 What's up everybody? I'm the hook. And I'm the blade. And together we are, you know. Welcome to the Assassin's Blade Creedcast, a show about all things hook pod. I'm your host, Lawson. With me as always is my co-host, Tim. I realized, isn't it a little unfair that I call myself a host and you a co-host? Like we're both hosts. I mean, co-host isn't the same as like, it's like when Michael and Jim were both co-managers. Right, they share the title. It's just every time I introduce the podcast, I say, I'm your host, Lawson. Well, are you going to say I'm your co-host? I know, it doesn't. I'm just going to say with me as always is other host. No. Here we go. All right. This is all staying in, by the way. I'm your host, Lawson. And with me as always is Tim. There you go. That sounds interesting. Does that work better for you? I never had an issue with it to begin with. All right. Well, I'm more comfortable now. We're going to get started with a segment we like to call the Valhalla News Roundup. And then we'll jump straight into our discussion of Assassin's Creed 3. So a couple, a couple updates in the world of Valhalla. First, there was a nice little thing earlier in the week that they essentially are making the Assassin's Creed, the AC Sisterhood logo emblem designed by Sebastian Delaria at Memento underscore gallery. They're making that logo or a design sort of based on that logo available as a tattoo in the game. They've given them a little, we got a little sticker. You know, something I noticed about the tattoo though. Yeah. And I don't know if this is like subliminal about Ubisoft like not trying to go all the way, but that tattoo is going to be kind of hard to see with armor on. I think all the tattoos are going to be hard to see. I just hope they let me get the Sisterhood logo as a face tattoo on my forehead. Right. Well, yeah, well, well, I think I'm sure that there will be tattoos that you could get like sleeves and then there are armor sets that probably show off your arms a little more. I just feel like having a tattoo on your back because clearly in that image, Avore is wearing something kind of revealing. I don't think you're always going to be wearing that out and I'm thinking about it too much. Can you imagine if you could get it as a tramp stamp? Is that an insensitive joke? I'm let me be clear. I love this this idea. I'm really glad that they're doing right. They're doing a little in game shout out to because I feel like it will also be in their style to like, you know, maybe there'll be a little blurb of text with some cute reference to like. Right. Right. Right. You know, there's Amunet. There's sisters and they stab people, you know, it'll be good. I'm wondering I'm wondering if like each tattoo, for instance, might have multiple placement options. Like, yeah, we really don't know a lot about exactly how the tattoo system will work. Like, maybe if I want to put the sisterhood like on my arm, I could do that instead. Like, I think that'd be interesting. If you can't customize it at all, it'll be a little boring in general for tattoos. I mean, well, yeah, well, it's like if you just have like 15 different tattoos that you can acquire and they all go on a specific part of your body, then it's not quite unique. The way that you put them on is not going to be very unique because every other person could technically have all the same tattoo in the same placements. It's a feature I'm really excited about because I'm definitely too much of a scared little bitch in real life to get needles in my skin. So I can really role play the fantasy of being all tatted up. I have a tattoo. That's that's true. You do. It's pretty hot. Thanks. We also got a new story trailer telling us the story elements. You know, yeah, Avor has a brother. The brother has a wife. There's a dude named Basim, who's like an actual real deal hidden one slash assassin. And what's really cool about this trailer is is that days after the, you know, tattoo is announced, they put out a trailer with only male Avor in it, which I've I've expressed some frustration with on Twitter. It's just, yeah, it's it's it's a little. I mean, we always, we always were like, Hey, you know, maybe it'll be kind of like syndicate and they'll focus more on the female Avor later in the marketing campaign. And that's I mean, it definitely sucks that that female Avor can't be at the front and center of the early marketing campaign. But, you know, it was something we could accept. But now we're facing two realities. One is that there is no marketing campaign. And two is that even when it does happen this late in the game, female Avor still is left out of the the screen time. I don't know that it would have been particularly difficult to do a story trailer with both versions in it, considering you can switch between them at any point in the game. You know, I don't think it would have been weird to say, here's a story trailer for male Avor. Here's a story trailer for female Avor. They could have been totally different trailers or they could have been the same damn trailer with different character models and voices. Really anything would have been better in my opinion. So also just considering though, a lot of it is, oh yeah, it's rendered cutscenes, but guess what? Those cutscenes are still going to be rendered for the female Avor model as well. So they could have just gotten the footage while playing as female Avor or, you know what I mean? Like the cinematic trailer was one thing because we knew that it couldn't have been turned around in like a week. They had the cinematic trailer made. They just released it way too fucking late with not a lot of fanfare. But this time, there's no excuse for it. They had plenty of time to rework this trailer if it was made for male Avor originally. They had plenty of time to rework it. And there's also just no sense in it not being female Avor because Evie, as you said in the syndicate campaign, Evie got like a big push come Gamescom because that was her demo. Yeah. And I've told you this before. I think it always would have been smart to have like two different, I wouldn't say marketing campaigns, but like male Avor and female Avor be marketed at the same time, but within different trailers. So like the cinematic trailer, I always thought should be one for male Avor showing one way to go about a particular mission. And then female Avor goes about another mission and they could have done that here where that where one story trailer shows your relationship with your brother and his wife and stuff and whatever in Basim. And then another story trailer shows you other characters involved. I would have preferred even if they gave us a whole marketing campaign where every single like asset got a version with both genders. It could have been the same trailer. And I think that would have maybe fit more in line with the idea that it is the same game, regardless of which one you play as. Like, yeah, I think we just both agree that any of the many other options they had about how to go about this marketing campaign would have been better than how they're going about it. And I'm I shouldn't be surprised given what we know about what goes on internally at Ubisoft, but like it just seems like a shocking level of disregard purely from the marketing team. No one else but the marketing team in this case to be like, well, you know, they don't really want to see female Avor and having to do things like put out that, you know, that video. Like here's all the people who've wielded the hidden blade and just constantly hilariously tone deaf fucking it up. Yeah, there's just not really an excuse at this point. I mean, we are like what three months past sisterhood inception. Yeah. Plenty of time for post Ubisoft like scandals. I mean, like there was plenty of time to work this in a way that would not have been such a bad look and it's gone to the point where like I didn't even notice that they didn't show female Avor because I've just gotten so used to it. Like I didn't even notice. Oh, wait, there's a whole other fucking character here that they're not showing. And so many people I think we're so busy like tripping out over Basim and the hidden right to even like I felt like my Twitter was surprisingly full of positive reactions to it right that I think maybe it took a little a minute for people to go wait a second. Yeah. I mean, where's my lady Avor? Well, that's the thing, right? Is your spot on like everyone was super stoked about the assassin stuff and I guess for a moment they got a pass on ignoring female Avor almost completely. All she gets is that little key heart, which she's doing the exact same pose as male Avor. I noticed women cool if they both have their unique key arts anyway. So long story short, Ubisoft hire more women on your marketing team. Darby says, Hey, there's more. There's going to be more between now and the launch of the game. Well, game comes out mid-November. So we got about we got roughly just just just over a month left. Yeah. And I could talk like obviously there's probably going to be a launch trailer so we can expect that maybe. I don't think we're going to get another cinematic. We'll probably get a launch trailer. Probably another gameplay demo. I just don't know like what more could they have to show that they didn't want to show up at UB forward, right? I mean, it's just a little disconcerting or they'll you know, I think they're going to do another Ubisoft forward in October or something. Is that the plan? That's what I've heard. I might be wrong. Okay. But yeah, so like there was also, you know, so we got the sisterhood tattoo, we got the story trailer. There's also a new interview with Darby, which I have to say does not have a lot of new information in it. I guess the only thing I would highlight that's maybe worth talking about is that that he kind of implies that maybe the whole alliances thing got overblown early on and that it's not quite that we get to choose who we ally with more that the alliances are dictated by the story and will, you know, evolve as a consequence of the story, which is a good thing. I mean, a fully freeform open-ended alliance system probably would not be able to produce much actual gameplay content other than like, oh, if I align with this tribe, they'll send 50 plus more resources to my settlement, you know, some instead of convoy type shit. But if it's all part of the story, then it kind of addresses something that, you know, we talked about last week with blue where if I can always at any moment be fighting for either side, it's going to be boring. But if the story says right now you're fighting for these people and then gives you a reason that in the next sequence you're fighting for those people, that can be very rewarding. No, I guess the only thing I bet that that confuses me if, okay, the alliances are a consequence of the story, which is like totally something that you and I are both on board with. Yeah. How much of the story are we going to be able to have choice over if the consequences are always going to be the same if we're going to still be allying yourself with the same people, no matter what choices we make? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I think it's probably too early to tell anything about like the level of choice. I know that like the way people who have talked about it who have played sections of it, it's like, oh, wow, there's actually some real choice mechanics going on here. But I definitely feel like if it's being treated as a story point who I'm allied with and, you know, maybe I'm sure there is actually quite a bit of choice in terms of like who you ally with and how that affects the story. It just seems like his answer indicates a more, you know, handcrafted system than just, you know, if you fuck this person, you'll align with this tribe and they'll give you these resources. And if you fuck that person and so on and so forth, there, I feel like one of two things could happen with that is that, okay, so let's say, well, we could reference the first demo and we could say that, okay, that guy could have died. He could have lived the guy that you're you're hanging out with at the wedding could have died. Like, so I think the worst case scenario in that regard is that all those things can happen and you can make the choices that set those things in motion. Yeah. However, what if they just don't matter come the end of the game because if I'm outlying with with these people and like, what if I made a choice earlier that like fucks those people over it can't matter if I'm supposed to in the story online with these people. So that's the worst case scenario there is that you can make these choices early on and they don't have an effect later on. I think probably the better scenario is that these characters do come back in the end and it's all and I trust Darby to do that. Yeah. I think to make the choices impactful though is that these characters don't just disappear afterwards. Right. And that really brings me to I think the last thing that I want to talk about with this, you know, interview is that is a point that you've actually made to me before, which is Darby talks about all the things that describe Avor. Avor is a warrior, a poet, you know, seeking glory, helping his people. And as you point out, like if you make Avor's personality that they're good at everything and they like everything, you know, it becomes easier to make choices between those approaches. If Avor just has such a broad and generalized personality that every choice you could possibly make is consistent with that personality because hey, you know, he's a warrior and a poet. So he can do whatever you get the idea. You could probably state it better than I can. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, right? Is like Avor has to be a vessel for the player that can like harbor all of the all the play styles. So there are people that might want to just be violent and take over without diplomacy, etc. And then there might be people who want to be diplomatic and more gentle and Avor has to fit that it has to make sense for Avor to do both of those things. Yeah. So Avor is a consistent character, but if his consistency is that he is a scholar and an historian and an assassin and a Templar, what does it matter? You know, like the examples he gave about like beating the guy up in the bar, buying him a drink and forgetting about it or just giving him a wink. Like sure, those are all things that Avor might do, but but there certainly is like an issue with a directed story that has a choice and a story that is built around your choices. And The Walking Dead is an example of that where no matter what you do, it ends in the same place and your choices can affect that. And so that to me, while I appreciate that more, just I do like stories that are crafted, you know, but I'm wondering if we'll be in a similar situation in Vahala where the choices that you make aren't going to land you in a different place in the ending. To that end, what was the point of the choices? You know, if it's just to make the large chunk of the middle of the game be, you know, more free for the players, then but it doesn't really affect the story or the endings. And yeah, I think it's very possible that that Avor falls into the same trap as like Cassandra and Alexios of just I genuinely think that they are non characters. They're not like you can say Cassandra is a bad ass. Maybe your Cassandra was bad ass, but Cassandra herself does not really have any character traits to speak of that are not determined by how a player wants to approach things. I feel like the struggle, you know, is that you can really not easily create flawed characters when you get to choose the character because people are not going to choose to be flawed typically. If you could play with choice through Assassin's Creed for a black flag, you could choose to have joined the assassins in the beginning and never be motivated by greed and then there would not be a character arc to speak of in the game. Conversely, when you try to in a game that that is driven by choice force flaws or character arcs onto the player, we're going to be frustrated by the fact that Avor at some point makes a decision we can't control. We're going to be frustrated that Avor is behaving, you know, greedily or or with hubris, things that maybe we wouldn't do for the sake of creating a character arc. So it's a really like delicate thin line that they have to, you know, walk tightrope style over. And we've said it a million times. This is Darby MacDevitt. We think he's a really good writer. He'll probably do a good job. But that is that is the the concern. So to wrap up this segment, basically sisterhead tattoo, story trailer, Darby interview. It's fine. It's all fine. I hope they put more women on their fucking marketing team so that we stop having these embarrassing mistakes constantly, constant embarrassing mistakes all over the place from Ubisoft because they are an embarrassing tragic abusive ridiculous company. But here we are talking about their video games. Anyway, let's talk about Assassin's Creed III and embarrassing tragic fucking mistake of a video game. That's the theme that unites everything in this episode is embarrassing fucking mistakes. Do you want to talk story first or gameplay first? We should probably do story, right? And let me let me preface by saying that I did as with every other playthrough that we've done so far. I did try to get a hundred percent full sync, which is pretty miserable on Assassin's Creed III. I did get all of the full sync objectives in the mission and I pretty much got all the collectibles and all of the side missions and the homestead missions. I think the only things left on my sync tracker left at 92 percent were like boring naval privateer contract missions and like, you know, the challenges like the guild challenges, basically everything else. I went through the whole underground, which is a pain in the ass. I did a lot of I experienced a lot of the content that the game had to offer. And one of the reasons I did this is because I've always heard people say that Connor is actually a great character if you play the homestead missions. And I would like to start with the hot take that that is completely wrong and not true statement at all because I think that all the homestead missions really accomplish is they show Connor being nice to people, which sure is a nice added dimension of character to a guy who is not really nice to anybody in the main game, but just seeing a character be nice to people does not, in my opinion, make them a well written dimensional character. Right? Yes. I mean, 100 percent having a character just be nice and cool and handsome isn't exactly like making them a better character. It. Yeah. Objectively, it gives us more of Connor doesn't mean that it exactly helps her his case towards being a good character, especially if I mean, if your problem with Connor is that he's an asshole, maybe this does solve that problem. My problem with Connor isn't that he's an asshole. It's that he's boring. It's really complex. There's a lot going on with Connor that makes him suck so much and I want to get into all of it. If you took out like a chunk of side content for at CEO, it's not like you'd be like, wait a second, his character sucks. Yeah. You know, yes, can you really be credited for good writing if you have to play hours of side missions to actually understand in your 30 hour game why a character is good? I think that's bad writing, right? But the issues with Connor are complex. I think that I understand what people love about Connor. Obviously, it's a pretty fantastic representation of Native American Indigenous culture. And, you know, he does have a lot of admirable qualities and likable qualities. He's idealistic. He's determined. He wants the safety and freedom and protection of his people. He just has that personality type of like, I want to make the world a better place for the people around me and because I'm a perfect skilled badass with no lack of ability whatsoever, you know, I can achieve that pretty pretty easily. So I'm going to go fuck up a whole battlefield. I'm going to single-handedly win the Revolutionary War, all of that stuff. It's it's there's nothing wrong with that inherently, but my first thing is, are we supposed to admire or pity Connor's idealism? He is constantly speaking naively about the workings of the world and people are constantly telling him whether it's Haytham Achilles or Paul Revere. Hey, buddy, you know, you don't get it. The world's not like that. You can't make peace with the Templars. You can't, you know, make peace with the British in this revolution. You know, you can't slavery. We can't get rid of it. Sorry, bud. Are we supposed to be like, wow, shake in my damn head, Connor's a naive little boy, or are we supposed to be like, wow, Connor really is a pure hearted guy who sees the world the way it should be because the events of the story don't impact his idealism at all. The early game seems to set up this idea that we might get to see later on in the game. Connors beliefs be challenged that oh, he'll have to come to terms with the fact that he and the Templars can't have peace. Oh, he has to come to terms with the fact that the world doesn't respect him because he's Native American, but that really isn't the way the story goes. He never really is forced to reckon with his own naive idealism, so it just comes across as the writers didn't know what to do with him or with that element of his character. How do you like what do you do you think I'm on the money here or what do you think? No, I think so. I think it's most apparent in the like confessional scenes. Yeah, you have like a pretty like black like you put you have a pretty gray area of like Templar explanation for what they were doing. And I always regard as AC three as pretty good at dealing with the gray area. The problem is that when the Templars are explaining themselves, Connor is just like, yeah, but freedom is good. Like that's his response. It's like, yeah, but freedom, liberty. Where is Charles? Give me liberally. You're so right. And I actually think you've kind of reminded me of another really good observation that, you know, Connor is very much he's like he's sequence one Altair writing. If he never became sequence seven Altair. Yeah, because Altair has the same memory corridor conversations where everyone's like, you're a naive son of a bitch, you don't know what you're doing. And he's like, but liberty, right? And then in the end, he's like, wow, my assumptions about the world have been challenged. I've really grown and developed as a character. Connor is just completely right the whole time and wins in the end. And you know, yeah, everything that he wants and he doesn't deserve it. He fucking sucks. He just he's also like kind of fucking terrible at his job. Like, except for when he's really unbelievably good at his job, which is often. Yes, he is. He's certainly like not portrayed as like being bad at his job necessarily, but because the story doesn't quite acknowledge it. But I think Connor makes a bunch of fucking mistakes and the story doesn't take the time to be like, Hey, that was a dumb mistake. Like, Hey, random guy in prison. Here's my entire plan. Guess what? There's a there's a conspiracy effect. Yeah, I hope you can help me. But of course, everything turns out fine because, you know, I think that what we're getting at and this is maybe my broader point about Connor is that maybe maybe in an early vision of the game, his idealism was his fatal flaw and that was something that he grew to change and accept. But I think that when you have a team of people, you know, that we know now at Ubisoft are primarily straight white dude variety of people and becomes their responsibility to shepherd the story of a minority character who is not well represented in the media. It's like, OK, we're going to do something really unique and really unprecedented here and we're going to have the main character of this blockbuster AAA game be a Native American dude and we're going to lean into the culture. We're going to explore that in the game, which is all good. I'm not I'm not shaming Ubisoft for for trying to do that. But I think that what you what you get when a lot of, you know, mostly straight white dudes are nervous about representing a culture they're not familiar with is they don't want to give that character any flaws. They don't want to give Connor a flaw because they're worried that someone will accuse them of attributing that flaw to the entire Native American people. If Connor was, you know, insert any flaw here, greedy had hubris, anything like that, that there's a fear unfounded or otherwise that people will play that and go wait, wait, wait, you represent my culture, but but not as a perfect ultimate badass. That's offensive. And I I'm not sure if that would be people's responses, but it happens all the time. If you look at, I mean, Finn in Star Wars has pretty much no flaws. Captain Marvel has pretty much no flaws. And it's OK. It's not a problem in and of itself. We get to have straight white dude characters all the time that have no flaws. They're allowed to be flawless. Certainly characters who aren't straight white dudes are also allowed to be flawless, depending on the context. But it's always regardless of who the character is going to be kind of a boring approach. And it also means that in a lot of cases for a lot of characters in terms of representation that they never get the chance to be flawed and realistic human beings in these stories. And that alone is a problem in and of itself. So I think that Connor maybe was at one point envisioned as having this fatal flaw of idealism. And they said, well, you know, we got to be careful with how we do this because we don't want people to take us the wrong way. And regardless of the job that they did, emulating and recreating and capturing the history and the culture of the people, they still underserved it, in my opinion, by having Connor be so painfully boring as a result of him having no flaws. And this is not unique to this game. Very few Assassin's Creed protagonists can be said to have any distinct flaws. Altair and Edward are pretty much the only ones I can think of where overcoming a fatal flaw is a major part of their character arc. But it's it's particularly frustrating here because they're constantly grasping at it. They're constantly reaching for it. They almost have it, but it's not there. I think you're running the money about that. And I think that does aid Connor's, you know, lack of introspection. Achilles gives him a hard time. Sure. Connor often will go into like an assassination or a confessional scene or what have you. Yeah. And the person will say, hey, dude, you're fucking you're not right. You're wrong. And you got it all wrong. And Connor is like, yeah, but I don't agree. And Connor never takes what any of these men have said to him with him. Yeah. A big part of what Altair does is he's constantly contemplating about like what the fuck Rebeir de Saab just said to him. And and how that changes his perception of the Templar Assassin conflict. However, Connor just hears whatever these people are saying and says, well, yeah, but you're bad. And then that's it. Yeah. The gray area for the Templars is completely non-existent in the rest of the story because it's not like Connor is embracing certain like contradictions of his ideology because he doesn't feel like there are any. Yeah. And that's the thing too is Connor is so like squeaky clean that they don't even like really allow him to like grieve like the dude loses his mom and we hardly see the grieving process. Like he's an adult and he doesn't really talk about it. You know, he doesn't like most of the developmental scenes like his training are shown off screen. Yeah. So much of Connor's journey to become an Assassin is shown off screen, which is a big problem I had with this game is that a lot of the stuff that probably would have given Connor more dimension and would have allowed us to see that he's more than just this idealist person is shown off screen. Meanwhile, the things that are put on screen are things like three years of Hatham's life or whatever the fuck and here's Connor is a little boy, none of which are really serving his character progression. Right. I completely agree and it doesn't help that he still is this, you know, idealist naive person in the scenes that we do see. Yeah. But I at least if he was like struggling with it with Achilles in those trading scenes, I think it would have been a lot more interesting. And it's so rare, right? That like this game gives us so much tutorial and yet the the actual tutorial of being an assassin is off screen. Yeah. How does that happen? How does how is there? How is there three sequences of Hatham and then like seven sequences as little boy, and then you get to the scene where he's training with Achilles finally and it happens off screen. Yeah. How does that happen? How do you make that decision? They had no idea what the actual beginning of their story was. I think it was Stephen King, the famous quote that's like start as close to the beginning as possible. Backstory for the sake of backstory is not an exciting way to begin a narrative and that's exactly what happens here, but they also don't have a concentrated plan on what they're actually going to use as the tutorial to introduce the mechanics to the player. So you end up like, well, we'll take the, you know, we'll do these Hatham things. We'll do these little little boy Connor things and then, you know, hopefully there will be some opportunities in that to teach you how to use a gun and climb walls and oh, but there's even you're forgetting the animus tutorial section where you play as Desmond running around doing parkour. They just they could not condense any of it to save their lives. And I think that that's one of the good ways you can tell between good Assassin's Creed games and bad Assassin's Creed games. If they put you in the action and let you learn as you go in an exciting way, or if they do the AC three or unity thing of there are four different moments of the game that are tutorializing and you will still make it to the late game without knowing some very important information. But besides the tutorial stuff, which we'll get into in the, you know, when we talk more about gameplay, I feel like all the things we're talking about with Connor and with the idea of his naivete or having a character arc in an ideal world. You know, him and Achilles and Haytham would kind of be the thematic triangle of, you know, of each having different perspectives and the protagonist has to learn from the other two in order to reach his own conclusion. The dynamic between Connor and Haytham is completely wasted. That was where you could do a lot of the work of having Connor learn things, have his beliefs and assumptions be challenged and have to make a decision, which one could charitably say they almost kind of do, but all of the weight and drama of the potential for this relationship where you have a son who's growing up an assassin whose father is the leader of the Templars. What are you going to do about it? Because obviously the ideology you've sworn to will require you to murder someone you presumably care about. But, you know, pretty much all of that juice is removed when towards the beginning of the game, Connor's looking at a painting of his dad in Achilles' basement and he's like, ah, yeah, my dad. And it's like, okay, so we don't get the revelation that, okay, this is your father, you know, you don't get the Star Wars moment. That's, that's fine. I can take that. But then also, you know, Haytham meets him and Haytham's like, ah, my son, there's no real reason why they should know each other if Haytham really was never around. Listen, that's the thing, right? Is like their first interaction, I'm pretty sure is in that like old church. Yeah. And Haytham pounces on him and he's like, any last words? My son. This is my son. It's just Connor. But yeah, it's like interaction would have made a lot more sense if Haytham attacked him just thinking he was a random assassin. Yeah, it makes less sense that he knows he's his son because are you really about to stab your son in the neck? I don't think so. I mean, maybe they were trying to be unconventional. Maybe they were looking at their story and thought, oh, it'll be too played out or overdone if we have them not know each other or who each other are and we have them figure it out. But it's like, yeah, it's overdone because it's good and what you've chosen to do instead is bad. I mean, besides though, that that trope is just a vehicle. You know, it's not like it's the entire story. They could have made it interesting within that trope within that vehicle. It's not like just doing that is bad. It's the way that you do it. Yeah. I know that's a very obvious thing to say, but everything is a trope. It's just how you transform it. Yeah, it's just like how dramatic and tense are those revelation moments for them, you know, because Connor can't have a moment of like, do I really want to be taking on this side of this conflict? If it's going to put me on the war path with my dad, if he knows that's the bargain he's making from the very beginning, there's no impact to be had of challenging his assumptions of challenging his preconceived notions about the way of the world. If he takes on the cause of I'm going to dismantle this templar group and he believes that it's the right thing to do and then the fact that his father, you know, is a part of it stops him at all, like puts an obstacle in his way. That's interesting drama, but if he knows when he's down there and he's agreeing, he's like, yeah, I'm going to be an assassin now. Hell yeah. And I'm definitely going to kill my dad. Now there's no drama and they try to force it back in. How the fuck does Achilles know that's his dad? He's like, he's like, yes, your dad. How do you guys talk this? Does Connor have a picture in his wallet? Of him and his mom and like, how else? How like, like we know that Achilles knows who Haytham is. They all they all checked each other's Facebook profiles, dude. Right, right. It's just that is an obstacle that could have came up later where he's like, okay, I'm going to kill all these Templar bad guys. And then later on, he gets to Haytham finally and Haytham's and they find out that their son and father that he's like, well, fuck, now I don't think I could do it. And that would that would be right. It would put an obstacle in Connor's way and it would probably have him. I don't know, have trouble making a decision. Connor doesn't have a trouble making any decision because he's he's always right. You know, he's always justified. And keep in mind too, like they try to do exactly what I'm saying. They should have done when they have Connor and Haytham teaming up for a sequence, which is honestly story and gameplay wise, in my opinion, the best moment, the best sequence of the game. It's great to have them alongside each other, their disagreements with each other, their dynamic with each other is really interesting to me. And yet, you know, watching and, you know, playing as Connor from the beginning, first of all, that it's a terrible idea for him to do any of this, like he should just kill his dad pretty much immediately at any moment. If the if the goal is to help the assassins and his ideology is really so pure and true as the game wants us to think it is that him not pursuing it, not defending it, even in the context of putting him against his own father when he's known from the beginning that that's what he would have to do actually now feels out of character. It feels unrealistic. And I know you can always say, well, you know, if it was you and your dad, you wouldn't want to kill him either. But at the same time, if if he's going through this whole experience and it's not forcing him to confront his his assumptions about the assassin ideology and about liberty and about everything he's fighting for, then what's the point? They don't have to have any doubt. If even at the end, he's going to say, yeah, Haytham has to die and I haven't changed my mind about anything because in a better story, Haytham could have opened Conner's eyes to things like, well, as he does, George Washington's an asshole, right? He tells Conner about that, but none of that information changes what Conner does or who he is because he was already perfect and right. So now he just has more information like like my dad's a kind of cool for a Templar and George Washington's kind of an asshole and Charles Lee maybe wasn't the villain that I thought he was, but in the end, all right, fuck it. I'm going to kill all the bad guys. Anyway, I'm still going to help George Washington because I've undergone no actual growth or learning through this terrible experience. I'm thinking I think, okay, you're 100% correct. And I also think this might perhaps, you know, circle back to like how a lot of Conner's training and stuff and his and his like ethics and all of that and all the philosophy stuff like all of essentially what inspires him to take on the assassin ideology so like to sink his teeth into it is off screen. And so we don't really see like what did Achilles tell Conner that made Conner so passionate about it? Yeah. Because he's not even so much passionate about the assassin ideology as he is about just freedom in general. Oh, and keep in mind, the only reason he even knows what the hell an assassin is or decides to dedicate his life to it is because he has an acid trip where he thinks he's a bird and he sees the logo flying in front of him and and he's told to seek it out, which is one of the most forced and contrived possible ways a character could be introduced to the assassins. So that makes his whole tireless devotion to their ideology even more confounding because it's not like he's raised with it. It's not like it influenced or means something to his life in any direct meaningful way. It's purely some of the game has to do to have a plot. Okay, so we don't see what Conner is told that makes him sink his teeth into the assassin ideology so much aside from that it's, you know, like freedom is pretty cool, right? Yeah. And and we know that he was only drawn to them in the first place because he was told, you know, it's not like he sought them out himself or found them and he didn't make the decision that this is for me. He just was like, well, I guess this is my destiny. Okay. But anyway, I can't help but just find the haytham and Conner scenes kind of laughable because look, they're good scenes. Don't get me wrong. I agree with you. It's the best part of the game. But you have haytham who clearly is this seasoned very smart, you know, like scholarly charming Templar guy. Yeah. And he knows a thing or two and Conner is just directly in opposition. But I don't feel like Conner is directly in opposition because he knows better. It just feels like that's what he's programmed to say. Yeah, he's programmed to be like, no, freedom is good. And like in response to Haytham's very intricate and nuanced opinion, it could be wrong. Obviously, we hope we don't buy wholesale the fucking Templar ideology, but there is parts of Templar thought that, you know, the best games show that like the Templar perspective sometimes has a good point, right? Yeah. And Haytham has some good points. I certainly am, you know, I guess more of an assassin than a Templar, I suppose in terms of like where I would line up. I'm just saying that the best games that have that gray perspective like AC one and in this game, supposedly, they always have the Templars like making some kind of sense. So they're not just cartoon bad guys and Haytham isn't one of those either. And so when Haytham is like, yeah, but you're wrong. Connor's like, well, no, I'm not like, there's not a dichotomy. There's not even just like there's not a dialogue. It's just here's my position that's been well thought out because I'm a grown man who has fought this for my entire life. We have Connor who's this young who's this young man and he's like, yeah, but no, those those interactions are not interesting to me because it's just Connor who is who is just sat on ideology where it seems like Haytham actually has the experience to back it up. And so that coming back all around that's why not showing Connor's training really is a detriment to those scenes because if you had it would give me a reason to believe that Connor actually believes what he's saying. Instead, he's just yelling like I am and stupid. You know, it also reminds me of like in those scenes with Haytham and Connor that often Haytham's like if you tell me this information I won't kill you and then someone gives him information and then he kills them and Connor's like Dad Why? Stop killing people. As if this game doesn't incentivize you to kill hundreds and hundreds of people. It happens like three times, doesn't it? It happens like three times. Hey, now that I don't need you anymore I'm actually going to go back on my words and fucking shoot you in the face. And Connor's like I hate when you do that. It makes me so mad. Ah. There was no reason to kill them. You'll learn one day, boy. When you're as old and smart and wise as I am, you'll be killing so many people. Oh my fuck, dude. Yeah, but it's kind of goes back to what we're talking about with killing a bunch of guards and AC three is the is the game that incentivizes this the most because guards come out of the fucking woodwork and you literally massacre an entire town of guards and yet you have this big issue like it's a sweet. There's nothing ever shows me that Connor is apprehensive of killing people. He loves killing people, dude. Connor loves he loves it. If I have one, if I've had one more thing to the whole to the story conversation, I know we touched on this a lot last week of just how wooden the historical characters are. But really, it does feel like they're they're like wax museum statues and they're like they're constantly speaking like they're telling you their whole deal. You know, it's like you press a button and George Washington starts being like, I'm George Washington hero of the Revolution. You know what I mean? Yeah, it is I Sam Adams. Ah, and this is my friend Paul Revere. We are doing a revolution. Won't you please join us, Connor? Come, we're going to do a Boston tea party. You should help us dump tea into the river which is what we did at the Boston tea party. It's ridiculous, dude. Why should I care about any of these people or like Israel Putnam is there and you're like, oh, boy, howdy, G. I took American history. I wonder if we're going to hear him say, don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes. And then you literally get an objective in the mission. Just like listen to Israel Putnam speech. So you walk up to a crowd of people and you just listen to him talk because they had to put in the game. The Israel Putnam says, and don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes. And then he comes off the, you know, he stops, he starts talking to you and he's like, what's up, dude? I was just bullshitting that whole thing, which is funny. That's cool. But like, God, there's so much of that shit in this game. Aha, I'm Benjamin Franklin. Literally, I've lost my book and dropped all the flipping pages. They are literally like cut out of a history textbook. Like they are not, they are so one-dimensionally American, like American mythological characters. It is so fucked. You know, it's like, you and I were talking about this and I think, I think the problem is, and we talked about this with, with OSP blue in terms of how like the suspension of disbelief at a certain point kind of hits a ceiling. And you can't, if you break that ceiling, you're getting into like historical like fantasy realm. And of course, Sessions Creed could be considered that, but it's pretty grounded, I'd say for the most part, even with all of its wacky shit, it's still pretty grounded. But in this game, the problem to me is that you have no other choice but to look at these as just like historical, you know, like reenactments. Because there's no character attached to any of these people. George Washington isn't a character. Charles Lee isn't a character. No one is a character. And so when you see these historical events and you see these things that like you can recognize, you're not like, you're not present in the moment as like it's Connor and these characters. It's, it's Connor in this historical event. And it's done differently in previous games as we talked about. Like that's why it all feels very stilted is because there's nothing to latch onto in these scenes aside from this is Connor cameoing in the fucking signing of the Declaration of Independence. I can't point to any of those people up there signing that document and I, and I can't say anything other than, oh, well, that's that's George, you know, that's Sam Adams or whatever the fuck. Like I can't just say like, oh, that's the character that I know. There's, there's, there's not that bond between player and character and player and historical figure. Nor is there any relationship between oftentimes the things that Connor is trying to do, like what his goals are and how it's overlapping with the revolution because time after time in the game, he'll approach these big fuck off battles, right? And, you know, he'll insert himself. He'll, he'll do something such that it turns the tide of battle in the favor of the revolution. But he's never doing this because he actually wants to further revolution. He's always, he's walking up to a general and he's saying, I have to kill this Templar on my checklist today. Do you know where they might be? And they're like, yeah, son, he's over there in the ship behind this big fuck off battle we're doing and, or, or, or they're like, I'll tell you where your bad guy is if you turn the tide of this big fuck off battle we're doing. It's always like a quid pro quo thing, which means it's really hard to actually get invested in the process of the battle or the outcome of the battle. I never as a character, as a person playing the game necessarily care about who wins other than the fact that I'm an American. So obviously I would like for the revolution to win and so we don't all be speaking British today. To your point, it's the same sort of problem of the historical characters, but it also applies to pretty much every historical event in the game. Every time that you are part of something, even on a gameplay level that's supposed to turn the tide of the revolution, it's almost always in service of Connor's own personal goals in a very silly and contrived quid pro quo kind of way. And that's getting past the fact that in all of these situations, you have to trust that like somehow Connor is such a perfect badass that he can genuinely run through these lines of soldiers and cannon fire and, and still come out unscathed and you know, how many times does someone say to Connor, well, we're really fucked here unless this one really crazy impossible thing gets done that pretty much no one would be capable of doing. And then Connor just sort of winks at him and you know, runs off to go do the thing that they just said was impossible. Well, and that goes into like Connor is the fucking key that like unlocks all these doors. It's like Connor without Connor and that's where the my suspension disbelief like goes like fucking breaks the ceiling because when Connor is the like defining figure of the fucking American Revolution, it's like it's like as blue as mentioning it just goes against the philosophy of the assassins in the first place. It's like Connor should fucking sign a declaration of independence. God damn. I mean, he basically fucking won the war for them. Jesus fucking agreed. And the one other thing I want to get out of the way about story is that and I have to make this point. There are two conversations in the game. One that's in the main story, one that's in the modern day and that you kind of have to activate on on purpose involving the description and defense of slavery. And in the context of how we know Ubisoft is behind the scenes, they come off pretty gross early on, you know, you get Connor talking to Sam Adams and Connors like, doesn't it kind of suck that slavery exists? And Sam is like, yeah, it does. But like, you know, you got to start somewhere. And I think it's interesting that they were in a tricky situation, having to kind of rationalize this idea that a lot of the heroes and people we would be defending or assisting in this game were slave owners, right? And that's that's something that's worth addressing. But I don't think you can just have a conversation about it that shows you both sides of the argument and call it a day. Like I don't think you can have an actual slave owner say, yeah, but I'm I'm like nice to my slaves and honestly like we got to start. We got to we got to free the white people first, which is kind of the subtext of that conversation with Sam Adams and Connors like, I think it's all bad because I'm morally correct about everything and I already know what's right and wrong. And you know, obviously it'll make us feel more comfortable to be playing as a character who thinks slavery is bad. But it does come off as like a cynical, half-hearted sort of attempt to navigate their way out from under it. And then in the modern day Desmond actually is taking up the position of slavery, you know, is this, you know, it's like we kind of the original sin. We kind of had to do it. We didn't want to do it, but we kind of had to while Sean is like, are you fucking kidding me, mate? You didn't have to, you know what I mean? I don't know. Both of those things didn't bother me at all when I was playing this game at age 13, but now kind of uggied me out, especially in the context of things that are going on right now in America just seems like neither approach that the game takes, none of the approaches the game takes, feel like an adequate way of handling the reality of slavery in the story. There's certainly also just a lack of compelling perspective from Desmond or or also Connor. I feel like Desmond's like, yeah, but you know, it had to be that way. And there's not really a good reason why and Conner's like, yeah, but it's bad. And obviously it's bad. Nothing from the argument that it's not bad, but either way, it's all a major yikes and so much of the whole story is a major yikes. Speaking of interactions that can be better in this game. I was just thinking about what would I like to see different in this game? Like what do I think could have like fixed some of the issues and I'm no professional, but this is what I kind of came up with with why I thought could be interesting story dynamic and then it'll kind of get us into gameplay realm and kind of talk about how I feel like gameplay also could have been improved from maybe a decision like this. There's just certainly not a revolutionary idea. Everyone revolutionary. Everyone and their mother thinks hate them. Pretty cool guy, right? Yeah, everyone likes hate them. So early on playing, I was like, you know, and me and you talked talked about this. Why can't hate them just be the playable character, right? Like why can't hate them just be the main guy? You know, and so I thought we're going to be interesting if this game had us playing as hate them and Connor at the same time. And I thought, OK, so how could that be possible? And I'm not 100% certain if this would if this would justify it. I'm sure you could figure out some animus chicanery that would get us there. But I'm wondering, OK, let's say William Miles, right? What if he gets into the animus? Can't he go and relive Haytham memories? And if Desmond got into the animus, he could relive Connor memories, probably. And so let's say for whatever reason, it's crunch time. Well, they only have time to go through one life. So they they they hop into the respective animus is animi animodes and William is reliving Haytham and Desmond is reliving Connor. And I was thinking this could also make up for some of the issues I have with modern day and that like Williams and Desmond's relationship fucking sucks. And there's no cathartic end to it. And I was thinking, OK, so let's say if Haytham and Connor are both kind of working out their father son drama, and then William and Desmond are both reliving these memories. And I feel like it could be pertinent for them because their relationship isn't a similar position of resentment and regret. Perhaps as the story goes along, like William could be like could start realizing and be more introspective and realizing his his his faults with parenting and perhaps Desmond could soften up to the idea of forgiving his dad because Connor was was on that road to do so. And I feel like it could bleed into the modern day well for them for because there's a father son drama in the history and then you could have a father son drama in the modern day. And of course that would require us to have both going on at once. And so what I think could be interesting is to like switch between the two. And of course you can't play as like young Haytham while you're pulling his Connor because that wouldn't work. You wouldn't have had the kid yet. I know that there is also like a little animus lower thing that like once your ancestor has his kid, you can't play as him anymore. But I feel like they could try and make that they kind of overcome that hurdle because I do think that this could end up being a better situation. And so I feel like with that way you get best both worlds. You get the Haytham side and you get the Connor side. And you know, I feel like I feel like it could bleed into the modern day pretty well with with their father son relationship. I also think in terms of gameplay, you could have an interesting situation where Haytham is you more like civilized person. He mostly interacts with the urban environments and that's where most of his missions are going to take place is in like the cities and stuff. And Connor is like the master of the frontier type stuff. And that's what I was telling you that I really wanted to see. Yeah, like I wanted to see the frontier be his home. He would have home advantage. Everyone else that's in there like red coats or anything like I always just picture him like, you know, Batman-ing it up because they don't really stand a chance against someone like him who can fucking climb up in the trees and hide in the foliage and hunt. I feel like what you could do also is let's say Connor Connor should have abilities in the frontier that Haytham does not. And maybe Haytham should have city abilities that Connor doesn't. I don't think Haytham can tree run it at all. And like you should keep it that way. Just like let Haytham be handicapped in the frontier and maybe let Connor be slightly handicapped in the in the cities. Sure. And that gives you kind of systemic gameplay differences. And also I feel like you could show the the perspectives of the American Revolution from both of them. Yeah, you could also show the perspectives of their revelation, their father and son. Like perhaps as you're playing as them, like you know as the player that these guys are father and son, but you don't know as Connor or as Haytham. And so perhaps Connor could kill someone and Haytham has to go clean it up. Just like Jacob and Evee and slowly but surely Haytham is like, wait a second. Like maybe I know this fucker. You could have that revelation happen in the gameplay sequences as Connor and his Haytham and you can have them both on their own figure out like, oh shit, like that's my son. That's my dad. Yeah. In the situations of gameplay where they do team up, I feel like could be infinitely more interesting because I think they also provide if their skill sets are hypothetically like I'm good in the frontier and I'm good in the city. They could also bounce off of each other like that. Like Haytham could be like, look, I got this and and then he could handle the situation that way. And I feel like it would give a freshness to their gameplay because Connor would be your go-to for like any of the hunting stuff or any of the like frontier stuff basically and but Haytham could be your go-to for like stuff in this city like in this ideal scenario. There's more to do in the cities and the cities are designed away where there's where it's more enjoyable to be in. I do think that Connor should have had more frontier abilities like it'd be cool if he could like put on pelts and if he could put on face paint. Yeah. And if the bow and arrow was actually a lethal weapon and the reason why some of the frontier stuff feels awkward is because they don't they don't give you enough tools to make it work for you. Yeah. And like you could hide in bushes, but the bushes don't really work that well. They can go up in the trees, but the trees are short enough to where people can still spot you while on the trees. I don't think that should be a thing. I think Connor should be able to be in the trees and he is especially at night. I think would have been a breath of fresh air from Ezio era stuff that doesn't really involve things like hiding or anything like that that could really anyway. I'm rambling on, but I'd like to hear what you think about that as a potential. Man, I dig that idea because I always felt like AC3 was trying to aim in a thematic connection where Connor's relationship to his father was supposed to be mirrored by Desmond's relationship to his father, but they completely don't pull that off by any measure and your idea would have been would have been a cool way to especially if Desmond and William could come to certain realizations about each other through their experience of participating in history as this father son duo that you know that could have been really great. That's pretty much what I would hope would happen is that like William would be playing as Haytham and he'd be like wow like Haytham is kind of a shitty dad and I'm kind of a shitty dad you know and shit like that. It makes me go like wow Connor is kind of annoying and so am I. Yeah. So no, I love that idea. Honestly, it could have been could have been really, really cool that that would have solved probably a lot of story problems and gameplay problems. So I really like your pitch. I like your idea. Ubisoft should hire you to remake Assassin's Creed 3. I'm sure other people have thought like oh, let me just play as Haytham. Oh, for sure. It's true. The observation that Haytham is more interesting and fleshed out than Connor is. So bringing a game about that would have let you sort of plays as both of them and see how that affects things that would have been really cool, especially because I think that could have addressed a lot of the problems I have with the game design, which is well, I mean the game design in Assassin's Creed 3 pretty much completely sucks. But if I had to give a headline for what I think is sort of the root of all evils in this game, I feel like the game is ashamed of its own systems. I feel like they weren't able to get parkour or combat or stealth to a place that they were happy with. So instead of building missions that let you take advantage of those pillars and use them in creative ways and have rewarding experiences, instead, every single sequence has at least one or two missions that is trying to get you as far away from those pillars as possible. The game has essentially ADHD. Every other mission is like a one off novelty of some kind, you know, flying as a bird commanding groups of soldiers running through a battlefield, following Paul Revere's instructions, dumping tea. It feels like you're playing theme park rides. Nothing is ever building on knowledge you gain by playing and even in like the side missions, they're constantly like one off mechanics that only exist for one single moment that never exists again. And to maybe kind of diagnose this, I think maybe one of the problems is that maybe they started as unlikely as it sounds with with story and and they wanted to build missions that would accomplish certain story goals. So for instance, you know, the story goal is to, you know, be on Paul Revere's midnight ride or the story goal is to, you know, be at the Boston Tea Party or to command a group of soldiers. Well, let's use the time and money we have to come up with a bespoke little gameplay moment that highlights the experience of doing that thing. Well, that's fine, but it's really crazy to think comparing this game directly to say AC four. They have the same engine. They have the same pillars. They have the same central mechanics. The combat is close to identical. The stealth system is close to identical. The parkour is close to identical. And yet AC four, you're constantly in these pseudo stealth playgrounds where you have all the bushes that you need and you run around and you have tools. It's giving you tools, teaching you how to use them and then creating level design and mission design that takes advantage of those tools. AC three never shines that way. It never uses its tools in a way that lets it feel rewarding because it constantly has to have you doing some other bullshit. I was playing a homestead mission where you have to break up a fight between two homesteaders and you literally for one mission only, you get this tug of war UI bar where you have to use the left and right analog sticks to hit it in the right zone as you're trying to push them apart. And it's like it's all the game design equivalent of quick time events is what a lot of these things boil down to. It shows up nowhere else in the game like most of these gimmicks. Well, yeah, well, like you said, like a lot of the shit like just is for that one mission like the power of your shit or the battlefield stuff that which should have been a lot more of this game. You run you go you run through one of them once and like that like little cover system that they implement is not a thing anywhere else in the game. What if they said hey, we know that a priority of the story and game design of this game is going to be participating in Revolutionary War battles and so almost like with naval gameplay in AC four or with any other thing, you make it a part of the world and a part of the story. So, you know, maybe in the story mission, you have these Revolutionary War battles and there's a unique form of the gameplay that uses the three pillars, but also allows you to do things like in the trailer where you're just running it through slicing up guys. You're being stealthy if you need to be navigating through groups of enemies using cover. If they came up with a framework for what a mission of that nature would look like and then they could say, all right, there are six or seven times that happens in the main game. You can find them naturally in the world. Sometimes then it's like, wow, they really made this a part of the game. It really feels cohesive, but as it turns out, I mean, even the naval really feels like a one off slapped on gimmicky thing because everything in the game is a one off slapped on gimmicky thing. It's it's just frustrating design. There also was the idea that like these Revolutionary Battles were going to be like systemic and just you just come across them in the open world. And that would have allowed me to get good at them to utilize like a set of tools like you said and you're so spot on like there's so many different missions in this game like every sequence. There's a new fucking thing that doesn't ever appear ever again. Yeah. Commanding your troops to fire shooting cannons at troops and it also doesn't make sense to see me from a story perspective of all of a sudden I'm commanding this fucking army. Like what the fuck is happening? You know, etsy games would do this to like there's you know, I think Brotherhood has that mission that's kind of like the Paul Revere where you have to keep getting directions and go the right direction that does go inside. You're going the wrong way. And there's also making good time Brotherhood cannon firing missions. But like, I mean, I have problems with Brotherhood's level design as well as we addressed in that episode, but it really feels like they took the worst parts of that and then made it the entire game of AC three. The whole ass game for sure. For sure. And there are so many systems that never get attention like I realized on this playthrough trying to do as much as I could that the assassin recruit system is actually super deep that you have a lot of different kinds of missions that you can do to recruit members and you have like six or seven different abilities you can have recruits do like have them, you know, set traps or have them stand on guard in a certain area so that they attack anyone that enters a certain radius or having them become a sort of like court is on group that will let you sneak into enemy areas. There's tons of stuff you can do with the assassin recruits and yet it's not enough a part of the game that there will ever be a context designed specifically for it and most people playing will miss it entirely. I missed it entirely. I recruited the first guy and that's it. Yeah, I did all of them and they all unlock new abilities that your recruits can do some of which are really cool and really useful. It's also like the peg leg missions. Who would have ever thought that seeing missions on a naval map on the naval map of the game that show you all the naval missions that you see these missions you can only unlock by collecting 26 peg leg trinkets. So you go around the world. You collect all these trinkets and they unlock these missions. They're on the naval map. So you think they're probably going to be naval missions. They're not they are fully realized cut scene including like full on missions that have story context and that have unique environments. Like one takes you to Jamaica. It's this whole sequence of missions you can play that are actually in my experience pretty fun and there's like three barriers in front of you to ever understanding what those missions are to the point of wanting to play them. You first have to collect all the fucking trinkets and then you have to realize that just because these missions are on the naval map and everything else on the naval map is a naval mission that these missions are not naval missions. It's ridiculous. Everything is broken. Nothing makes sense. It just strikes me as okay well incoherent is just like obvious right but there is a certain degree where that's the best word for it because if the game actually focused instead on like oh okay so you're going to you're going to go through like three different revolutionary battles throughout the game. They're going to be really big and open and and whatnot but you do it like once and it'd be one thing even if it wasn't like a like a systemic open world thing but if there was like three or four or whatever however many like battles that you had to go through that had significance with a character that you were trying to kill or what have you. What if like perhaps they took up like an entire sequence and so like your involvement in this battle isn't just one and done but what if you just go in and for a few different missions you are doing these little things that are going to help tip the scales in your favor instead of just showing up and then wrecking shit and leaving because that's certainly what happens in the cinematic trailer but you don't even get the wreck shit and leave you just the cinematic advertises that you're going to be a part of the battle and yet the being a part of the battle is that I get to run behind rocks like that's it. Yeah. Yeah. But what do you think about like the the revolutionary battles being instead of just like one and done missions. They're kind of like they're they're these like big open areas. They could even be fucking black box missions honestly. I have different I was just going to say that you motherfucker. I'm just going to say that like they could be they could be black box instances where like hey go sabotage the enemy weapons go oh yeah kill this commander go do this and then and then when the actual battle happens and it's time for you to go kill the guy their weapons are malfunctioning and their commander isn't there and then it gives you an opening to go kill the guy and more successfully instead you get none of that they knew that they wanted the battles to be an important part of this game but they still were just not able to design a way that that would work with the gameplay and I think that they weren't even really on a basic level able to make the gameplay pillars themselves work properly because you know as we've noticed so many times the actual navigation in cities is fucking broken a guard on a roof can detect you on the street and a guard on the street can detect you on a roof so there's never really a strong advantage to being in one place or the other enemy aggression spreads faster and farther than the fucking corona virus because the moment anyone notices you or even just smells you in the vicinity every single guard in a 30 mile radius is running to get on your shit so God help you if you even have a single tiddly wink of notoriety because they will hunt you they will hunt you down in the streets it shouldn't be the case that anyone playing this game is going to have at least like five or six moments where guards have just started spawning at them relentlessly and they've created a stack 30 meters high of bodies in the street but it happens all the time yeah the detection in this game is broken beyond repair like never mind the fact that parkour on this in this on these poorly designed cities with these slanted roof tops and you know it's already not a very fun or satisfying experience to run around in these cities and then on top of that you have the fact that like yeah you're going to get seen you're constantly either going to be fighting guards or running away from them in any context in which you navigate short of running through the street in the most boring least interesting way possible it was always a design philosophy of a sea games that running on the roof top should be a gameplay advantage it should get you somewhere faster than then running through the street which used to be accomplished by the fact that like okay if you knock into people you'll stumble which doesn't really seem to be a thing anymore in the Kenway games the the frontier to park whoring through the trees in the frontier is almost always a pain in the ass in my experience because all you get are these very linear paths through the trees you don't have a whole lot of control over the actual direction you're going because you have to go whatever direction the trees will let you go which means that it's typically in my experience faster for me to just run in the direction of a marker in the frontier then it is for me to look for opportunities to get up into the trees follow the trees to whatever point at which they terminate and then be back on the ground and do it all over again it'll look cooler but it will actually in my experience take significantly longer so every part of the parkour system just doesn't mesh well with the design of either the frontier or the cities trees could have been a an opportunity to be like the roof tops of the frontier the issue there is instead of being like the roof tops of a frontier they could they they just become like you said this linear path you get up in the trees and you're right you can't really control what direction I'm going which would have been cool as if there was like if you could like actually see like okay so if I go up this tree and if I go to the left and get on that set of trees it'll and land me here and you can't really do that but that is totally what you're doing within all of these games on the rooftops you're always thinking of if I go here I'll end up here and that isn't really the philosophy for the frontier it's just point a point B that's it and that's why a lot of the chase missions that involve you getting up in the trees just so happens to correspond with a guy on the ground going in one direction only yeah I think that the parkour system is actually designed best for the frontier situations it just so happens that the frontier is also not designed incredibly well yeah climbing up the side of cliffs and stuff like at least like he's grabbing and hand holds and I actually found it to be more fun than I did the first time around on this replay and I do like how you know you can't like jump from trees and stuff like it is cool and I've come around to that because I used to think it was really boring and stupid for the most part I don't think it's stupid anymore well that's good that's an improvement so definitely boring but the thing yeah that's the thing is the frontiers also just so fucking like vast and open and they I'm wondering if that's also a detriment because yeah it's a really big area and that means there's a lot of open area you know you can't very well like fucking run from one end to the other and like not touch the ground or whatever you know they mean like right there are limitations there I eventually I just like you said I gave up on getting on the rooftops fuck it I just ran from point of the point B that's all I did get on a fucking horse and call it a day yeah honestly like I gave up because there are guards everywhere there are too many guards in fact and like we've talked about the rooftops are too short you are on a rooftop that's really short but guards in the ground can still see you what's the point of me getting on the rooftops then yeah it's like it's never a problem really before or since this game I don't know what it was that they they fucked it up so bad in this game I think the best like thing I can think of is that they just got the math wrong about detection radiuses about enemy aggression and things of that nature and they just got to a point in development where fixing it would have thrown so many designs and so many things out of whack as far as like the way the missions were playing out that they just couldn't fix it maybe that's part of why so many of the actual missions in the game just sidestep those systems entirely and have you do these random one-off things is that they are genuinely ashamed of their actual systems to the point that they are constantly ignoring them and doing other things and then you you want to just add another ingredient to the shit sandwich so you add these fucking full sync objectives oh my good Lord Jesus Christ what the fuck was anybody thinking responsible for making this fucking piece of shit game with these ridiculous full sync objectives in a perfect world well I would say in a perfect world there'd be no full sync objectives but in in games that are good and in good Assassin's Creed games they will be small things extra things you can do to make a mission more interesting if I'm playing a c4 and I have a sync objective it'll be like hey use five berserk darts use two smoke bombs it's encouraging me to use the tools that they give me but in the worst examples in a c3 the full sync objectives essentially require you to pull off incredibly specific almost choreographed sequences of action in order to succeed where any diversion from whatever that sequence of events is will result in failure and there's basically no way of figuring them out short of blind trial and error or saying fuck it and googling the solution some examples that stick out to me doing the whole thing with the two ships where it's like air assassinated green deer and don't get detected on the ships well there's one very specific way to not get detected on the ships if you look at like IGN's walkthrough you can see that pretty much the only way to meet the requirements for that mission is to do exactly what the walkthrough says where every single guard and every single ship has a specific very finicky maneuver you have to pull off to kill in such a way that you won't get detected and even in the walkthrough they'll admit for pretty much no reason if you do this the intuitive way you'll get detected even though you don't think you should how did anyone play test this and decide it was okay to put on fucking store shelves and then do it again seven years later in the remaster how does that happen well it's funny because I was playing the original versions all time and it's it's somehow apparently like there are a little bit of better things in the remaster but somehow it's all the shitty stuff it's still there it's still there they fixed a lot they made a lot of nice touches and I think the fact that they had to fix anything speaks to how broken AC3 originally was because they could remaster quote-unquote the Ezio collection and change not a single damn thing but they knew that there were certain things that if they put the remaster out and they still had those problems that they'd be crucified and for good reason but AC3 is such a fundamentally broken and disjointed game that the only way to actually fix it to the point where it would be a genuinely good and well crafted experience would be a full blown remake where every single thing that they ever did in the game was a completely different choice that's the only way to fix it is by remaking the whole thing so I appreciate the effort the remaster was definitely easier for me to get through than the original one for a number of reasons but seriously the full sync objectives how about just removing the one that requires you to get all the objectives in the same mission because what ends up happening is if you play a mission where you know let's say you have three sync objectives the first one's really fucking hard and you you managed to do it anyway but the second one is so impossible that you just want to throw your controller away and you don't want to play it at all in any other Assassin's Creed game you could at least be glad you got the first one done because it'd be done you can play the mission again not worry about the first objective focus solely on the second one and check them off the list but AC3 for full sync requires you to do them all in the same single run-through of the mission so the moment you hit objective 2 and you find it to be a punishing pain in the ass if you decide not to complete it you'll have to do the first one that was really hard all over again what does this accomplish how does this enhance the experience of the game it doesn't it's it's also pretty ridiculous though considering that when you finish a mission it like it was like a late like a like a score yeah it's like oh you missed that one but replay the mission and go out and get it later and yet you can't do that because you have to completely do every single one again like like you said so what's the point of of giving me a score and showing oh well you missed one when what you what what you're really saying is I missed all of them because I have to go do them all again anyway the simple concession of this remaster could have been removed that requirement just that one and I'd have been so fine with that just removed that one requirement but no I do have I I do have a stealth in a situation this game that I would like to share with you yeah the worst mission in the entire fucking game I can't even remember the name of it but it's where you are going on to a boat trying to find out where Charles Lee is yeah the one that you had trouble with as well they changed it actually to I found out that your full sync objectives and my full sync objectives are totally different mine was still fucked up but for a different reason interesting my big problem with with it is because the game's detection is broken and it has like a C2 levels of detection just before they die like if I'm running up to an enemy and I want to kick them off the side of the ship if they see me do it that counts as a detection yeah like why are you negatively impacting me for getting rid of the person that is seeing me do the action yeah and you also have to consider to is you have the rope dart and I just you just recently get it in a story and it's like okay let me try and use this my advantage I'm going to stand below the guard and yank him off the side of the ship oh no I get detected because guess what the guy knows that as he's dying he just got stabbed by me and that counts as a detection yeah that's ridiculous and oh lord have mercy on my soul and I also like when you did that mission did it say you had 15 regular kills or three I I think 15 in the remaster you get three regular kills oh no I presume that the mission is redesigned such that maybe only two are necessary and the rest you can kind of bypass because I didn't really have a problem with that so to speak but it really highlighted a fucking problem with just the design of the objectives you know when it would give you a you know zero out of three counter on any individual thing it at first is really unclear what the hell that means so you know you're playing the bird mission and it says avoid obstacles zero out of two how do I avoid obstacles twice well what it actually means is you get one hit of an obstacle and then you fail the mission what that broadcast to me is that they want me to do some kind of maneuver to avoid obstacles twice like do some cool bird that's what I thought and given that when you have a near miss with an obstacle it kind of slows down time in a satisfying feedback way I thought that was avoiding so I didn't know why I was in a credit for that and then I'd hit the obstacle and it say one out of two and I'd say what I didn't avoid that I hit it do they want me to do that twice and then you do it twice and you fail the fucking objective but in this mission right hundred percent awesome that is a is exactly what happened word like verbatim like if anyone played tested this they would have figured that out in that boat mission right limit regular kills zero out of three okay another optional objective is I have to kill the captain easy enough I can probably do that so I know I'm going to have to save a kill for the captain so I only kill two people on the boat and then I get to the point where I have to kill the captain and it says three out of three objective failed so think about that they're telling me three the number they're putting in front of me is three but if you hit that number if you reach three kills you fail the objective shouldn't it fail on my fourth kill wouldn't that just make sense but no it's actually required by law that nothing in this fucking game makes any sense so I had to replay the entire mission which you know is a pain in the ass up to that point terrible to kill that captain and know that even though on the screen it says kill zero out of three I can only kill one guard on the way because if I then kill the captain I'll fail then on that mission after doing that perfectly exactly right or actually I was I was struggling to kill the captain because I didn't know that according to Google the answer is you stand behind a crate and you whistle and he comes to you that's the specific choreographed way you kill him and if you do anything different you fail I thought I'm going to be clever I'm going to dive off the boat and sneak around to the ledge that he's standing near and I'm going to climb up and kill him I'm using the tools and the understanding of the game that I've been given to do this and I don't think that if I jump into the water it's going to count as escaping the boat concluding the mission because there's a green marker 200 meters in the distance that I believe I'm going to have to swim to and I'm still in the water well within the the red square of danger okay on the minimap so I jump into the water and the mission fucking ends instantly and I don't kill the captain and I now have to play the whole thing a third fucking time I hope that anyone listening to this right now I hope your blood is boiling on my behalf I hope that you are frustrated for me and I hope that if you ever played this game and you did 100% the whole thing that that at some point in your life you're given the Medal of Honor you deserve for having done so because this game is a nightmare and everything about it sucks it would be so much more enjoyable if the bow actually killed people on impact and yet you shoot one guy with an arrow and let's say if you're quick enough to get the other arrow off it's too late he already detected you so fuck you and pistols instead of just alerting people they full on detect you when you shoot a pistol like I get it but if that's my only lethal ranged option because you won't let me rope dart someone if my only range lethal option is the pistol and I shoot it and no one sees me they still detect me what the fuck am I supposed to do no you're forcing me to deal with your shitty guard routes your shitty guard detection math radius whatever the fucking when I call it and it just makes it so fucking infuriating you're not letting me use the tools that you give me it's like it's like if an AC4 when you shoot someone with a berserk dart they're like wait a second I think I just got shot by a berserk dart and they detect you it's bullshit yeah and it's terrible it's like every time you think that you are being creative about how to solve a problem you're going to be punished for not doing it exactly the way the game wants you to do in that two boats mission right I have to air assassinate a grenadier or whatever I have to kill these two guys that they don't see me air assassinate the grenadier because multiple failures taught me that even if the grenadier is on the far end of the fucking boat and I air assassinate him people on the other far into the fucking boat are gonna get a smell it so I go over where they are and I try to rope dart one of them and of course he detects me his friend detects me everyone on the boat text me I am coming into this experience thinking that I'm doing something smart and the game is actually like hold on fuck you you're not smart just Google it you big dumb piece of shit and read what IGN tells you also can't low profile double assassinate people it's fucking which is I'm glad they added that in the remaster and the original even miserable without it just it's it's it's so bizarre to me that like I'm gonna rope dart a guard right and the guy next to me is going to immediately without reaction be like all right fight me like is there no kind of reaction time do I not have even a second to then kill the other guy before he apparently shouts at the top of his lungs to everyone else there's no fun in using the tools if most scenarios of using the tools gets me in trouble yeah like I should be able to rope dart a guard and then stab the other one on my way down instead of having to like rope dart someone and then immediately get into a combat scenario I know and I know like not every single but like also the way these guards walk with each other it's like you can't do it you can't rope dart someone who's a part of a group that everyone else seeing no you're completely right there's there's really no it seems like the game has no interest in actually being fun or satisfying or just logical even beyond the numerous glitches and bugs that I experienced even on the remaster this game is just in my opinion honestly a complete and total turd shit sandwich poopy party it's just disgusting I'm sorry I know people are listening to this that love AC three and that go hard for AC three I don't want to take anything from you I don't want to say that like you're stupid for liking it or that it's you know impossible to feel positively about AC three there's a lot to admire about it more in my opinion though for what it tried to be but failed to be than what it actually is but there's certainly ambition there's certainly ingenuity there's a lot to respect about AC three I think that also a lot of people played it when they were younger and they didn't necessarily care as much about you know the structure of the story or the design of the gameplay and that's again that's normal that's fine I just I've had such consistently bad experiences with this game from every single time I've played it that it's like impossible for me to to love it and to not see it as anything but the worst game in the franchise and I every time I replay it I go into it thinking I'm going to give it a chance it's going to be good everyone loves it this is going to be a better time and the game always just spits in my face for trying to treat it charitably like no matter what that's pretty much what happened with me I mean I was expecting to at least appreciate some elements to it and I just I went away with it trying to get through it as quickly as possible I still think one of the biggest like I don't mean to like go back to a previous discussion or anything but I do think one of the one of the bigger mistakes was not allowing you to immerse yourself into like more like rural stealth because the previous games all focused on like social and urban stealth and while I obviously really enjoy those things there was an opportunity here to really like inject some like fresh ideas with giving you like a lot of rural environmental stuff to play with and also the weather changing stuff could have really implied like while it's raining your footsteps are aren't as heard or that while it's snowing the guards can follow your footsteps or you can also follow their footsteps and perhaps you could lead them into a trap like you have them follow your footsteps into a trip mine there's plenty of shit that could have happened and they just didn't do it and I don't want to I don't want to attribute to like laziness because I'm sure there are plenty of people who wanted to do such things but as we know that as we can suspect the development on this game was a fucking shit show. Yeah. I think a lot of these things are corrected in AC4 but there's still worse and elements of AC3 that could have been special. I thought it was going to be more fun than it was and I fucking hate it and it's so bad and it's so disappointing. It's the biggest hindrance on my argument that these games should come out every few every few years because this game had a few years of development and fucking sucks just like unity just like unity. So like who's going to who's going to take up that side of the debate and when games that do get years of development still suck. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, I mean that's that's the long and short of it. Assassin's Creed 3 I feel like on so many objective levels is just purely broken and just does not work. I think it's good in this time of of great unrest in the Assassin's Creed fan community and and so many classic fans like ourselves having such problems with the way that the games have gone recently with Odyssey and now Valhalla. It's sometimes really useful to just remind yourself Assassin's Creed has always kind of sucked and and maybe more importantly that that you can stay true to the fundamentals of what the games should be in our opinion and still make a game that fucking sucks. 100% no matter how bad Odyssey was how bad Valhalla is or any future Assassin's Creed game it would blow my entire fucking mind if they ever made another game as truly terrible and completely broken as Assassin's Creed 3. So that's been it you guys. Thank you for listening and for supporting. We hope that for those of you who love Assassin's Creed 3 this was maybe eye-opening to things that that its detractors believe. We hope that if you hate Assassin's Creed 3 that it was cathartic to hear us truly just deconstruct every single thing about it and why it sucks over the course of however long this episode turns out to be. If you like this show you can subscribe to us like the video comment on the video. If you're on Spotify Apple Podcast or anywhere other than YouTube you can't do those things but we still appreciate you listening anyway. If you like this show recommend it to your friends who like Assassin's Creed tweet us at hookblade share your thoughts retweet our our things and clips and whatever show us some love do what you want to do. We won't hold a gun to your head but if we did and we shot the gun at your head at least you can rest easy that everyone in a 30 mile radius would detect and attack us. That's Assassin's Creed. I've been the hook. I've been the blade and this has been a terrible episode. This has been a heart wrenching tragic experience. We will we will see you next week. Good to go.