The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

lol nice

Funny how Ubisoft tried to subtly point out the obvious without breaking the 4th wall. I would have been less surprised to hear Ezio say "Cool, a checkpoint" instead of these unnatural lines.

Pretty sure they're Ezio thoughts. I like seeing how the environment changes to create a natural checkpoint, and I can easily dispel any doubts by remembering that the animus is designed to help people stay in sync, and may have manufactured some of those moments.

Personally, seeing "Checkpoint reached" written on the side of the screen is enough without having Ezio narrating.
But well, these lines are still funny to hear, especially after a massive column just collapsed, probably alerting the entire lair of Ezio's presence and nearly making him fall to his death, yet he calmly talks about the checkpoint.

I always notice these lines but they don't bother me too much. They seem quite unnatural and unsubtle but at least they alert us (or perhaps other less intelligent gamers ) that the whole route doesn't need to be repeated if a mistake is made.

Ah! Too dark!!!

And if the Animus can just manufacture elements in a memory, it's not accurate. Realistically, it should just play back whatever happened to the ancestor. It doesn't matter if they remembered it one way or another. Everything is encoded in their DNA, not their mind, when every moment occurs. The ONLY reason we have to "stay in sync" is so we can do whatever we want, get hurt in fights, not screw up lairs by falling, etc.

A reason I theorized why Desmond has to go through certain memories is because he's a descendant of Adam, one of the first Humans to have the uncanny ability to shrug off the tech from the Ones Who Came Before. His body resists anything related to them, hence the beginning of AC1 and Brotherhood. I haven't read the comics or anything else about other Animus users to see if this is true, which is why I stress that it's a theory.

Anyway, I said I was sorry about the lighting

I comfort myself thinking the lairs are way too bright. I mean, when was the last time you were in a big dark hall lit up by 3 small torches and could see everything clearly in your environment? Not to talk about the tunnels in the Catacombe di Roma.

Well that last part is not true because there have been synch problems with every animus user ever.

And as to it not being accurate, it's accurate in the important things. Does it really matter if the way that Ezio jumped across one ledge and something fell to help him get up was false? How is that going to affect anything. If something falling was important to the memory, then it's accurate. And remember, the animus adapts to however you kill your target or do certain things. It's completely accurate during cut-scenes, and I'll bet certain things DID fall like that when ezio jumped between them, but I don't think it happened EVERY time.

Unless the Animus has a living, reasoning brain, how can it determine what's important and not important? It's purpose is to read and show events that happened to the ancestor, not get nit-picky and say Ezio freeing thieves is more important than him killing an archer that almost blew his cover. It's completely random, yet somehow shows exactly what Lucy/Vidic want to see. It is a flawed machine. It's not self-aware. At least, the ones used by Desmond aren't.

It's not self aware, but it's been programmed to automatically put in things to smooth the process of getting through memories, hence checkpoints and more leap of faith points than actually existed. IT doesn't know what it's doing. What it's doing is translated by the subject's mind to make things easier.

How come you act like you know this stuff? I always say it's what I think, but you say in like you have Animus blueprints in your basement. O_o

OK, I'm sorry.
It is heavily implied that what I say is correct from other obviously animus-related functions and things that Lucy and Vidic have said about the animus. I am speculating, but I really do believe that anything that's obviously a gaming convention that appears in the animus part of the game is meant by Ubisoft to be easily explained away as "The Animus did it". That's what they've said when confronted about similar things in the past.

Guys, guys. You do not take in account how memory work. You remember only the most significant events and upon recall, the gaps are filled in, and sometimes they're off. I think that's the most likely explanation to this particular problem.

Was just thinking about this.

I've always pictured the Animus as a "sandbox" for viewing memories. The more synch you have with your ancestor, the more accurate the memory becomes. So if you have a lot of synch, the locations where pillars break will be more accurate to what really happened, among other things.

That does make sense. The one reason why I can't understand Calvar's explanations is because it reads DNA memory, not the minds of the ancestors. Now, none of us are experts on fictional technology (so far) so we can't be totally sure. But someone tell me in a very logical and reasonable fashion how DNA encoded memory, implied in AC to store every moment exactly as it happened, can be shown completely differently in Animus sessions.

It's hard to think of Altair remembering every investigation he did for each target. Maybe a lot of them, but not every one. The Animus reads Desmond's DNA for those moments, whether he fully remembers them or not.

"Hey, Altair! Do you remember that time you listened in on those guards? Their friend had to deal with some family issues, so one of them got his back and made sure they weren't found out?"

Altair: "Wtf are you talking about?"

I just want something I can understand. I'm asking you guys to convince me! lol

That would explain why they are all so alike, he only remembers one or two memories, and associates the others with it. Maybe the informers looked totally different? And didn't all have the same voice? Lol.

Or that Ubi reused models for making their job easier.

I just wanted an excuse for the unexcusable

I think that it would make sense for the animus to make up certain things to allow users to move forward in the DNA without desynching all the time. It's a straight and orderly path, DNA, but what it does is widen the path from what the ancestor originally walked, allowing for a margin of error, and flexibility with checkpoints and killing random guards. that's why the whole game isn't an uncontrolled cut-scene.

All DNA mutates over time, which in this case could cause the memories to become "corrupted," for lack of a better word. The differences that the animus shows are its efforts to reconcile many slightly different versions of the events, or its efforts to remove certain corrupted memory elements that might, say, have gravity reversed or some other event that obviously didn't actually happen.

Now that's what I've been looking for. A reason why DNA can alter the memory readings. Thank you, Icefire. You win a hat.

The body does have DNA repair enzymes, though, so that could explain why memories don't get lost over thousand and thousands of years.

F*ck you, Phi, now we're back where we started.

Bad luck, then, Joey.

If you didn't know so much, I'd have agreed with your Animus theory.

Mutations still occur in both cell division processes (meiosis and mitosis) which is why we don't end up looking the same as/more similar to our parents. This could also explain memory corruptions/changes.

In reality, these mutations and changes are so random and so great that I think the memories would be completely broken up (if they did indeed exist within DNA).

Bringing back 6th grade science lessons to me. Now that makes a little more sense.

Patrick, you have to fight Icefire for the nice hat I gave him.

What kind of hat would it be, Joey (other than an insanely awesome one)?

An oversized sombrero with bells hanging off it and covered in shiny, glittery things. Signed by Billie Idol.

I already have an oversized sombrero but there's no bells or shiny, glittery things. And it certainly isn't signed by Billy Idol!

It's mine, Icefire

so now we're talking about hats.
what is this, Team fortress?

No, it's THB: Friendship is Magic

It's only been a day and I already lost my hat?

It happens. Phi really stole it from you. Blame him. :3

IN MY DEFENSE:
It was a really nice hat and I wanted it bad. And because this rhymes, you're no longer mad!

WITCH!

Did she turn you into a Newt? BURN HER!!!!!

Note: assumption of female due to the fact that witch is a female noun.

I am, in fact, in possession of a corpus and spirit of the male variety.

42 zombies verus Joey, Patrick, Jfighter, stabguy and me.

Seriously, this isn't even a competition.

Actually, men were also called "witches" when the people were (somehow) stupider than they are now.

"That person can properly use math skills? WITCH! BURN THEM!"

Now all I can think about is Monty Python.

"She turned me into a newt!'
A newt?
...I got better..."

so if she weighs the same as a duck...

Then that means she's made of wood...

And that's how Oktoberfest started.

wait...ROB is the duck holding anything? possibly a coconut if it's a north-african duck, which assumes another 4 ounces underneath it