Poll: Out Of The Animus

[Jayben Tibbles]

I don't know if this is a common opinion, but I'm completely disinterested by the aspects of the Assassins Creed series outside of the Animus. I love the worlds presented inside the Animus, but occasionally the plot will force me out of it to play in the modern world. Am I alone in feeling it ruins the immersion.

 

[AngelOfBlueRoses]

My first Assassin's Creed was the second one and it was quite jarring after so much time spent inside of the Animus playing Ezio's story to get pulled out so that I could climb a bunch of ladders and press red buttons to make them turn green.

Immersion is one of those fluff words now, but here I'll definitely agree with you. I lost myself in Ezio's story, forgetting about droll Desmond, and then -boom!- the game went and reminded me that it was just a game. It broke me out of a great mentality so that Desmond could have a breather.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

Pretty much all the Desmond sections were terrible. So I'd prefer the games without them.

 

[AidoZonkey]

The out of animus sections were wasted potential. I liked them in original as they add to world and help you understand that there is more at stake then what simply lies in front of you. However they somewhat loose there effectiveness in the later games. You can see a gradual decline in the quality of the outer animus bits after each game.

I don't know, maybe they could have been better if it was split 50/50 inside and out side animus bits, and I would like to play a modem day assassins creed game, but for now its just there not really adding much

 

[Nickolai77]

I liked how in the later Assassins Creed games they had some missions taking place outside of the animus were Desmond uses the knowledge and skills he's learnt from the memories of his ancestors to climb up skyscapers and sneak around urban environments. The main trouble i think is the plot development that occurs outside of the animus. I mean the ending of AC III was just freakin' weird. I feel they could have explained the power of the apple of eden without such a convoluted and unusual backstory.

The game would work perfectly fine if you didn't have the animus, the ancestor memories and the weird back story.

 

[Baron Tanks]

It serves to tie the games together and as such it's tolerable. But I think we could also do with non-interactive story progression, although a lot of people would be up in arms to contest that that is not the way of the videogame. Or you could drop it all together and focus even more on the empowering gameplay and settings of the main games. I think as long as the settings are varied and strong enough, they don't need a metanarrative to tie them together...

 

[chuckman1]

I just wish they'd drop the animus and make a game where you're an assassin without all the inversion breaks.
Assassins creed is a series i want to like but they bore me.

 

[omega 616]

I don't know if this is a common opinion, but I'm completely disinterested by the aspects of the Assassins Creed series outside of the Animus. I love the worlds presented inside the Animus, but occasionally the plot will force me out of it to play in the modern world. Am I alone in feeling it ruins the immersion.

Dear god no, I rush the "Desmond" bits so quickly it's just a blur to me, I skip every cut scene I can in order to get back to the juicy stuff.

Even his name sounds like a maths teacher who has leather elbow patches on his corduroy suit, his hobbies are train spotting and stamp collecting, he also enjoys playing scrabble with his wife Dorothy and son Bartholomew (never Bart!).

I don't get the whole idea behind "I know you have been playing as this awesome character, in an awesome setting with cool weapons but how about you have none of that for the next 20 minutes?", none of the modern people are even likable.

 

[Drago-Morph]

Considering the only time I've ever had any sort of vested interest in the Assassins themselves was with Altair, yes, I do like the outside sections. I like them so much that they're pretty much the reason I keep playing.

 

[K12]

The series is eventually going to have to have significant amounts of gameplay outside the Animus, Assassining it up in this dystopia that we're trying to topple. They don't bother to world build much of the "real world" yet but I'm sure it can be fun if they do it as a Mirror's Edge or Deus Ex style cities.

Future Desmond is really boring but I thought that it may be possible to have a fun, charismatic future character who has been reliving all of Desmond's memories up to this point and it is this guy or gal who is the main protagonist in the future setting. Maybe future Desmond has a kid and then gets killed before completing his mission and then future Desmond juniour is the real hero.

 

[Baron von Blitztank]

I'm indifferent to the world itself. You see barely any of it and from what you do see is just from the point of view of the Assassin's and it otherwise looks pretty much the same as normal life. I will admit that the Desmond sections were my favourite part of Assassin's Creed III since they atleast focused more on stabbing/shooting people and the rest of the game was just so friggin' dull.

 

[The Ubermensch]

>Yearly release title
>People still being interested
>I Shiggy Diggy

Game play's been lost to the minigames, I don't even know what the underlying themes are anymore, and if I did get invested in the series, it would end up with a shitty Gainax ending anyway (Specifically shitty, I like Gainax when they do it right)

There's nothing in the series for me to grab onto anymore aside from the stabby gameplay. As long as it works I don't care, I probably don't care even if it didn't work.

 

[King of Asgaard]

To be honest, you don't play Assassin's Creed for Desmond's sections. You play them for his ancestors' stories, which are infinitely more interesting. Let's face it: Desmond was never really meant to be a protagonist, he just happened to be the connection to the present day that Ubisoft deemed vital to the story. Unfortunately, they forgot to actually make Desmond's supposed plight relatable enough so that the player base would actually give a damn about him. Instead, we got Nolan North voicing a theoretical alien/gelatinous cube imitating/trying to imitate human behaviour and failing to do so spectacularly.

So no OP, you're not alone in disliking the Desmond bits.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

It seems to me like a pretty simple sort of 'all corporations are actually Abstergo' capitalism/liberty thing going on. It's not too interesting. What I wonder is what they think they're going to do with it, seeing as they've got no plans to end the franchise any time soon and the outside world missions in AC4 were nice, but not nearly as mechanically deep, and I definitely wouldn't believe stun batons were the main weapon of security details for a whole game.

 

[Tom_green_day]

This may sound ridiculous but for the Ezio AC games, the only thing I looked forward to was the outside the animus parts. The cities just get so boring and repetitive, especially as the games are quite long, that it's lovely for a change. It got annoying in revelations where there were no real out-of-animus levels.

 

[DoPo]

The out of animus sections were wasted potential. I liked them in original as they add to world and help you understand that there is more at stake then what simply lies in front of you. However they somewhat loose there effectiveness in the later games. You can see a gradual decline in the quality of the outer animus bits after each game.

I don't know, maybe they could have been better if it was split 50/50 inside and out side animus bits, and I would like to play a modem day assassins creed game, but for now its just there not really adding much

YES! This is exactly what I think of them. They had so much potential. In fact, the first AC I thought was brilliant with the Desmond sections. Not at first, though, at first I thought they were boring and a waste. It went "Oops, no more Altair for you, go walk to that room and come back". I wandered why the hell did they even included those. Then, during one of the sections I decided to disobey and not go sleep. I found....story! I overheard a conversation between the doctor and the woman, then found some emails with news from outside. I really found myself liking the sections, as at first I just did what I was told, then eventually "worked up the courage" to start wiggling around in my chains, so to say. Then the ending bit was...well, quite awesome, indeed - it wouldn't have worked without the rest of the Desmond sections.

In AC2 the Desmond bits fell a bit short, though - I liked the fact that Desmond was starting to break down but they could have elaborated more on that. In Brotherhood, the theme wasn't touched on as much and the Desmond bits...well, sucked. I blame it mostly on them being short, though - there isn't much one can show in short slices of Desmond's life, maybe if they emphasised a bit more on them it would have been better.

I've yet to play Revelations and beyond, so I can't say how they were there.

 

[AidoZonkey]

You can see a gradual decline in the quality of the outer animus bits after each game.

YES! This is exactly what I think of them. They had so much potential. In fact, the first AC I thought was brilliant with the Desmond sections. Not at first, though, at first I thought they were boring and a waste. It went "Oops, no more Altair for you, go walk to that room and come back". I wandered why the hell did they even included those. Then, during one of the sections I decided to disobey and not go sleep. I found....story! I overheard a conversation between the doctor and the woman, then found some emails with news from outside. I really found myself liking the sections, as at first I just did what I was told, then eventually "worked up the courage" to start wiggling around in my chains, so to say. Then the ending bit was...well, quite awesome, indeed - it wouldn't have worked without the rest of the Desmond sections.

In AC2 the Desmond bits fell a bit short, though - I liked the fact that Desmond was starting to break down but they could have elaborated more on that. In Brotherhood, the theme wasn't touched on as much and the Desmond bits...well, sucked. I blame it mostly on them being short, though - there isn't much one can show in short slices of Desmond's life, maybe if they emphasised a bit more on them it would have been better.

I've yet to play Revelations and beyond, so I can't say how they were there.

Revelations and AC3 both fell short. Revelations was possibly the worst as there was so little to explore outside of Ezio's time line and AC3's was just forgettable, and the possible end to Desmond story acre suffers because they just spend enough time in his time line. It just could have been so much more

 

[Fenra]

I'm pretty much indifferent, they serve to drive the metanaritive which is kinda interesting but so badly handled that for most of the time you could have just had small cutscenes / voice-overs while the next part of the animus is "loading" to tie it together, like a random voice, doesn't even have to be Desmond updating the player on the Assassin/Templar real world struggles and how your actions in the animus have influenced that so far

Sad part is I can't help but see it as wasted potential, thought since the first game if they had divided the gameplay up evenly and made Desmond a top class assassin in the real world too already it could have been incredible, performing modern day assassinations along side the stuff in the animus with modern day/semi futuristic versions of the assassins tools we have in the animus, using information gleamed from the animus such as locations of pieces of Eden, Templar secrets etc etc to set up the next real world mission.

Instead for most of the series he is just a guy that lies in bed playing assassins creed

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I like it because it adds a layer of mystery to the game. It's great seeing present day characters discover what really happened in the past and how their ancestors were involved in some weird things. The problem I have with it is that it's not fleshed out very much. It was very good in AC: Brotherhood, though.

 

[Hero of Lime]

I voted dislike, I don't hate those parts, but I would rather have them be optional for extra plot. There were a few interesting sections in some of the games, but for the most part, they were boring.

I wish the modern day sections focused more on the bigger conflicts between the Assassins and the Templars, we never saw much or any real conflict outside of a few Desmond missions in AC III. Even those weren't very fun or interesting.