impossible in that final room.
This is still an impressive feat. The infiltration and exfiltration (JUST AS IMPORTANT, UBISOFT) we very near ghost runs.
And you could cut the tension with a knife.
“Force has no place where there is need of skill." Herodotus