 What's up, everybody? I'm the Hook, and I'm the Blade. And I am the bomb crafting mechanics, the inferior aspect of AC Revelations gimmicks, also known as Blue. Hi. And together we're, you know, welcome to the, uh, what is it again? Bomb cast Blade Hook. Oh, yeah, we'll go with that. This is the first time I could not think of a single name pun, so bomb cast. This is why you keep me on the payroll. Blade Hook. Yeah, yeah, that makes you an official part of the Hook Brain pod trust. That's why I pay you the big bucks. I'm your host, Lawson, joined as always by your host, Timothy, and, welcoming back to the show, our friend, buddy, pal, homie. He's blue-dab-a-d-dab-a-die, blue, from the Overly Sarcastic Productions YouTube channel. Hello, hello, hello. It is wonderful to be back here, gentlemen. It's wonderful to have you back here, sir. How's life? Uh, doing all right. Um, I've basically finished up all my big work for the year, so I'm just kind of like tying off all the various loose ends and things that I was too busy to do like two months ago. So now it's just like, ah, no video stuff. Let me just do errands. Yes. We're doing all right. We're doing fun. I'm like knee-deep in finals week, so I'll get there soon, but I'm not quite there yet. Oh, gosh. I don't know what that means. Thanks. Meanwhile, I'm working up to getting ready to play Immortals, um, which will weirdly be one of the better Assassin's Creed games this year, compared to the best Assassin's Creed game of 2020, which is Ghost of Tsushima. You cannot argue that I'm wrong. So, yeah. Okay, so you, you pretty much gave up on Valhalla. Is that right? Oh, I fully gave up. No, I, I fully, fully quit. Good for you. Good for you. We, good for you. We applaud you, sir. It was actually really funny because I, I was obviously a, a devoted listener of the Hookblade podcast as I was playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which I had to do very quickly for a realism review that I put out the following week. Spoiler alert. They kind of, there's some goofs in there. I, I was listening to, to you, Tim and Lawson talking about it and Lawson, you were like more like excited about the gameplay and the way that it works. And Tim, you were like, I don't know. I'm not feeling it. And I like legitimately every single thing Tim that you said in that first episode, I was a hundred percent on board with you because I was basically at the same point in the game where you were, I'm like, yeah, I don't like the story. The exploration is kind of dumb. I don't really like the combat. I just know not feeling it. And then both of you soured on it by the end and I'm like, yes. Help me justify my decision to quit after playing through London and realizing it was dumb. Honestly, if you think about it, we saved you like what, 90 hours of wasting your time. Oh, easily, easily, at least. Yeah, if I wasn't, if I wasn't participating in the Assassin's Creed podcast, I would have given up around the same time as you did. Yeah, I was like, I was playing through the first one with Leta Chester sure. And what really did it was when I was trying to do one of the, the hill forts, like Mount Toblerone or whatever the hell it is, where you have to do the mission with I have our Ragnar son to take like the hill fort. And I had gone there just on my own time. And this is actually on a stream. You can see me playing it. You can't get into the main longhouse because you can't break down the door unless you have your raiding party there with you. So I spent on stream embarrassing myself 30 minutes trying to get into this damn house only to be like, fine, I quit. I'm done. I'll just go do the next mission. And then the next mission was taking that hill fort that I spent an hour in. And I'm like, I hate this game. Yeah, yeah. That happened to me multiple times, multiple times. But I'm like, I'll do London. That's the one thing that I want to see. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do whatever it is. I was only mildly entertained. And then I'm like, no, I quit. I'm so, I'm so done. I'm out. What happened one time, what really like sold me. I'm like, I cannot finish this game was I was sailing up the coast in my longship and I accidentally pressed triangle and triggered a raid. And I got onto the beach and I was doing the combat. And I'm like, no. And I just turned off my PlayStation 4. I never do that. I just, in the middle of an encounter, didn't even say, I'm just like, no, I'm done. I'm done. I'm gonna go out to YouTube. I'm fucking done here. Well, are you ready to feel even more vindicated for the decision you made? Yes. Even for people who love Valhalla, apparently this week it's getting markedly shittier because I don't know if you've heard about this, but they're putting out an update that is going to do a couple of key things. One is it turns on level scaling so that no matter how high level you are, any enemy that you would be leveled above will only be at most 51 power levels underneath you. So, I mean, pretty much a big middle finger to people who still have zealots or wild animals, boss fights left that they have to do, and also conveniently at the same time, they're introducing an a paid Helix credit XP booster. Imagine that. That sounds like trash. Yeah, that's pretty garbage because as Jorraptor I saw pointed out on Twitter, they said that isn't it an interesting coincidence that a month after launch they're adding in these features so that reviewers and early decision makers can't know that there's going to be a complete change to the way that levels are scaled and a paid XP booster option like in Odyssey. Man, that is, that is skeezy. I don't like that one bit. Kind of scummy, kind of scummy. All I can say is I hope one day Darby McDevitt gets to write on a game unburdened by the kind of aggressive corporate shitheadery that has ruined Assassin's Creed. It's probably not going to happen one day. One day, one day it'll happen, I believe. I'm an optimist you guys. Just give Darby his own studio, just like ship him off to make a new Ubisoft headquarters and like just give him Assassin's Creed. Yeah, just like throw a dart at a map and then make that like Ubisoft like Minneapolis, St. Paul and then just give Darby free reign to build the studio and do whatever he wants. Yeah, he's the architect. Yeah, he builds the fucking. You see Darby with a hammer. He's like, I got to build it. Darby's laying bricks. He's freaking border. Hey, guys, you want a job at my Ubisoft studio? I do. Darby, pick me, even though you might be mad at me because we were mean about Valhalla on the podcast. It has to even out after the years and years of praise. It's got to like, you know, we got to keep them humble. I like the way you think. I'm like the cut of your gym. So I guess the main thing we're here to talk about on this week's episode of the bomb cast blade hook is let's talk about some cities. You guys have thoughts on cities? Hell yeah, I do. That's why I suggested this topic. What's okay. I just want to get this out of the way right right now at the top blue. What is your number one favorite city, even though we know you're going to say Venice? It's actually not Venice. If I legitimately had to give you a number one city, it's just ever so slightly. We're just like just to shift the map marker a little bit. It's got to be Florence for me. It's got to be Florence Florence. Yeah, Venice is also very good for reasons I will explain. I prefer Venice or I prefer Florence to Venice. I know heresy coming out of me. I know, I know. Did I get the meme wrong because I thought that like OSP watchers joke about you having a thing for Venice or is it? Oh, no, totally. Absolutely. Like Venice is like, best thing on earth, can't do any wrong except for all the war crimes. But in AC, I have to give it to Florence for reasons we can get into. Man, it's going to be some obscure like historical references that we're not going to get. No, fam. It comes down to game design, really. Because like pure aesthetics, pure aesthetics, Venice takes it obviously is gorgeous. But in terms of game design, there are a couple reasons why I prefer the way that Florence works as a geographic geometric playground for an assassin's game. Yeah, I think I think that's pretty much where I fall because Venice feels a lot more vertical. Maybe you have to kind of I don't know. I feel like the rooftop to rooftop traversal experience in Florence is better personally. Yes. No, definitely. No, it isn't. No, it is. I'm sorry, Tim, it is. I think this looks better. Well, no, Tim, go ahead. Why? Why? Why do you disagree? Well, OK, I should say Venice isn't my number one, but I like it more than Florence. I feel like the Venice from rooftop rooftop is better. But also, Venice has the diving off of the rooftops, which add a whole another level to the experience. That is fair. That is fair. And with the gondolas, there are a lot of more varied ways to do the traversal in Venice. But one of the things that really breaks it for me is that the Grand Canal in the middle of the city really breaks it up in a way that can be frustrating to the flow. Compare this to, and obviously technology changes over time, compare this to the way that Assassin's Creed Syndicate handles the Thames in London, where the Thames is like it's a highway. It's the highlight of the city. Getting across it is like the best part. And it's very much an integrated part of the experience of traversing London. And it's just it's dynamic. It's cool. Everything's moving. Whereas in Venice, if you have to go from from east to west in that city, you just got to jump into the water and completely break your flow. And obviously it's very cinematic and it's very much a unique part of the feel of the city, but it kind of kills the navigation. And part of me, and we'll get into this, Venice is just a little bit too big. You can't always keep track of where you're going. So I love playing through Venice, and I love like the district to district of it. But the city as a whole, it's just a little bit unwieldy with with all those with all those big open crossings. Yeah, I think that sums it up. One of the the things I love about a lot of the early game cities is how you get the sense, because they're a lot smaller than now they have been in a long time, you almost start to feel like you know the city like the back of your hand. There are certain like, I found myself on my recent AC2 playthrough, like I could find a glitched foothold somewhere, and I would encounter that exact foothold numerous times in my playthrough and be like, Oh, this is that one foothold that always makes me stick to it for a weird reason. I don't know. I just like that sense of familiarity with the area that I'm in. Yeah, that those games provide. I think a big part of that too is the design philosophy with these cities was a lot different than because they knew that you were going to be spending 30 hours in this one location. So they have to you have to build that rapport with the location. Whereas most recently, staying within the cities and we've talked about this a bunch, but staying within the cities isn't so much the priority as it is go and be a part of the bigger outside world. Yeah. Like you're only spending one sequence or arc in an entire region of the map. So you're not getting used to that region on any real deep level. The newer games with the philosophy of making the world as big as possible and having all these like varied environments to traverse and there is merit to that. You get the sense and not just because there are a lot of like icons to cross off, but you get the sense that you are moving through the world as opposed to existing in the world. So when the first like 10 hours of Assassin's Creed 2 are all in Florence and every single mission, every single side activity exists within the space from the collectibles to the races and the beat ups and the courier events to the main missions to the assassination contracts for Lorenzo de' Medici, all of that exists within that space and serves to get you familiar with the geography of the city and introduce them to the landmarks. And the city is such a perfect size where you can always look up and see the Duomo and one other building that is unique and distinct and lets you figure out where you are. So Santa Maria Novella looks super different from Santa Croce because the way that the churches are organized, just the design of them is totally different. And then you have things like Piazza della Signoria and Palazzo Vecchio, how daft of me. Josh, you're so fucking silly, blue. You know, the old clock tower where Ezio's family gets got, all of those places are completely different and operate in different little corners of the map. So you can always kind of use those things to keep you grounded and knowing where you are. There are a lot of smaller things in the game as well. Some of them are a little, they reach into the future a little bit for some of the buildings that come later, but it works, it works. Compared with Venice, where a lot of the secondary locations aside from St. Mark's Square and like the Ferrari church, they're all kind of indistinguishable unless you really know your architecture and I don't. So for me, it's like, which of like 10 churches is this? But in Florence, it's like, there are like six or seven main things and you can always ground yourself in relation to one of them. And I don't know, it just, it works. You feel such a sense of place where you always know exactly where you are. It's small enough that you can get a familiarity with the individual routes and like, oh, you know, this little area has a kind of parkour path that I can use, kind of like in the original cities in AC1, where you always like have a really good handle on like the three city blocks around where the bureau is. And then for the rest of the map, it's like, I don't know what the hell's happening here. But the area around the bureau, that's my neighborhood. That's the place I know all of Florence gets that feeling because of how much time you spend in it at the risk of just kind of going on and on and on. I want to go with your two guys's top arm. Maybe we can do like a little mini top five just to get the rundown that we can. Yeah, I was going to ask Tim, what's your number one city? Well, this is going to come as a shocker. Constantinople is my favorite. Istanbul and Constantinople. All right. Yeah, I love Constantinople. It's great. You know, and it's pretty good. There's many, many reasons. A lot better than Rome. Well, that's the thing is, there are many, many reasons why it's my favorite. But to kind of tie it into what you were just saying, Blue, I do think what's interesting is Constantinople is about 10% smaller than Rome. But even that small of a gap, I think it's felt throughout the way that you can navigate. Obviously, there's some design improvements, but I think maybe not smaller is better, but definitely you don't need to go bigger if you don't have to. Yeah. And so I definitely noticed with Constantinople being smaller than Rome, and that's kind of why it edges out, especially over Rome for me is because in Rome, I feel like there's a lot of times where my flow is getting broken up with different parts of the map that just aren't very well climbable. Whereas that's totally not the case in Revelations or for Constantinople because very seldom does my flow get interrupted in that city. I just love the atmosphere of Constantinople. I love the colors. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's gorgeous. They do a really good job with it in terms of like how it looks and feels. The atmosphere is unparalleled. Yeah. For me, the only problem is that I never knew where I was going. It just kind of felt a little too big. So I always felt myself getting lost, but I guess that's kind of the design philosophy of like, look, it's such a big city. And there are a lot of landmarks, but I always had a hard time figuring out where I was going. It's just slightly too big. You don't have that like, oh, I can orient myself based on what this landscape or this landmark is. You don't have that sense so much in Constantinople. I think that that's okay considering like at a certain point, you're pretty much not going to be able to do that in most Assassin's Creed games. Like there are very few cities that have that Florence effect, maybe only Florence, honestly, out of all of them. I think that's almost true though, Lassen, because I found myself constantly in Constantinople being able to evaluate where I was based off of where the Hagia Sophia was, because you can always see the distance no matter where you're at. That is true, except it's a symmetrical building. It's only one building. It's not multiple or anything. So that's why I say it's almost true because I totally get what you're saying. But I feel like I always was able to look and see it. And that's kind of what I feel like. I've been thinking about recently that Assassin's Creed does uniquely that I don't think I've really experienced in other games is because they have the emphasis, especially early on, with viewpoints and synchronization, it really incentivizes you to be able to get high up to see something of interest and to be able to know that I can go there. When you're coming up on a city in AC1 on the horse from Kingdom, you see this vast landscape off in the distance and you can go there and play around in it. That effect is constant throughout all of these games, even in some of the not so great worlds or cities. It's always you're up high doing a viewpoint and you can see something and you can go to it and you can interact with it. And that I think is you could even say it's constant in Opal. You could say that. No, that's totally fair. That's conversely, that's one of the reasons that I really like for the exact same reason, which is not I guess what the definition of conversely is, but who cares? The reason I really like San Gimignano also in AC2 because it is a large open space that all points towards this big city on a hill with these super bomb-ass towers that you can go and climb. It's the same effect of when you first ride in to a city in AC1 and see it from the hill as you're going down towards the city walls and gates. Same effect done exquisitely. I really love that feeling. Something that I love about Constantinople that it has in common with my number one favorite city, which isn't Constantinople, is that I want to highlight this because I want to see what you guys think. I think Constantinople and my favorite city that isn't Constantinople are the best for if you're just walking through the street, you're not running, you're not parkouring, if you're just walking at a normal pace at street level, looking around and seeing the merchants and the people who are milling about and going about their lives. The most beautiful and immersive street level city experience can be found in Constantinople and in Unity's Paris. Yeah, hard agree for sure. I'm glad. I'm glad you hard agree, Tim. For a second I thought you were going to say London and I'm like, wait no, but London's kind of bad to go around. No, but Paris is so exquisitely crafted. If London was just the Thames, it would be up there, but the rest of London brings it down. Paris is so well done. And the crowds are amazing. Yeah, the crowds are so big you can really get the sense of being a blade in a crowd, which so many Assassin's Creed games for some stupid reasons struggle with. Paris is so well executed that you can clearly tell all of the design and development focus was on making Paris as good as it can be. They didn't really care all that much about the rest of the game, but Paris got the attention that shows everything from Notre Dame and the outside, the interior, everything on Ile de la Cite. It's just so well done. And Paris is actually on my list of top five as well, not my number one, just because it's so lovingly rendered with so many little things going on that you can stop and see and just enjoy being a part of. It really feels like there are people getting stuff done in a way that you don't see even in the newer games where like, yeah, sure, in origins and onward people have like daily routines. Yeah, but they're just kind of walking from place to place to place. There's not a lot that's actually being done in the city. Am I making sense? Perfect sense. And I think that that's why, especially in Unity and Revelations, more than really any other game, I like found about as many excuses as I could find, either in like a role playing sense or what have you, just to like, I'm just going to walk now. Like the area with the Cafe Teatro and like the bridge sort of extending outward from it. Anytime I was in that area or I was heading to the little assassin hideout underneath, I just walked and like took in the environment around me. That's that's the reason why is that it was just so it's all in the details. You can really see so much detail. And London had that too to some extent where there was a lot of variety in the activities and things you could see Londoners doing in that game. And it was true that like you could be climbing or, you know, looking around a building and you could hear music coming from the window and you can see someone playing music inside the, you know, there's all those little details and beautiful moments. And certainly to some extent, those even happened in the last three games. But Paris, I think, aesthetically on an art style level, brings it together in such a unique and distinct and immersive way that it's just hard for me to not consider it my favorite city. Yeah. Now, I think even among the people who don't like unity almost at all, you'd be hard pressed to hear them disagree that that Paris is very good. Even if it's not their best, which is fine, some people can be wrong. But yeah, no, no, I don't need to be a unity is the best Assassin's Creed game edgelord to recognize that Paris had a going on. Indubitably. So something else that one of my favorite gaming memories now of all time, I have to say blue, is going to be when we were writing legacies together. Oh, yeah. And we'd be on on a Skype call with the Google Doc open typing stuff out. And I would have next to my computer, my ps4 hooked up to to a monitor. And I'd be in unity like at the, you know, at any look, we were using like the pantheon for like a scene and the cafe theater. That was like the final showdown, too. Yeah. Yeah. Because it was set there. We were using the geography and it's like, OK, now we have to describe, you know, the motion. And it was like, it was just this interesting like experience. I don't know if you saw there was that one one guy on who listens to who found our podcast through your your guest episode who commented or tweeted at us that he read legacies. Oh, don't ask him when he thought about it. He said it was good. Oh, OK, never mind. I was going to say what I loved about that was on Brooks on. I don't know how it's pronounced, but we appreciate you for reading legacies. What I love most about that whole setup of us of us writing that was I was I was doing study abroad. I had no video games for like two months. So I was I was bored and deprived, even though I was actively in Italy. I was sick out of my mind the whole time with a sinus infection, neither here nor there. Oh, no. What mattered was one funny instance where you Lawson were kind of bopping around in Notre Dame up in the higher levels of the church for us to kind of like game plan out, shea breaking into the Notre Dame for some reason. And he had a scene where he's rummaging through a bookshelf and then he leaves and he's like, oh, I'll clean it up later. But in the game, there's a bookshelf that's totally like scattered all over the floor and messed up because we had like reverse engineered that moment in the story. And I just thought that was the funniest little detail. Shea's life is kind of funny. Clean up later. I'll clean it up later. Sorry. I totally forgot what an Irish accent was. That was my shame impression. Regarding Paris, too, it's really interesting to me. I feel like that was kind of the last game where we heard about this building took three years to develop because Notre Dame took three years to develop. That's three years of development time to a building. And I think that really symbolizes where the development head is at with some of these games because that's so much time just to a piece of architecture that we're going to be able to run around and play in. So that's so respectable. And the other thing, too, is it's kind of interesting how there isn't more missions that take place there. I always thought it would have been easy thing to do is to repurpose it for like a modern day mission because you might as well. You built the thing. It would have been doesn't look that much different. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you fill it. Except with upstart. Except for that. In 2014, it didn't. You got me. You got me. Yeah. But you can just fill it with modern day civilian people or tourists and then you just fight a bunch of abstergo people there. No, that'd be a great idea. So Notre Dame. Awesome. Tim, why are you so smart? I get it all from blue. You're so smart. I learned it from overly sarcastic production. I get it from one of the hosts of the hookplot blade cast. That's why he's such a smarty pants. I was going to say to your points about like they clearly put so much effort into crafting this building, like there was one person on the team whose job it was to make Notre Dame. It's so impressive in part because the building is entirely open for the whole game. You can just go on in there whenever you want. Like there's there's St. Paul's in London, which is like it's pretty cool. It looks good. But I don't think you can really go inside it. Like you go into the top of the dome for one mission with Evie against like whatever that other character's name was. But you don't actually like get to kind of experience the whole building in the way that you can with Notre Dame where it's like, yeah, no, wide open, go on and have fun. It's a playground. Even back when they were still like really, really, really focusing on their architecture with Constance and Opal, they had Hagia Sophia for the Ishak Pasha memoir pages, special bonus mission, whatever. I remember seeing the dev diary about how they went inside and did like special recordings to get the echo right of the footsteps. Even that's only one mission that most players won't even see because they don't do all of the bonus stuff. So I definitely have to have to agree that Paris is the most effort taking building that effort needed. What's the word for like high effort? Well, most diligently crafted. That's the fucking word was diligently crafted building in Assassin's Creed because every single aspect of it is explorable, park horrible, inside and out all the time. Just mwah. And meanwhile, you watch like the dev diary for Valhalla and they're like, we went to Norway and talk to some real Vikings. We went to Norway and ate some fish. We went to Norway and did a bunch of touristy bullshit. And then we shot this like a Viking commercial for IGN. And then we ended up almost every trace of Ashraf from the promotional video we shot in 2018. Oh, poor Valhalla. That's the thing about Unity too is that was that I remember that being a big selling point was like one in every four buildings are enterable. Like you go inside and the interior was built. That was a big thing about Unity. I remember sitting I remember playing Unity and it was just even though there were so many flaws and so much wrong with it, there were there were those few things that I just knew because they had just been basically created for Unity. That they had to come back in the next game. And I knew we would get those enterable buildings and the big crowds and the great parkour experience. And that it never happened again for the rest of time. Everything I thought for sure would come back. Never did. Yeah. Well, anyway, anyway, so we've all got our number ones out there out and about I guess what are some some, you know, runner ups or things that that were close to the number one spot didn't didn't quite make it. Pick me. Pick me. Pick me. Oh, okay. You're going to pick me anyway. Hell, yeah. For me, top one is Florence and paired with it. This is not really in any order after number one. Paired with it is San Gimignano also from AC2 slash Tuscany technically because they function so well as a pair within the story. Well, we're at first you're just in Florence and then you kind of bop over to Montereggioni, but it's it's kind of off in its own little corner. But in the sequence where after the Patsy conspiracy where you are just kind of going around Florence, going around Tuscany, just like cleaning up this whole mess, there's a real synthesis between the countryside and the city itself. And then San Gimignano within this big Tuscany map works so well because it's a small city that you can understand the geography of really well. It's a couple big avenues that are easy to kind of run down, but then there are also a lot of like, well traversable buildings that you can get across. There's a nice wall system that you can that you can run around. And then there are these big old towers in the middle of the map, which make for such a good parkour experience, because you can completely ignore them if you're just trying to get from point A to point B. But there are a handful of missions that really lean into that aspect of the city's geography and really play it up and make it a puzzle of how do you climb these buildings while also maintaining stealth? Because if you get detected, you're going to get a knife in your back and you're going to fall off the tower or a bow to the ass, I guess. Don't start throwing rocks and game mechanics, it's only when you're being at whatever. But it's so well done because it combines a navigation puzzle with a stealth puzzle. That's such good asca heme design and they never do again. It all, it sings. It beautifully just sings. It's like poetry. It rhymes. But it looks so good. The colors are so nice and so wonderful. And there's a lot of cool stuff in the country side beyond that. There's some cool like monasteries and stuff you can go to. It's just it's so good as a side city that pairs with Florence that I have to give them creds for integrating it so well. When it could have just been a piece of garbage thrown in at the last minute that serves no purpose and looks like crap, aka Forley. But we can get back to that later. Watch your mouth. Words. Forley fucking sucks me. Thank you, Los. Okay, we can hash this out later. No, hash it out now. Okay, let's hash it out now. Tim, what on earth is there to like about Forley other than Catarina's forts of living there? Exactly. Okay, so here's the thing. I was going to give it to this. Also, you've never had to play Battle of Forley. Yeah, but I can still explore Forley, but you never had to play the shit ass DLC sequence set there. Well, here, Tim, go ahead. Go ahead, Tim. Tell us what you're going to tell us. Okay, so I think it's pretty atmospheric. I have fun in it. It's not my runner up, by the way, but I have to defend it. Also, something I got to say, I have to check my bias here. I really, really enjoyed any time I could go to Forley in Brotherhood multiplayer. So the repurpose of that map for the multiplayer really gave me an appreciation of Forley that I didn't have before. So, okay, I will grant you that. Forley is a very good multiplayer map because they use one specific corner of the city, but can I transition into my rant about why I don't like it? Sure. Well, I just want to say one thing before you do that, in that I agree that Forley is atmospheric. The same way I could say it's atmospheric when I walk into the laundry room and my dog has shat in it. Like there's an atmosphere. Sure. It's just kind of a stinky garbage one. I'm sorry. Let me just pick up that baton and then try to bring this home. Wash your hands first. The reason that I don't really like Forley is because in the main game, it serves essentially no purpose. It is a stopover that exists to pad out the game between you going on the carriage ride with Da Vinci and showing up in Venice. That is basically all that it's doing in the main game if you don't play Battle of Forley. Battle of Forley is not great, but I can't really knock that as the reason that the city is bad. It's just that they only gave one sequence worth of content for this city. That's not the city's fault. That's the story designer's fault. It is indicative that they don't really know what to do with Forley, however. The reason they don't like it. Half of your city is behind DLC. Fair. But Florence is still a complete package without needing to go to the Ultrano district. I will grant you that. That is a very valid point. So Forley is very greenish, brownish, grayish, dull colored, which I get was the only part of the palette that was missing from bright blues and pinks in Venice, bright reds and oranges and greens in Florence, and then a kind of golden summer, nice pastel-ish field color in Tuscany, San Gimignano. So the only color that was left was dog shit. They put that for Forley. I recognize they were trying to do heavy, older-style Romanesque architecture, which is Forley's a little bit of an older city. It didn't have as much of that late medieval construction methods. That's fine. That's what they were going for. But in terms of a game design perspective, even looking past the way that it looks, and the fact that it serves almost no purpose in the main story, it is very poorly laid out because it is basically one city completely split in half east to west with a giant boulevard in the middle that you basically cannot cross. So there is no way to meaningfully parkour across the city, because if you want to go west to east, you've got to just jump down to the middle of the road and climb back up. It's the same problem with Venice and the Grand Canal, but it's so much smaller, so it's so much more noticeable. And then the main building, the main tower, the main church landmark in the city, you cannot actually get to by parkouring. As far as I am aware, there is one place where you can climb up it by the colonnade in the cloister next door, so there is no way to smoothly parkour around east to west on the city, and then parkouring up towards the main viewpoint. So it's just weird, and you have to keep on going down to ground level again in a really frustrating way. Beyond that, there are these really weird marshy areas outside of the city compared to Tuscany San Gimignano, which is just big open fields, nice, fine, easy, whatever. There's all these rivers and stuff that's really hard to get around, and then there are two lighthouse towers that look identical, but are in different places, and it always confused me. That's just a me thing. However, it's still part of my experience, so the reason that I don't like Forley so much is because if any one of those things was the case, fine. But there's so many different things about it that just don't work in the middle of a game where all of the other cities are done so well. It's just like, how did this happen? So that might be for Forley. The thing is the best part of Forley is the part that's in the multiplayer map, so totally I will grant that. That's the good part next to the castle in the middle of the city. Great, cool. It's only when you have to cross the main street or go check out the tower that you realize, wait, this geography doesn't make any sense. I have to keep going down to ground level. What the hell? I have to go around and swim into the piss pond. Keep in mind, Forley isn't in my top three. I do like it. It's good. No, that's fair. I'm not attacking you. I know. Can I shout out an honorable mention that doesn't make my top three, but I want to give it some love? Yeah, it's your podcast, dude, I don't care. Jorvik in Valhalla. Oh no, boo, boo. No, Jorvik is pretty good though. Yeah, but it's not even comparable to the cities we're talking about. It's not. That's why it's an honorable mention. That's my point. Valhalla. Forley is not really comparable to the cities we're talking about. No, I would take Forley over Jorvik any day of the week. I don't know. Honestly, I feel like Jorvik, impressively, you can pretty much go rooftop to rooftop to get between any points in the city. It's a small city too, which is rare. It's the best location in Valhalla, that's for sure. It is. But it's also, if you think about it, since Syndicate, the only taste of valid rooftop to rooftop navigation we've gotten. I mean, this is another one of the many cases where I'm in a desert and then Ubisoft pisses into my mouth and I'm like, okay, well, I am less thirsty than I was before, but I'm still drinking piss, but I gotta give it a little bit of love for that. Yeah. In the same way, I like the cities in Odyssey just because they're really good renditions of Greek cities and they serve their purpose of what these places would have been like. I think either Mykonos or Delos out in the Aegean is really, really cool because it's vertical, it's got the canals, it's got a little bit of the Venice vibe, but there's nothing really to do in any of them because Asi Odyssey is forts the game, so there's no actual meaningful, long form game content in the cities, which really brings them down a peg, but the cities themselves, like, Athens looks great. It was really fucking pretty in there. Yeah, and same kind of in Origins when I was popping back into, I played around in Origins a little bit before Valhalla, and Alexandria, Memphis, cities like that are interesting because the scale is so huge, but you completely lose any sort of recognizably fun parkour navigation pretty much entirely. Beautiful to look at, and there's technically maybe kind of stuff going on. It's just not very fun to be in. Yeah, it's again, it's the kind of content where it's like you are experiencing the city because you're going through it. You come back to Alexandria for some stuff, so like points there, but you're not spending a lot of time in the city doing main story content. You kind of show up and then you're off to the next thing to go clear out another corner of the map and never come back again. And it's just, it's a different design philosophy, and to a certain degree, I can understand what they're going for. It doesn't mean I like it. So yeah, I will say to round out my list of the top five cities that I really like, a good counterpoint to the Ubisoft big open world after we've kind of broken down the games that are just set in cities with AC3, we get the big frontier and all that. AC4 and Rogue have really good home base main urban centers in the middle of a large open world exploring jungle crawling seafaring game, and those are Havana and AC Rogue's New York. Rogue's New York is pretty much the next one on my list that we haven't talked about. I love New York and Rogue. They're both so good. For similar reasons, even though the flavor to both of them is extremely different. Havana is really interesting because I definitely have a deep fondness and affection for Havana, but it kind of doesn't stack up to even something like Rogue's New York or, you know, most of the cities in other Assassin's Creed games just because there isn't really a lot of really effective, oh, I'm going rooftop to rooftop for XYZ stretch of distance. It's like a very small cluster of buildings and then a lot of sort of outstretching flat area. I mean, it's hilly, but it's not buildings, you know what I mean? That's fair. I like Havana because there's a lot of opportunity for parkour mid, which the later games don't have as much. We have like on the ground, on a horse, on rooftops, but aside from like unity, we don't really get like middle like jumping on rafters and swinging on beams and stuff except in Havana. That's a good point. In Kingston, we don't really get it. In Nassau, we don't really get it because there's not a lot in Nassau. And to an extent, I think Havana suffers because it's only one of three main cities, whereas New York is like it for Assassin's Creed Road and for Assassin's Creed Rogue. And it shines because all of the attention went into that one city. So I definitely get what you mean. And Havana is kind of on the smaller side. But, you know, for me, I'm the kind of guy where I feel like that's a strength because I always kind of knew where I was going in Havana. And there are a lot of interesting things. There's the governor's mansion down in one corner. There's the prison up in another corner. There's the big church area. There's the whole thing with the docks. I feel like there's a lot of really nice variety within this one space that's very easy to manage. There's some big landmarks to work with. And then in AC4, there's the system that works really well, where if you climb on top of a high enough surface, you'll see where all the map markers are. So you don't need to go into your menu every three seconds. It's a feature I am just flabbergasted they didn't bring back because it works so well for navigating Havana. You can also hold, at least on an Xbox controller, it's LB. And it'll show you a card of all the objectives you still have to do to complete this one map area. Yeah, I love that. That's pretty great, dude. It's good. There's a lot of good like game level design in Havana where the way that AC4 is constructed makes Havana better than it otherwise would have been. You know, I gotta say there's a lot about Black Flag cities that disappoint me. Where I'm coming from with that is I had more fun of them certainly than like AC3 cities friends, for instance. Yeah. The thing about Black, okay, so here's what Black Flag have the opportunity to do when they didn't. I felt the ocean in between Kingston and Nassau and Havana could have emulated the kingdom in AC1. And then all these different cities could have been very distinct from one another and all had their specific atmospheres as the cities in AC1 did. I've always been a fan of the, here's my four, three to four cities and I can explore to them how I want to with like fast travel points in between rather than the big open world. And so with the Kenways games, the ocean could have been the kingdom, could have been the stretch of land or water in this case in between these places. And because they're separated from each other, they can all be very distinct. And I don't feel like Black Flag cities are very distinct. I think kind of on some level, what you're looking for is that like really dramatic color palette swapping that gave the impression that you were in a complete, like you're almost on a different planet in some of these cities. And I get that. Like I think that one thing I wanted to call attention to in Havana was that I feel like it has this very vibrant atmosphere to it, right, with all the colors and stuff. And certainly that's distinct when you compare it to Nassau, which is crumbling to shit and Kingston, which is a lot more subdued in its palette and its tone. It's definitely when you get into these big, persistent open worlds, they have lost the ability to be like, yeah, we just have a whole fucking different skybox for this city. So, you know, it's a whole different world here. You know what I mean? Yeah, I will say that even in the earlier games, I don't, I don't notice it as much with Constance Noble. But in Rome, you can cross a bridge from Isola Tiberina into the Trastevere district. And the skybox changes from pink to green. You can, if you walk slowly, you will see it happen in front of your eyes. They change the color of the skybox and it is so jarring. So they are still able to do those kinds of things, but you're right. There's there's only so much you can do within the context of it being one city where even like with San Gimignano and Florence, they're still both in Tuscany, but they look and feel so different just because they're able to like totally start from scratch. They can make them entirely different, different skyboxes, different environments in the background of the mountains. And they can create a little universe around each one, which is what I like about the cities of AC4 and Rogue, where you, you know, you go into a loading zone when you go into those cities, and then they can be Tartacy. Like Havana in the Havana map is a lot bigger than Havana as the little port on, you know, Cuba that you can sail around in two and a half seconds. And it feels much nicer to me than going across a big kingdom like in Greece or Egypt or England, where it's this huge, huge, huge open world and these big cities inside of it. And there's no real like threshold between them. So I know it was like Dev jargon speak with AC4 with it like, yeah, we didn't want it to feel like GTA where it's all one big map. So we had them gated off as loading zones. I feel like that was a little disingenuous because obviously they just wanted to justify the fact that they had loading zones. But I maybe I'm just falling for like the, you know, the the game devs speak, but I genuinely did like that they are their own separate worlds where it's like, okay, I'm going to Havana and there's an intentionality behind that. It's like, okay, now I'm in this world. And if I want to go somewhere else, you know, I'm going somewhere else. But right now I'm in here and I don't know. I don't know if there's really like a meaningful change in how they actually work. But in terms of how it feels, I like being in a map that is just that city. Yeah, I think that's a very good and interesting point. And it's like, on one hand, I think that the odds we ever get that experience again, pretty much are zero. Because the advantages as far as everything goes technologically to like, it's a seamless experience are pretty evident. That said, it'll be really interesting to see if, as I optimistically hope will happen. You know, what, what is it going to look or feel like when we do get the game that is, you know, on the same sort of engine and priority level of it's a big single open map that you can go to all the places within, but still within that map, having these huge cities that are really like detailed and, you know, luxurious and meticulously crafted. If we had a game that was like, maybe sure the map is the size of fuck off England, but the three big major cities were, were five or six times the size of what they are in Valhalla, you know, and then there were these main centerpiece experiences that you are going to spend. Basically, if we ever get a game again, where you are spending the majority of your time in the cities, are we still going to have that same feeling of, I wish we could go back to when it was, when there were those loading screens and when things were kind of cordoned off and separated from each other. Yeah, I guess it depends a lot on the type of game they try to construct. So a running theme on the podcast here for a few weeks has been one city multiple time period, specifically the last episode because I was listening to that yesterday. But like that is an example where you still have a city focused game and each city, so to speak, is its own unique world that you have to deliberately step into. And I feel like if they were to do that, you can't just like pick a direction, keep walking and end up in 1918 or anything like that. Like you have to have intentionality behind that. So I don't know. I feel like if that was the scenario, they could kind of like split the difference and have the best of both worlds. But if they wanted to do one time period, one setting, multiple cities, it would be dodgy. They'd have to really do some geographic squishing to make it work. Yeah, I feel like with regards to more of the, even AC3 still has the big frontier, but it's still a place in between the cities. I don't need to be able to ride my horse from Florence to Venice. I don't need to be able to do that. I'm totally fine with going through a loading screen or what have you. And that to me has always been the recipe for making all these areas feel unique. And because not only like not not only is a Scott like the skybox is different, the colors are different, but also I noticed like an especially an AC1, the civilians are all completely different. They have different dialogue and accents and such. And so I feel you can better bring the immersive factor up when you're not relying on so much space in between the cities. And you can just have, as you said, Greg, that one city be that one map in particular. I say I vote 2020 no loading screens. I'm sorry. I don't want to see them again. I don't think they should bring them back. In fact, if they remake AC1, I want it to be one persistent world with the kingdom between all the cities. And I don't care. I'm not saying that they should literally have loading screens in between them, but they I know they should have a buffer between the two things because that's that's how I think it's so effective. A bridge. Let's call it a bridge. Now, let me hit you with with an opinion that I don't know if if you guys will agree with it all. And this will be my my big like oh here comes blue this big disagree. So you can just ship me off and whatever. But I will often think that a game is better and has the capacity for more meaningful variety. If like square footage being equal, we have two different smaller cities than one larger city, like square footage for square footage. Yeah, I would rather have Florence and Venice rather than one big old constant note. Yes, agreed. Because within that the things that you can do by fundamentally having a different core geometry to the way the city works, no matter how big and beautiful Constantinople is, it's a city with two land masses and one river in between them. Venice is totally different. Florence is it's two big land masses and one river between them. Rome is kind of that but there's an island in the middle of it. The ability to have a fundamentally different type of experience between two distinct playgrounds for me is so much more meaningful than one large city with an internal variety. So sure, like in London, you know, the Strand is way different from Westminster, which is way different from whatever the hell is south of the Thames. But it's all still within that like vein of it's all London, it's all a big carriage city that I navigate with the rope launcher or whatever, as opposed to like, oh, Venice is the city where I use gondolas. Florence is the city where I'm running rooftop to rooftop and each of those worlds has its own distinct design choices behind it where you can do entirely different architectural styles, you can have different sets of NPCs. The benefits of having distinct worlds, it doesn't need to be big, it just needs to be distinct. And I feel like that's what big AAA games miss nowadays, because they're like, oh, bigger, bigger, bigger, no, no, no, variety, not size variety, damn it. And that's kind of I was hoping, you know, when Unity came out that like, well, if this is what the size of this city is, and this is the experience that I'm having, obviously, the future is, we could get a game with two or three cities that are roughly the size of Unity's Paris. And that could be super cool, which now may never happen. But it was still, I think, a worthwhile idea at the time. Yeah, I think that part of the reason, and honestly, I don't even need to say I think this, it almost certainly is the reason. When you have these bigger countryside style maps where it's mostly England, I mean, you're getting the sheer size of it down, but the actual content per square inch of that is like the expectations for what you're actually going to have to do in that space are much smaller. So there's almost a direct incentive against them, a direct incentive to not go back to primarily city based worlds, purely on the basis that it seems like, I mean, have we ever had an Assassin's Creed game that came out and the map size was physically smaller than the year before? Revelations. Revelations was 10% smaller than real. I don't know if Syndicate is smaller than Unity when you account for the time anomaly. I'm pretty sure London is bigger than Paris. I think that Revelations and Unity are like asterisk edge cases because I think Unity is smaller than Black Flag for sure. But that's only if you're counting all of the fucking water. I don't know if that's true. Well, yeah, well, because I remember hearing that Paris is the size of Black Flag's maps and water put together. That cannot be accurate. I know it sounds absurd, but like, I mean, I remember hearing that there was some type of similar thing with AC Egypt's Kingdom or AC Origins Egypt. Man, I'm really, I'm really confused my code names here with AC Origins Egyptian Kingdom and AC Odyssey's Classical Greece, where I thought it was that like the land mass is roughly the same between Odyssey and Origins. It's just that Odyssey has all this water in between it. But I don't know, someone will have to do those video comparisons. I don't know off the top of my head. I am not a human GPS. But no, definitely it's an edge case that a game ever deliberately gets smaller. On a pure like mile for mile comparison, the number one is Odyssey and the number two is Black Flag. But those are both the games that have a lot of fucking water, you know. And then you have Origin, but this was made before, I mean, so this doesn't include Valhalla even, but it then goes sort of Origins, Rogue, AC3, Syndicate, Unity, AC2. Yeah, it's not an exact science, but I definitely feel like they've been able to say when advertising every single game that the map is by some metric, whether it's just in terms of land mass or whatever, by some metric they're able to say it's bigger. And I really wonder what kind of crazy logistical gymnastics that they'd have to pull off to make a game that is as city motivated as we want it to be and still be able to slap on the box that it is a bigger map. That's the thing that I guess they can't. I don't think they can do that. Right. There's no way. One thing I will say is following our whole collective logic here, we do have to give Valhalla some credit because even though it's not a city-based game, it has a Norway map, an England map, a Jotunheim map, a Asgard map and whatever the hell they call New England. Those are five entirely separate open worlds that are pretty distinct from each other. None of them are all that fun, but they are still distinct open world maps that exist in their own space. Sure, I would rather wish that England was a quarter of the size, but I do have to give them props for that because they are kind of doing what we're asking for. It's just kind of like a monkey's paw kind of thing where we don't end up actually getting what we want. You know what's funny blue is, in my experience with Valhalla, I actually ended up liking Asgard Jotunheim and Vinland the most because they felt conquerable. They were these areas that I felt like I could fully explore and not devote the rest of my life to doing so. Asgard, Jotunheim and Vinland, they were both distinct areas, yes, but also they just weren't unfathomably huge because when you pop up with the map and it's like, oh wow, this is only how big this is, I could totally explore all of this. That incentivized me more to go seek out the mysteries and the artifacts and wealth there because I knew it wouldn't take me eight hours to do. I think the real reason I have any optimism is that I think at some point they're going to realize the diminishing returns of the selling point that the map is being. Because I think that if they're smart and they're paying attention, they already would have noticed that for the approximately 12 minutes that Valhalla was announced and we thought it would have a smaller map, people were excited about that information. There are advantages and that you can only go so big without having to, well, I don't know. I keep making this silly mistake where I think that Ubisoft has a brain. If they go bigger than Valhalla, I don't know what the fuck that's going to look like. I would have said that after Odyssey and technically Valhalla is bigger than Odyssey. And Valhalla is even set to get bigger still because we're going to get Ireland, I don't know how much of it, but clearly Ireland and a lot of France. Yeah, who knows how much countryside they're going to put in, but clearly they have the entire Seine Basin, which connects up to the coast and Normandy and probably a decent amount around it. So I don't know what they're going to do for that map, but that's going to make Valhalla one of the biggest varieties in a game. And then again, another annoying asterisk to my previous counterpoint is if we go into Odyssey, if you guys played the Atlantis DLC, that's three entirely separate worlds, not insanely large, not the most fun on their own, but Elysium is very different from Tartarus, is very different from Atlantis. And they're all actually pretty interesting to navigate. So I've got to give the credit where it's due. They're not amazing, but the Atlantis DLC was pretty good. All things considered pretty good. And probably one of the closest things we can hope for in terms of unique, small, map-focused, individual, purpose-designed worlds in the game that are self-complete within themselves. I don't know. I know that we don't usually think of those when we think of the cities because it's kind of schlepped into the DLC and forgotten about unless you're one of the people who's there a year later. But I've got to give them the props. Then it's kind of what we're asking for. The gameplay within it is a little eh, so, but still. And it's a fucking myth world. Yeah, it's a myth world. I wanted to mention something about something that I think is featured across many of the games. I don't think this is the case for Florence. This isn't going to be the case for every city, but it's occasional enough to be a pattern, especially in AC1. And I know, like, Venice has this. A lot of the maps or cities in these more older games really have a distinction between the wealthy part of the city and the poor part of the city. AC1, every single one of their maps has a rich and a poor district on the map, and Venice has its own version of this. Rome very much has its own version of this. Yeah. So I just, I always thought that was interesting because that also changed the way you navigate because in the more broken down parts, it's a little more unstable and rocky, but in the wealthier parts, it's, you know, it's a little bit more comfortable and just that's a really interesting way to, and also if you go, if you can go even further to where in AC1, the people are dressed better, you know, and there aren't as many drunks or beggars, you know, so it's that stuff right there is a really great way to immerse you and to give you very subtle cues about what part of the city you're in. Yeah. Yep. And what the, like, it's a storytelling device too, is you get to understand what's actually happening in the city better. Yeah. I think that the moral of, if we could distill this podcast into game design advice is deliberate variety is really what makes the best cities in this game good, where they're designed with a like a gameplay idea in mind of like how are you going to navigate the city? They look cool and are welcoming and inviting except for the places where they're deliberately not welcoming and inviting and that can be a gameplay thing again, which is purpose driven and they have story going on in them. They don't need a billion, you know, tick marks to check off. It's just like let the game unfold and let the story progress in the city and then we'll develop a connection to it as we play and they're not doing that anymore, but they were. And that's why the games that we liked are the ones that are really good. Damn it. And even Ghost of Tsushima, it's this big map, sure, but it breaks that map into three sections that are not persistent. You have to fast travel into those sections and they're all very distinct from each other. Yeah. And there are varieties of biomes and atmospheres within all of those zones that make you feel like you're actually experiencing a variety of aesthetics as you traverse throughout the world. There's, I guess the answer, you know, to simplify it even further than what you just said would be there are better ways to do it than Ubisoft is currently doing. Whether that's the old games or Ghost or what have you, there's an optimal strategy, at least for those hardcore fans of us out there, who fell in love with that iteration of Assassin's Creed. And, you know, we want it back. I know it always kind of comes back to that's the prevailing theme of this podcast is that new equals bad, old equals good. And I apologize for that, but. Well, no, I mean, it's true. We can turn it around again, because Lawson, you were telling me that you were playing through immortals and having a decent time with it, right? Yeah. I tried it. I haven't, I don't have the game. I haven't played much, but I did the demo and I tried to run it on my shitty computer. And I like what I've played of it so far. Yeah. One of the things that I'd seen in the review that, excuse me, I'm talking. God damn it, Blue, you're such a diva. YouTube really changed you, man. I'm mad with power. Now, one of the things that I had seen in reviews about immortals phoenix rising specifically was saying that the four little corners of the world that you go into are so specifically themed around each God and feel so different from each other and how you navigate them, what the world looks like, how it feels, and what the kind of like gameplay implications are in a way that we like about, you know, the old school style of AC City design. So clearly people at Ubisoft get it. It's just the Quebec team is better at it than the Montreal team. We have to keep in mind, too, is as much as I, you know, I'm going to say, like, yeah, just give me or one city maps and be done with it and let me travel between them. You also like also the way that they want to go about it with these big open worlds is already done very well with Breath of the Wild, which has probably the most various map in games. And it's all one single open world, but all the areas feel so distinct from one another. And that is because the, you know, it's it's one a different biome, but so many systemic things change upon the location that you go into. So many different things are affected. Like if you go to the fiery area, I'm not sure I'm not sure the exact name of the area. It's been a while. That is the exact name. Really, the fiery area. If you go into the fiery mountains, if you go there, you can't use wooden tools, though, burn up and you have to put on different armor. And it's just, anyway, long, long story short, I do think there is a way to do the one big open map with diverse locations. But, you know, Ubisoft has been trying to emulate Breath of the Wild for the past four years. So we'll see if that we'll see if they catch up. So to kind of, I think a good sort of last thing, Tim, you said you had a top four. I pretty much just have a top four. Blue, do you have a top four, top five? Florence is my number one. And then paired with Florence rounding out the top five in no particular order is San Gimignano. And then I also really like Paris. And for the reason that we talked about earlier, I like New York in Rogue and Havana and AC four. And they each kind of like fill a different niche. There's a different reason I like them. I think the most similar on the list in terms of their gameplay function would be New York and Havana. But they all are there are different reasons that I like each of those cities for the most part. They do different things very well. And I wanted to try and like pick a diverse bunch of cities that really represent the best of Assassin's Creed across a decently wide stretch of time. Because I mean, obviously Venice is really good and really fun. But for the purpose of discussion, it's more interesting if I if I like pull in a city like San Gimignano, even if I like on the whole probably enjoy spending time in Venice more, San Gimignano, I think when paired with Florence has more interesting design implications that are that are worth discussing. So yeah, that that's my top five. After Florence, there's no particular order. But I pretty much I pretty much go number one, Paris, number two, Constantinople, number three, Florence and number four, Rogues, New York. I had I had a top four. But then but then when I when I realized I didn't need a top four, I whittled it down to top three. So pretty much just Constantinople, Venice, Rogues, New York. Cool. A lot of overlap, but also a lot of differences between our lives. Fuck Paris. This was a fun discussion. I enjoyed talking about this. There's, I mean, yeah, this is a good time largely a game about navigating urban spaces. And obviously, you know, games are allowed to change. That is an entirely separate discussion. But I think it is telling that we have so much to love about the way that these cities are constructed. Because for, you know, all the things about Assassin's Creed, good and bad, the cities really are something special that that catapulted it into the the position of of adoration and enthusiasm within our hearts that this community has followed along to to become fans of this game. Because without, you know, without those great cities, there's not much, not much Assassin's Creed going on. We complain about Assassin's Creed a lot. We complain about Assassin's Creed a lot. But this, I think, is something where we can just be like, unironically, unambiguously positive about a lot of really, really good pieces of design that are like the reason this game has the place of prominence in gaming culture that it does, you know? Yeah, beautifully said. Beautifully said. Folks, if you enjoyed listening to this episode, there are a number of things you can do that help us out quite a bit. Leaving a comment, leaving a like helps leaving a dislike actually helps. So consider that if that's how you feel in your heart, don't don't encourage people to do that. And there's already one person that does it every week, I know. Yeah. I gotta leave a comment which is like the one dislike that's a Templar. Old YouTube comments. The one dislike doesn't like Paris. You'll love to see it. You'll love to see it. Also subscribing if you're not subscribed is a big help. You can tweet at us at Hookblade. You can like us on Facebook. We have a Hookface pod book now and we appreciate your support. Thank you for listening and thank you, Blue, for joining us. Thank you, Blue. Once again. Thank you for having me on. This was so wonderfully fun. I have such a great time coming on here to talk about this game that we all love and hate so much. That's what I'm talking to you guys. So every time I'm listening on the episode, I'm like, I have thoughts about this, but I gotta wait with her. So I appreciate you guys putting on such a fun show and inviting me on to share the laughs with you all and have fun in this wonderful Assassin's Creed community that we are a part of. It is our pleasure. All right. And make sure, by the way, guys, if you haven't for whatever reason, check out Blue's Valhalla Realism review on his channel, Overly Sarcastic Productions. That is our show and we will see you next week. Wait, you didn't say you've been the hook. Oh, fuck. I've been the hook. I've been the blade. I've been the guest. Oh, thank God I really have to pee. All right. I'll let you guys go. Yeah, we will. That's our show. We'll see you next week.