A few days ago I bought the first Assassin’s Creed. Overall it’s a fantastic sandbox style game, but most of all it’s absolutely beautiful. However, it fell well short of what it could have been, playing it one could really see that it had a lot more potential.
The major reasons for falling short were:
- The investigations were repetitive and did not properly integrate into the storyline
- Combat and even hiding was simply too easy
- The assassinations themselves didn’t require much effort (only in part due to combat being so easy)
I’m quite interested in the second incarnation of Assassin’s Creed to see if these and the points below have been corrected, regretfully the PC release is scheduled for Q1 2010 (while the console version is coming out early next month).
I spent almost a day brainstorming about how the game could have been improved, mostly regarding gameplay and game mechanics, but also how the story plays out. I hope to go into that in another post, however, as that may take a while I want to start off by present some of the notes that came out of the brainstorm:
The great:
- Incredible environment (look and feel)
- Movement/climbing system
- Fighting system
- The field of vision and hiding system
- Camera system
- The story
The good:
- Leap of faith
- Crowds going into a frenzy when they see you kill somebody
- How other people react when you punch somebody’s lights out (scared and intimidated)
- Pickpocketing
The bad:
- When you kill all your pursuing enemies, you lose your entire wanted level
- Too many hiding spots
- You can never lose a fight, no matter how many opponent
- Counter is way overpowered
- Timed attacks are way overpowered
- Enemies only attack one at a time
- Fist fighting is pretty useless (hit, deflect, hit, deflect, rinse and repeat)
- The camera system during cutscenes (the problem is that it makes it seem like you have control over something, while in actuality you really don’t)
The ugly:
- If bystanders see you commit a murder, they will run around screaming for guards, but never actually approach or lead one towards you
- People carrying stuff do not respond to dead bodies
- People will just leave dead bodies lying there
- Enemy guards are sometimes a bit oblivious to your presence and won’t chase you until they’re “notified” by other guards
- Guards won’t kill vigilantes
The downright silly:
- You can’t swim
- Exiting the game through the user interface — you have to “Exit Memory”, “Exit the Animus” , “Quit the Game” , select your profile and last but not last “Quit” (surprisingly ALT+F4 actually works)