Instructinator

I finished Assassin’s Creed. I have to say the main problem with the game is indeed repetition. The game caters to the strengths of it’s core mechanics for the most part. This is what makes it feel fun to play, and why I was eventually able to finish it. The only time there was a strong departure from this is fighting close to water, and gameplay in the lab.

Collision in the lab:

Blocking volumes are needed or a more rounded and simplified collision mesh for the character. I cant count the number of times i got snagged on corners in that slow moving environment. this made me not want to explore the area and i would run to the bed to get back to the good part of the mechanics as fast as possible. also i understand the decision to not let the player move like he does in the Animus, but being able to jog a little would have been nice. The pace in those portion already feels slow enough without being forced to move so slowly. It discourages exploration, which is that those breaks were all about in the end.

Combat near Water:

Ok so you didnt want to do a whole animation tree for swimming and fighting while swimming and guys with chain mail swimming and the loads of other logistical horros that come with water gameplay, thats ok. However, you should have given the player a second chance arround water, sincethe rewards are the same the risk need to be balanced to avoid having the player scream “WTF”. When you are kicked off or miss step and begin to fall, there should have been an increased chance of grabbing the edge if there is water beneath him. This would balance out the risk, and seem quite unapparent to the player. If your going to cut corners, you need to polish off those jagged edges in the gameplay.

Repetitive Missions

Other than that I blame the decrease sales and overall nerfing of the game’s impact on the mission scripters. Come on guys. with all those mechanics you could not come up with anything else but pick pocket, beat up, or lock on and listen missions? oh and lets not forget assasinate missions. im not asking for zelda diversity. im just asking for a little variation now and then. the horse was underutilised. you could have had a fetch mission at the least involving the horse. or better yet chase down and kill the messenger mission. and I know fetch missions and escort missions are now dead thanks to abuse in MMOs but they might have been fun on rooftops. what about chasing a defective assasin across the rooftops? maybe 3 of them that split up? and you have to hunt them down with the help of the falcon, annother unterunilised element. how about some sniper support for a fellow assasin? take out all the archers in a compound to allow him to achieve an objective easier in exchange for information? It’s like you got half way there and then the producer said ‘no more, save it for the sequel”

Flag collecting:

When your doing the quests finding flags is fine and good, but when your done, the final thing you get in the final bit at the end should be a hack code to the animus that gives you a compas or detections of some kind for the flags. when you have 99/100 finding that last one is a pain in the ass and totaly not worth the headache. everyone will metagame it anyway and look on gamefaqs for the answer, and even then they need to recheck every location and cross them off one by one on a spreadsheet. AC2, flag detector. Do it.