Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag – The Good, The Bad, and the Treacle
With Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, Ubisoft couldn’t have picked a more appropriate theme than the Carribean. Because what better way to market a game about buccaneers than with massive content piracy and information leaks?
Whether it was all intentional or not (the speed at which mirrored trailers is getting taken down indicates it wasn’t), Ubisoft has let the cat out of the bag: Edward Conway, grandfather of AC3’s Connor, will be the series’ captain in the next game. He’s a dual-wielding, quadruple gun-toting, Jamie Lannister-looking killer. And oh yeah… he’s on a boat.
Sidpyker from Reddit has somehow gotten his mitts on a bunch of AC4 “screenshots” that give some hints at what to expect:
- Extensive naval combat
- Additional tree-running
- Dual-wielding weaponry
- Possible underwater segments
- Possible sealife interaction
- Swagger
Of course it’s not all good news, as it means fans of AC3’s northeastern setting and protagonist (they exist, I know it!) will have to settle for an entirely new venue (the ocean) and titular assassin. It also means land lubbers who weren’t fond of AC3’s naval combat segments will probably not enjoy AC4: Black Flag’s prominent ship-to-ship gameplay. And while I can’t host the AC4 trailer here just yet (you can find it if you’re good with Google), I can most certainly share my thoughts about what the trailer revealed and how it will impact Assassin’s Creed, both in single player and multiplayer:
I think AC4 Black Flag (Not calling it AC4BF because that just sounds weird) is named that way because of its new character and because it sounds better that way.
Also, AC4, for the playstation 4? Get the connection? You know what, that’s probably wrong, but just putting that out there.
Also, why is your place always the same whenever we see it, I mean, it’s the same down to the last card in the booster boxes and the left.
Well now with the images I think it gets clearer that we’re really facing a lot of naval battles to come, well it’s about pirates that should be expected, anyway, keeping my fingers crossed they don’t take my favourite multiplayer away! ;)
I don’t like it. I feel they’re trying too hard to get people excited about it. They’re just capitalizing on the semi-recent pirate craze. The only thing that would be worse would be a zombie mode.
Also, I’m interested to see how they make the single player interesting. We already know what happens with Connor and his story, so why would his grandfather’s story be interesting to the modern day animus users?
I’m sure I’ll be picking the game up, but I just feel disappointed in Ubisoft.
I was highly disappointed with AC3 singleplayer in ways that had little to nothing to do with the characters–in fact, I enjoyed Haytham–so I don’t expect much from a game that has taken only a year to develop. My opinion: There was a sharp decline in quality from AC2 to Brotherhood to Revelations, so I would expect the same between AC3 and AC4.
On the other hand, I don’t see how it could get much worse.
The multiplayer of AC3, however, I felt was an improvement over both the previous iterations–which is pretty funny, considering that’s the part they DIDN’T spend several years developing. I’d like for it to receive further iterations, but an additional naval battle multiplayer would not go amiss, provided it didn’t interfere with development of the ole standard.
Definitely not buying day-one like I did for the previous two iterations, as I felt burned both times. They were the only two games, mind you, that I have bought day-one in… well, ever. My thought process went something like: [ACR] “ACB was great, and I’d really like to be in the front ranks of the multiplayer communit–uh, wtf is this?” [AC3] “Well, ACR kind of sucked, but they’ve had their top guys working on this for THREE YEARS. It’s gotta be grea… … … How did they make this NOT fun?”
For AC4, I predict a lot of point A to point B running, chore quests, a wide expanse of jungle with hardly anything to do, little to no difficulty, bugs, non-intuitive mechanics, bugs further-simplified paper-rock-scissors combat, and maybe some bugs. And lots of “Oh Em Gee, this main character is HAAARRRRD.” (Get it?)
Don’t forget the sucky protagonists!
Then again, I literally cannot imagine a character as bad in so many ways as Connor. And this is coming from a person who has to put up with Overpowered-alicorn-author-insert stories daily.
Well, there’s always Multiplayer, I suppose. Bet’s on which two bugs they’ll fix with this rererelease of it! My money’s on Smoke Bomb not automatically giving you 1500 points each time you drop it. So far, I’ve encountered this glitch in each mode but Assassinate. Fix plx!
I can certainly can wait until the release of this game, I know it is just me but some can say I am a “land lubber” and never enjoyed the Pirates of the Carribean movies or for that matter anything with the whole Pirate theme. I hope they do what they have been with the previous titles that have had the multiplayer where as they slightly improve the features as I do not want them to drastically change any key features we all know and love about AC3’s multiplayer. I wait to see what they have actually changed from the previous games and the only thing I really hope to see from Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is many hours of singleplayer and heaps of replay ability.