More like a Quarter play really, as my stats say I'm 25 percent done, however, I'm not impressed.
Hmmm - it hasn't set me on fire like Assassin's Creed 2 did.
It seems to me to be trying to emulate the huge sandboxes of Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout and the like - but it's failing in one major aspect.
There's Simply Not Enough To Do.
In the above games the "side-quests" which are often completely irrelevant to the main plot line, are absolutely LEGION. Teddypig bought me the manual for Skyrim and frankly it's a scary book; you could put a Rottweiller down with it if you dropped it on its head. Two inches thick of thin A4 pages crammed with thousands of quests and characters - I know people HAVE completed Skyrim, but I think to finish it 100 percent has to be near enough impossible. In Oblivion I spent hours and hours once simply finding the ingredients for a cure to vampyrism because I was sick of never being able to go out during the day. (and having everyone attack me). Oblivion was the game I bought when I purchased my PS3 and you can tell how long I've had it--and i don't suppose I'll ever finish it.
Not so Assassin's Creed 3. The sidequests are laughable. For example, both in Boston and The Frontier you have "Courier Quests" to achieve. In Assassin's Creed 2 these varied each and every time you did one. You might have to deliver 3 letters to jealous women in very twisty turny city streets before the time ran out - you might have to get a letter to a man before he gets arrested by the guards, you might have to leap on a horse and get three letters delivered in 3 outlying districts before time runs out - which is a very hard one to do.
All you do in AC3 is walk up to the requester, apparently he gives you letters, although they haven't even bothered to make a voice conversation, and on your map then appears several places where those letters have to be delivered. You find your letter deliveree, walk up to them, press O and he says "thank you".
And that's it. Not exactly riveting, heartstopping racing against the clock stuff. I can't help but feel that lazy gaming is inserted because the world is so vast. Give me a smaller world then, and give me variety.
There's also "collect trinkets" for some mad old crackpot back at the Homestead. Apparently this will reward you with some letters from Captain Kidd but I'm not holding my breath for anything exciting. I'll probably get a new hat or something. It doesn't compare in any way in "collect recipe items for so-and-so" in the huge sandbox games. Plus the fact you have the AC icons to tell you where stuff is - something that most sandboxes don't bother with.
There's an awful lot of NOTHING TO DO in the Frontier - and the gaps between what sidequests there are are pretty large. To open up more pointless sidequests you have to (as in previous games) find a viewpoint and again here it's Very Dull because you climb exactly the same BLASTED TREE over and over again. In previous games half the fun was working out HOW to get up the buildings, because they were generally of different construction. Similar, granted, but sometimes the struts were on the wrong side and you'd have to climb down, or shimmy sideways to work out how to get to the top and some buildings you couldn't even climb until you got the special gloves/ability to leap a bit higher. But all we have is the same bloody tree. Over and over. Not exactly challenging.
There's one sidequest (the Frontiersmen quests are a little more interesting*) where you hear about a Sasquatch who has been killing beasts and frightening the neighbourhood so you track him down (via a Bloody Obvious "Here be a Frontiersmen Quest icon" rather than, yanno, working it out YOURSELF) and I creep into this cave, terrified that some huge mythical furry creature is going to bite my head off and ... well I won't spoil it but believe me, it's LAME. Lame as a one legged man in a black and white minstrel show. *And that's what I refer to as "more interesting"...
There are set pieces - equivalents of the Assassin's Tombs in previous games - the only one I've done so far is Fort Walcott - and that's pretty absorbing but OMG so easy. One route once you are in there and I know it must be easy because I did it with full points.
I am minded of those programmes on TV where they talk about "enrichment" for the captive animals' environments. Like building fake termite mounds for the meerkats, or putting up rope swings for the lions. Well, scuse me if I feel that I need a bit more enrichment than the same rock to climb no matter where i am, or the same tree and the same church and a LOT more than simply being Mr Native American Postman. Specially when I get bugger all out of it just the same bloke saying "thank you" (and you can't even stab him)
Even the assassination contracts are a JOKE. Previously there were pigeon coops where Machiavelli would leave notes and each and every assassination contract was its own challenge. Kill a guy on a boat, kill three patrolling guards in a very busy market, poison this person, air assassinate another--and you were given reasons. In "Brotherhood" you met up with people who said "this bastard has killed my wife please kill him" and off you'd pop and do the work. Never one the same.
Here, you don't even get anyone giving you the contract! You just have to find the target which is always the same bloody guy, some git wandering around with a musket waving his arms around - which I assume makes him unpopular - and you follow him until no one's looking and that's it. BAH. WHERE'S THE CHALLENGE GONE? When I think of the mission in AC2 with all the towers... this banality makes me weep.
I appreciate the expansion of the world. I do. I love it that there's so much space, but when there's nothing to DO in that space other than to repetitively slaughter animals that I'd rather not slaughter thank you very much the expansion seems just a "oo look we can do BIG like Skyrim."
Well, no, you can't. Perhaps next time you'll manage it but you've fallen very very very far short this time. Sorry.
Hmmm - it hasn't set me on fire like Assassin's Creed 2 did.
It seems to me to be trying to emulate the huge sandboxes of Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout and the like - but it's failing in one major aspect.
There's Simply Not Enough To Do.
In the above games the "side-quests" which are often completely irrelevant to the main plot line, are absolutely LEGION. Teddypig bought me the manual for Skyrim and frankly it's a scary book; you could put a Rottweiller down with it if you dropped it on its head. Two inches thick of thin A4 pages crammed with thousands of quests and characters - I know people HAVE completed Skyrim, but I think to finish it 100 percent has to be near enough impossible. In Oblivion I spent hours and hours once simply finding the ingredients for a cure to vampyrism because I was sick of never being able to go out during the day. (and having everyone attack me). Oblivion was the game I bought when I purchased my PS3 and you can tell how long I've had it--and i don't suppose I'll ever finish it.
Not so Assassin's Creed 3. The sidequests are laughable. For example, both in Boston and The Frontier you have "Courier Quests" to achieve. In Assassin's Creed 2 these varied each and every time you did one. You might have to deliver 3 letters to jealous women in very twisty turny city streets before the time ran out - you might have to get a letter to a man before he gets arrested by the guards, you might have to leap on a horse and get three letters delivered in 3 outlying districts before time runs out - which is a very hard one to do.
All you do in AC3 is walk up to the requester, apparently he gives you letters, although they haven't even bothered to make a voice conversation, and on your map then appears several places where those letters have to be delivered. You find your letter deliveree, walk up to them, press O and he says "thank you".
And that's it. Not exactly riveting, heartstopping racing against the clock stuff. I can't help but feel that lazy gaming is inserted because the world is so vast. Give me a smaller world then, and give me variety.
There's also "collect trinkets" for some mad old crackpot back at the Homestead. Apparently this will reward you with some letters from Captain Kidd but I'm not holding my breath for anything exciting. I'll probably get a new hat or something. It doesn't compare in any way in "collect recipe items for so-and-so" in the huge sandbox games. Plus the fact you have the AC icons to tell you where stuff is - something that most sandboxes don't bother with.
There's an awful lot of NOTHING TO DO in the Frontier - and the gaps between what sidequests there are are pretty large. To open up more pointless sidequests you have to (as in previous games) find a viewpoint and again here it's Very Dull because you climb exactly the same BLASTED TREE over and over again. In previous games half the fun was working out HOW to get up the buildings, because they were generally of different construction. Similar, granted, but sometimes the struts were on the wrong side and you'd have to climb down, or shimmy sideways to work out how to get to the top and some buildings you couldn't even climb until you got the special gloves/ability to leap a bit higher. But all we have is the same bloody tree. Over and over. Not exactly challenging.
There's one sidequest (the Frontiersmen quests are a little more interesting*) where you hear about a Sasquatch who has been killing beasts and frightening the neighbourhood so you track him down (via a Bloody Obvious "Here be a Frontiersmen Quest icon" rather than, yanno, working it out YOURSELF) and I creep into this cave, terrified that some huge mythical furry creature is going to bite my head off and ... well I won't spoil it but believe me, it's LAME. Lame as a one legged man in a black and white minstrel show. *And that's what I refer to as "more interesting"...
There are set pieces - equivalents of the Assassin's Tombs in previous games - the only one I've done so far is Fort Walcott - and that's pretty absorbing but OMG so easy. One route once you are in there and I know it must be easy because I did it with full points.
I am minded of those programmes on TV where they talk about "enrichment" for the captive animals' environments. Like building fake termite mounds for the meerkats, or putting up rope swings for the lions. Well, scuse me if I feel that I need a bit more enrichment than the same rock to climb no matter where i am, or the same tree and the same church and a LOT more than simply being Mr Native American Postman. Specially when I get bugger all out of it just the same bloke saying "thank you" (and you can't even stab him)
Even the assassination contracts are a JOKE. Previously there were pigeon coops where Machiavelli would leave notes and each and every assassination contract was its own challenge. Kill a guy on a boat, kill three patrolling guards in a very busy market, poison this person, air assassinate another--and you were given reasons. In "Brotherhood" you met up with people who said "this bastard has killed my wife please kill him" and off you'd pop and do the work. Never one the same.
Here, you don't even get anyone giving you the contract! You just have to find the target which is always the same bloody guy, some git wandering around with a musket waving his arms around - which I assume makes him unpopular - and you follow him until no one's looking and that's it. BAH. WHERE'S THE CHALLENGE GONE? When I think of the mission in AC2 with all the towers... this banality makes me weep.
I appreciate the expansion of the world. I do. I love it that there's so much space, but when there's nothing to DO in that space other than to repetitively slaughter animals that I'd rather not slaughter thank you very much the expansion seems just a "oo look we can do BIG like Skyrim."
Well, no, you can't. Perhaps next time you'll manage it but you've fallen very very very far short this time. Sorry.