The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

Smarter AI is always good, no matter what, so yes.

ACR's was still pretty bad. You can be detected and 10 seconds later still kill 4 guards in a row before they decide to counter your attacks.

A.I. hasn't improved at all.

I'm still waiting for a faster combat flow.

And by faster combat flow, we don't mean "kill everything with a killstreak". We want faster COMBAT, not faster godliness.

Yeah each game they say the guards will attack you more than just one at a time, I never see this though

They SOMEWHAT did this with Revelations, as well as removing the ability to counter while doing a killstreak. It still didn't feel like they did it enough though, felt like a teaser. Ever since AC1 I've wanted the games to have a difficulty option of some kind. Revelations was even rumored to have a difficulty slider. I was looking around for it in the options menu and I couldn't find it. Oh well. Haha!

Not being able to counter during a kill streak is like the dumbest thing they have done

I agree with this. Instead of doing that, give that back, and increase the frequency enemies attack you with. Also, Assassins' healthbars are HUGE. HUGE, I tell ya!

Umm...I do that all the time in Revelations...

O.K. It's official. The combat sucks - major-ass. It needs to be changed changed. So here's my suggestion:

Enemies don't have any "traditional health". Now what I mean by this is that in ACII, you see Ezio indiscriminately slash/hack/pound the crap out of enemies and you'll slowly start seeing their life bar diminish. What enemies will have will be called "blocks".

All guards have 2 "blocks" of health. Seekers have 3. Brutes and Elites have 4. Now Ezio has to enter a kill streak in order to take out one block. So picture this in your head - in combat, Ezio will start attacking a random guard. After 3 weak slashes, he takes out 1 block out of his health (instead of just killing him). Ezio will now enter in Kill Streak Mode, where he can zip across the ground to the next guard and attack him, taking out 1 block of his health (that guard still lives). The player can then make the decision of attacking him again (thereby killing him), or attack another guard.

Dual-wielding is still in this combat system I'm proposing, and you can even aim where your bullet/knife will fly through. That means that if some guard is backing away from the fight and preparing to load is gun/crossbow, the player can simply throw a knife/shoot a bullet at him, taking out one block of health from him.

If a guard makes the (unfortunate) decision of attacking you, you have 4 options: counter (taking out 1 block of his health), sweep kick him (stunning him in the ground for 4 seconds), dodge the attack (if timed correctly, he can attack his fellow guards), or counter-steal (grab all of his money, items, and disarm him at the same time). If any of these 4 options are pulled of successfully, then the Kill Streak Mode will continue, and Ezio will still keep attacking. Fail, and the flow is interrupted.

Now some of you may be wondering: wouldn't it be easier to just kill the guard instead of just taking out 1 block of his health? Well, this combat system is suppose to keep the combat flow speed, while at the same time increase the difficulty of combat nevertheless. This combat system I'm proposing will bear similarities to Batman's FreeFlow Combat System, and that's what I'm aiming for.

As for the weapons themselves, I want the ability to customize and add certain attributes to our weapons. Some attributes can be:
- poison
- small % of instant K.O.
- auto-steal money or items
- "shoots" away dirt from the ground, flicking sand in the guards' eyes

Comments?

I think that's a really good idea Ves, and it could, like you said, make the combat more challenging for certain, but how fast it feels really depends on how quickly you can do these actions/how natural they look. I hate a jerky combat system that seems to slide NPC's into position *ahem* double assassinations *ahem*.

So true. In Double Air Assassinations, you even see the guards shift into correct positions as there being killed. That's not good animation - that's just tweening the movement/position of them so they can get killed.

In BAA or BAC, Batman's attack have a similar jerky and unnatural look to them. However, he usually jumps while he's attacking from a large distance, so it seems somewhat realistic.

As long as two guards are right next to each other, the game forces them into place. Even if they're back to back and you leap from behind them, they suddenly surge to the proper position according to Ezio. I never liked this. I thought either Ubi should create a new animation for this issue or the player has to wait until they're properly positioned.

I'd like the HUD to show "Double Assassinate" when guards in the correct position and "Assassinate" if it will hit only one. That way, you wait until they're the right distance from each other. If they move during the animation, Ezio should hit one of them first, then quickly do it for the other one in a short 2 second long cutscene/animation. That would make more sense than shifting them into position so you can needle them both at the same time.

^Listen to him Ubi. I'm not sure that the guards separating would be an issue. Just program them not to change orientation when the player inputs the command, should be simple enough. I mean they pretty much do that any way (so long as they aren't being whipped around at hurricane speeds). I love using the trick of running up a wall to do a pseudo air-assassination just because it has a MUCH wider radius for double kills.

Animation overhaul would be nice, for kills and free-running. I'm hoping free-running is overhauled to be more precise and less automated.

Speaking of combat speed, I think Revelations did a good job of that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but were the counter windows not reduced in Revs?

No, I'm pretty sure it was about the same as Brotherhood's. You can counter pretty much as they step to swing. They just attack faster, but the window is the same. It's a good illusion.

I haven't had a chance to play Revelations for a few months. When I get it back from my friend, I'll start really getting into it's mechanics, now that it's not all shiny and new.

Then I can have info like this ready in time to compare it to AC3. Oooh boy. It's starting again. : )

I find there wasn't much point focusing on the combat for revelations, its so easy that you rarely even seem to fight many guards. I got so sick of recruiting assassins so I just started bombing the guards as fast as possible.

Im starting to miss Brotherhoods VR system, that really did give the game more value.

I had a lot more fun fighting guards in revelations than brotherhood. Some of them could take a few gunshots/knives, and they just attacked more often, which was nice. After you get used to it and get armor it goes back to being easy, but at the beginning I got into a few hairy situations with Jannisaries.

If you want a VR styled fight, there are plenty of missions to replay that feature a shit-ton of guards.
Although it would be nice to have that back in the game.