low profile kills that are disguised as mundane actions
so i've been thinking a bit about the hidden blade. the whole point of it is that it's completely concealed until the moment you strike, and even then it might pass unnoticed to an observer. so why not have animations where the assassin attempts to pass off their kills as, for example, shaking the hand of their victim, or accidentally bumping into them?
The way it is right now, kills seem framed and posed to make it extremely obvious that someone is being stabbed with a blade on your wrist. I understand the purpose of that as far as marketing, but isn't that what high profile kills and air assassinations are for? low profile blended kills could get away with being much more discreet, to the point where if you didn't know what was happening you might think it was a purely innocent action.
This both adds to the tone and feeling of social subterfuge and makes the difference between low and high profile actions matter more. (perhaps low profile could be more contextual now and include running kills if you were undetected and thus able to pass that off as an accidental collision)
Obviously the trade-off for this would have to be an increased penalty for hanging around the scene of your easier-to-disguise crime, guards would have to detect you through subtler means than your obvious kills in front of them, and there would have to be situations and obstacles that would force you to be careful and not allow you to get away with endless silent murder sprees. (one of the most obvious of these would be the crowd being more than passive observers and actually turning against you + informing on you if you raised their suspicion enough through too many suspicious deaths in the same area)
AC1 kind of treated its low profile kills like this but didn't make them look subtle and didn't have appropriate systemic deterrents for being stab-happy.
I'd really love this a lot. I appreciate that you also took the time to write out the basic requirements for something like this to work properly. As you say, AC1 was definitely the best example of it so far, it's just that the animations for the behavior weren't there. It worked that way mechanically, though. Unity and Syndicate don't appear to as much.
I've liked the idea of Civilians being more than window-dressing for a long time. Deep, qualitative details are preferable to Ubisoft's "bigger and better" approach to game design lately, and their adamant focus on Quantity. If Assassin's Creed's game world could be even a quarter of today's AC Cities, but have all of these little behaviors, systemic touches, more responsive controls, and more functional systems overall, I think it'd be a far better game for it.
That woud be great. I agree that low-profile kills should draw as little attention as possible. I can visualize an assassin moving through a thick crowd and bumping into someone who drops dead a few moments later. That'd look awesome.
Not only that, but it would feel awesome too~! Current Low Profile animations look pretty cool but we can only really do them in areas where little guards are around for fear of being noticed, which pretty much destroys the function of Low Profile Assassinations. (This has been a problem in Unity too, as far as I remember.) More subtle animations can bring a new aesthetic and mechanical experience, so I'm definitely up for it.