The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

Those words are hella accurate. [does survey]

My language was a little more vitriolic than I expected to type up, but fuck it, we're sending it anyway. "What other mechanics do you want?"

NO FUCK OFF I WANT BETTER MECHANICS, NOT MORE. WHEN ARE YOU FUCKING RETARDS GOING TO UNDERSTAND THAT QUALITY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN QUANTITY, IDIOTS

I went that direction, too. I said, "If you're going to input actual stealth controls, borrow from successful stealth games like Splinter Cell where it actually flows well." There's no excuse not to borrow one thing from a game series that works. Especially if it's a series they made! Also, I went on to say keep everything polished and not focus on how many things are in the game.

If a mechanic is bad, it is not because cutting twelve side missions would have made it better. That mechanic was being worked on years before the first mission designers got on the project, and it was probably not declared "final" until a week or so before launch. Clearly "just make it as good as splinter cell" isn't so simple. (and you can tell that's what they were going for, plenty of people from Blacklist worked on the game) You can only get the details right with time, and in a series with so many details to get right even at its most stripped-down, more time is the only possible solution.

The designers are smart enough, it's the project managers who need to wise up.

Aside from entering a little bit about the Nemesis System from SoM, this was legit my answer as well. I don't want more mechanics, I want better mechanics.

This is true, and I kept it in mind. I have good faith in Ubisoft Quebec, actually.

Perhaps my first post seemed a little more optimistic than I meant it. I think they're making some smart choices re: what they're choosing to focus on pushing forward and what they're going to keep the same, but I really just don't think they have enough time to do the kind of deep refinements that a lot of people want.

Syndicate will probably be fit for mainstream appeal but surely won't win over many of the core gamer people who dislike AC, fell off it, or have never been drawn to it due to its issues. (I will probably get if if the E3 Demo looks cool, but I'm an easy sell)

I hope this survey is directly related to a re-considering of the AC release schedule. It has all the makings of it: it's about what people want from the series, which would indicate they're evaluating what they need to do to be capable of delivering that.

Even still, I will have a genuinely Good (Read: Not Perfect, but still quite Good) time with Syndicate if;
- Combat is fast-paced (It looks like it is)
- Cover is less frustrating (It looks like it is, since no more Sticky Cover)
- Parkour is less stiff/glitchy (this can't be told through watching videos but here's hoping)

I'll still want refinements from the future of the series - but if Syndicate manages to do those three, I'll have a decent enough time with it to warrant a Day 1 purchase.

Those are roughly the same things I'm looking for. And this may be contrary to some folks on THB's preferences, but I am encouraged by the lack of multiplayer and hope it becomes standard going forward. One concrete step towards a more focused structure.

I agree with the lack of multiplayer. Assassin's Creed has traditionally been a very solitary experience. Everyone goes in by themselves, and everyone gets something different out of it. Then we all come back out of it and discuss what it is we took and absorbed from our time with the game. This is how AC used to work at the time of AC1 and 2 - and that period of time turned out to be TheHiddenBlade's most Active. Correlation is not Causation, of course - but it's worth mentioning. It's possible that no multiplayer in those two led to a tighter, more focused experience. If the Devs understand that they have nothing to fall back on should the Single-Player be sub-par, they'll do their best to make it great. More important though is if the publisher, and the project managers realize it.

Eh honestly I don't think it's the multiplayer but rather the change from one creative director with a unifying vision (Patrice Desilets) to a "creative director of the week" type setup.

Definitely one of their bigger problems.

I never said that removing multiplayer was the linchpin, 161803398874989. There is always more than one problem, and all of them interact with each other.

The necessity of different creative directors for every game is a symptom of not having enough time between projects for anything else to be viable. Multiplayer is an extra consideration that can bottleneck other elements of the project, as demonstrated in Unity when the automatic connection to Ubisoft servers exacerbated framerate issues in singleplayer.