Shit Pie Says: November 2013

Back in 2012, when I should have been getting insanely hyped for Sleeping Dogs or Far Cry 3, I for some unexplainable reason found myself hyped greatest for a freaking annualized title. If you have paid attention to 1/2 of the previously posted posts, you can probably tell what game it was. In case you can't, you are stupid. Yes, I know that's insulting but it's also the truth. PS - if you said Black Ops 2, you are beyond stupid.

Yes everybody, I had convinced myself that Assassin's Creed 3 would be the gaming experience that would end all 2012 gaming experiences (not saying much, because let's be honest - compared to 2011 or 2013, 2012 was a real crap year seeing how everybody was giving GOTY to Journey or The Walking Dead). Everything about the game seemed so amazing! Alexander Hutchinson and the rest of the development team all seemed geniuinely hyped about the game with the luscious boner-inducing promises they made. The whole promise, of seeing a new take of Assassin's Creed set against an American Revolution backdrop with a Native American assassin, appealed to me. Now in all honesty, we didn't see too much gameplay released before the game like we have had with this year's Black Flag, and what we got didn't look too much of a step-up from the decent but ultimately lackluster Brotherhood and Revelations. But holy hell, Ubisoft seemed to know what they were doing, especially when this trailer released and convinced me that this would be one of hell of an assasssinating past hero journey worth taking:

But as Connor said in his deleted soliloquy (more on that later) - Ubisoft did what was right, I suppose. What was right for them. And by that making a ton of money at the expense of us, the consumer. Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate Assassin's Creed III like a lot of people on the Internet do. It's ultimately a decent open-world experience, despite some extremely horrible things like overly linear mission design and one of the most anticlimatic unfulfilling endings since Halo 2.

I'm not here to talk too much about the game's design, because there's someone else on the internet that already does a pretty good job of cutting it apart. You should give him a read, and tell him I sent you so that he might give me money. I'll use the following paragraphs to briefly discuss what I liked about the game, and what I didn't. So to get things started, the worst thing by far in the game was the mission design. Ever since Assassin's Creed II, the open-ended structure of the original game and its freedom was gradually phased out with each consecutive yearly release in favor of more linear, cinematic games. The dreadfulness of this culminated in Assassin's Creed Revelations, which could be beaten in a blink if you weren't going after the side content. It's just as prominent in Assassin's Creed III - the missions all have multiple "full-sync" constraints that will restrict how you play in order to get 100% in the game, and even worse many times the missions themselves weren't designed openly enough to encourage any sort of playstyle.


You never actually get to do anything as badass like this in the missions. Even the mission where this happens.

To make things worse, the game has an agonizingly long tutorial. Just to summarize it - you spend three sequences playing as Haytham Kenway, Connor's father. That tutorial, which should have been summed up in about a sequence of missions, was stretched up to three. And once you finish that tutorial.... ITS TIME FOR MORE TUTORIALS. Yes, after beating one tutorial with Connor's dad, you have about two more sequences worth of tutorials with Connor himself. This whole experience rounds out to about ten hours. It wouldn't be so bad if the actual game with Connor as an Assassin was long enough or fun enough to justify it, but it felt even shorter - the last two sequences are only two missions long each, and some of these missions consist of walking, watching a cutscene, and more walking.

There's a reason why I gave up trying to replay or get a 100%. Just like Haytham gave up a relationship with Ziio beyond a union of whiskey, painful memories, and his right hand on stormy evenings.

But surely, as long as the assassinations themselves are still good, the design of the normal missions can be ignored? Maybe... but even so, if the meat on a cheeseburger was cooked fine and everything else rotten or burnt, would you still eat it? And no, the assassinations by far are the lowest that Assassin's Creed mission design has sunk. This is an interesting inverse, since Assassin's Creed III by far has the most developed, morally justifiable cast of Templars featured in the series so far, which was a welcome departure from the "Scooby-Doo" villainly of AC2/ACB but on the other hand there is little fun to be had in killing them. To break things down, there are three types of assassinations in the game: scripted, free, and QTE. The following gentlemen, DLC included, are our assassination targets:

Edward Braddock (Seq 3)
William Johnson (Seq 6)
John Pitcairn (Seq 7)
Thomas Hickey (Seq 8)
Benjamin Church (Seq 9)
Connor's super best friend (Seq 10)
Haytham Kenway (Seq 11)
Charles Lee (Seq 12)
Nicholas Biddle (naval side missions)
Benedict Arnold (The Infamy of King Washington)
Israel Putnam (The Betrayal of King Washington)
Evil George Washington (The Redemption of King Washington)
Daniel Cross (modern day)
Warren Vidic (modern day)

This DLC brings a whole new meaning to the term revenge fantasy.

Of those fourteen assassinations, about six are scripted events like a linear chase or boss fight. With only eight left two go, a further five more are resigned to a QTE or cutscene assassination. Yes people, in game that originally let you kill your targets however you choose, whether it be head-on confrontation or stealthy poison, etc. is now giving you the exciting option of pressing x to win. That leaves us with about only three kills (one DLC) where you can actually choose to confront your target how you like, and those missions are still ultimately hampered by the aforementioned 100% sync.

The game was also notoriously buggy, despite the promised three years of development time that was talked about in interviews. What happened? Was it the huge world that was built and apparently left unfinished? Was it the new engine, unrefined as the developers ran out of time? Given a lot of the problems with the game, it appears that three years were not enough. How bad were the glitches? Not Bethesda-level, but still embarrassing. When I first went to New York, the first thing Connor did was instantly glitch below the ground and die.

At least the view's nice.

I'd talk more about some of the other problems with the game - the lack of atmosphere in the cities, the last of ambient music playing in the background like earlier games, all the crap they cut out like gameplay-altering weather or random events to make freeroam less lifeless, but this blog would go on forever and I am a lazy fuck. So I might as well get twp more things off my chest that I detested - the DLC and side content. The Playstation 3 had exclusive content - the Benedict Arnold missions. Now if exposing one of the greatest American traitors in history sounds like fun - be disappointed. The missions suck, the advertised exclusive hour of gameplay is about twenty-thirty minutes (cutscenes exclusive), and it does nothing to develop Connor's growth as a character and there's no memorable moments other than a scene where Connor pwns George Washington. The actual DLC (season pass stuff) wasn't any better. The Tyranny of King Washington episodes had a great presentation that was lacking in AC3 with the drawback of a weaker plot, but still suffered from short length (the whole thing feels like it was cut into three parts just to pad out the season pass), bad mission design, everyone except for Connor and Washington inexplicably feeling like their voice actors were changed, the absence of some of Assassin's Creed III's best cast members like Haytham and Achilles, and gimmicky superpowers that ultimately added not much to the gameplay.


Being able to go predator, summon wolves to your aid, and fly is about fun for thirty minutes. Which is coincidentally a 1/3rd of the time it will take you to complete each episode. Have fun paying $30 for less than 10 hours of gameplay!

Side content - undeveloped schlock for the most part. Assassination contracts - finding some random guard with no backstory and killing him. Letter delivering - were pointless missions in AC2 and are still pointless here. Hunting - air assassinating a beaver is fun, but its no fun or challenge to kill all the big dangerous animals like wolves and bears through boring QTEs. Naval missions - okay, this is probably the best developed part of AC3 gameplay wise but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the Assassin part of the game and the promised free roam exploration was cut out. The only missions that I felt added to the game, despite their flawed execution, were the liberation and Homestead missions. These added to the growth of Connor's character and his eventual rebuilding of the American Brotherhood, and are some of the only times in the game where you will see Connor happy despite the stiff animation and stilted delivery in some of the cutscenes. Hell, some major storyline shit was idiotically relegated to these missions - Achilles' death and the revelation why he named Connor Connor are all here.

The forts were also fun - probably the part of AC3 with the greatest freedom presented to the players. Too bad the psychic AI made doing them stealthy frustrating.

Oh well. At least the multiplayer was fun, albeit being a glitchy, unbalanced mess with the worst cooperative teammates ever..

Yum

The plot itself has problems as well - instead of being an Assassin's Creed game with an American Revolution backdrop, it feels like an American Revolution game with an Assassin's Creed backdrop until the final sequences. The plot further suffers from an overly bloated cast of historical side characters who were poorly developed, under-utilized, and were there just because "Hey! Look, you're meeting history!" Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Tallmadge have about five minutes of screentime and about ten lines of dialogue each, and do pretty much nothing. Israel Putnam shows up during the Battle of Bunker Hill so we can throw in that famous speech, and then disappears. John Hancock I think appears in some cutscenes and maybe says a word but who the hell remembers John Hancock. Even the historical figures who do play semi-major roles feel unused. Connor forms an interesting sort of bond with the Marquis de Lafayette, but it's mostly relegated to optional conversations and nothing comes of it. Samuel Adams, when he's introduced, seems like he's going to be Connor's Da Vinci but suddenly disappears from the story and is never brought up again. And the biggest name on the roster, George Washington, is predictably mishandled.

Did you wanna team up with the first President, rushing into the heat of battle together hand in hand? Sorry, nothing like this ever happens in-game. At most, George stays at Valley Forge to sip some tea while Connor and all the other soldiers do the dirty work. But hey, at least he's not sending them to steal oi- we mean, find weapons of mass destruction.

We never get to see him interact much with Connor, and as thus you can't really see them as friends/close allies the way Ezio got off with Da Vinci and those no-name forgotten Italian politicians like Mackiewhatshisface or Altair with Al Mualim or Edward with Blackbeard and those other pirates who aren't Blackbeard. As such, when Washington betrays Connor by attacking his village, it lacks the emotional twist that it should have had. Washington overall is depicted in a negative light as weak, indecisive with none of his positive traits and actions brought to light. For a writer that overall did a good job portraying its bad guys from morally grey standpoint, you wonder why Corey May couldn't have done the same with Washington. Hell, the DLC where Washington is a maniacal king portrays him more positively than the main game!

Assassin's Creed Revelations and Assassin's Creed Black Flag both did a great job of making each of their historical figures feel like they mattered to the overall plot, whereas in AC3 the historical characters for the most part feel there just to be there. The best parts of the plot, where Connor is interacting with his Templar father or his bitter mentor, have almost zilch to do with the Revolution. And yes, before someone points it out, it was stupid how Connor get shoehorned into several major events that were there just to be there, like the Midnight Ride. Yes, Paul Revere is also in the game (you don't say!), does nothing, and has gone down as the Jar-Jar of the franchise.


Thomas Jefferson is also shoehorned into the DLC, and Connor teams up with him plus a bunch of redcoats and Ben Franklin for some reason. Predictably, nothing meaningful is made of the encounter aside from a "Does this make me look fat?" joke with Ben Franklin. We don't even get to kill Paul Revere in the name of righteous payback.

Furthermore, the modern day sections just suck and that's all I will say about it because it just hurts to think about what could have been, evenmoreso than the historical part.

Desmond finally does assassiny things, and still has the charisma of your road-killed mother as she sailed through the air and smashed her head on the pavement. Somewhere, Patrice Desilets is passed out in garbage dumpster amidst bottles of whiskey and rum while someone shaves his head and draws a very thick line in the middle of it with Sharpie.

So what did I enjoy about the game, given all the nasty things that I have just said of it?

For one thing, despite my problems with the presentation, I actually enjoyed the story. Modern-day bits and all that First Civilization crap put aside. At its core, it is a good plot that suffered from piss-poor presentation and structuring because Corey May apparently forgot he was writing Assassin's Creed and not Revolutionary War the Game. But still, Corey May does great things with his dialogue, as evidenced by the death conversations Connor has with his targets.

There's an appropriate metaphor for this, but I don't know what it is

While the game has many forgettable/terrible characters (99% of them historical and the other 1% Stephane Chapheau), it still managed to feature a cast that ultimately drew me in. Haytham, our tertiary protagonist and secondary antagonist (for some reason, Charles Lee is the main one even though the father-son relationship should have been the focus on the game), demonstrates a powerful charisma and menace thanks to Adrian Hough's performance, and had there not been a tie-in book that filled in his entire life, I would not have minded Templar's Order in 2015 about his life. Achilles is a depressed black guy that fills the embittered mentor in the mentor-student role well, and since KFC hasn't been invented yet, Connor becomes the one that ultimately brings hope back to his worldview. The reason why Achilles is so depressed isn't very well explained, with one of the many pieces of cut dialogue explaining the reason why. Connor's mom and Connor's super best friend, the natives with the names I won't bother spelling because there's going to be at least one person bitching about improper accents.

Achilles prior to the life of an Assassin.

The only reason I am writing these things is because I hate all of you. Even you, the special little one, reading this right now with the oh so tender skin and beautiful eyes.

Haytham's supporting koo-koo Templar Krew, from the "in in for the tits" Thomas Hickey to the disillusioned Benjamin Church prove to be a memorable bunch and the only completely well done historical characters, despite the forgettable assassination missions which took them out. Its in AC3 where we finally see the Templars in a completely morally ambiguous light - AC1 and ACR took steps towards this but it was still painfully apparent that Altair and Ezio were by and large the heroes in that game. However, as the dying Templars in AC3 give their motivations and justifications to the naive Connor, it's hard not to consider that perhaps for once the Templars may be right especially after spending a ten hour tutorial playing as one and that Connor is doing the wrong thing by supporting the Patriots especially once we see what they do to his people when the war is won. Even Charles Lee, who is degraded into a racist, unshaven wretch who strangles little boys dies with a shred of dignity and honor that was absent from the villains of the first two games of the Ezio trilogy.

Pretty much all of Cesare's dialogue could be summed up as "GUARDS!!!" or "Lookin' good, sis." Not that I'd fault him, of course. God made older sisters for a reason, you know.

So at last we arrive to Connor, the Assassin who has divided the fanbase like marmite. Some people hate him, calling him the worst Assassin yet (forgetting that Stephane Chapheau and Desmond were Assassins) while others feverishly formed a cult dedicated to worship of his character in the hopes that like other entirely fictional characters - Jesus Christ, Kenny McCormick, and every single Marvel/DC superhero that's been killed off ever he may return from the dead one day.

What do I think of Connor?

My favorite Assassin.

Oh yes.

Even more so than Ezio. So yes, I've probably just committed some great blasphemy somewhere.

Why do I like Connor? While I like Ezio, he's more of an inspirational figure that you can aspire to one day become (which you won't, you fucking virgin nerds) in the vein of Souproman, Battermensch, and Woodah Woomun. Connor I feel is more of a relatable character - like you fucking AC nerds he's an eternal virgin with no social skills whatsoever. Which is a wonder why everyone hates him - he hits far too close to home for comfort. As I could relate to Connor, I wished to see him grow and win, to become what pathetic nerds like ourselves could never be. Given that I look through peepholes at my sister's room and bring self-pleasure into my pathetic life about twice a week, I was able to find some resonance but not the kind I hoped for with the frustrated, monotone Connor who has everything bad happen to him with little good in return. The guy loses his mother at a young age, is forced to kill his own father despite wishing to find peace with the man, loses his fatherly figure at the point where he needs Achilles the most, has the men he puts his trust in betray him, loses his people, kills his best friend, and all he really gets is to say, "At least I beat the Templars." Considering what he just went through to get there, that is the equivalent of the trophies they give the last-place losers at competitions. There's some more stuff, but I'm too fucking lazy to bother explaining further so go google Wolfkin Initiative (aka Connor cult) because somewhere amongst the rabid hordes of fangirl someone has explained for me why I like Connor BECAUSE I WON'T. There is also a claim that Connor never smiles, that he's always angry or boring and cares only about himself. Besides, he clearly did not have to help herd those pigs or get that stupid miner guy married, but he still did! Here is some pornographic evidence: