We Deserve Better Than Assassin's Creed Unity

[Music] Assassin's Creed Unity once seen as a generational failure for Ubisoft has seen a total 180 when it comes to online discourse while its Rocky reputation still carries weight among General audiences the last half decade has seen a throng of voices within the fanbase appraising Unity as a misunderstood gem that deserves a second chance as you can tell by the title of this video I'm not one of those voices but I still do understand why so many people have come to feel that way the visuals are instantly striking the free running animations are instantly eye-catching and the Black Box missions are instantly compelling and almost more importantly than any of that the game isn't Assassin's Creed Odyssey nothing elevates fan opinion on something old more than something new that they don't like and so when Ubisoft removed social stealth streamline free running added RPG light mechanics and removed long-standing iconography like the hidden blade there was something of an exodus back to Unity by those who felt it better represented the series as they saw it this video does not exist to compare the old games to the new ones plenty of people have done that better than I can but I do believe that the same rhetoric that drowned out unity's genuinely Innovative mechanics with endless articles about faceless NPCs also drowned out the many legitimate flaws that plagued Unity to this day patches and all and this goes beyond performance issues and shoddy Co-op every interesting idea or mechanic in this game comes with a caveat from the free running to the combat to the story to the beautiful city of Paris itself I understand why people ask for Ubisoft to return to the mechanics we see in unity I too still do want that perfect Assassin's Creed game where the parkour is flashy and responsive the assassinations are open and creative and the world itself is denser than it is large but I do not believe Unity is that game I understand how it tried to be but what I see when I look at it is a rushed broken and lazy game where the corporate greed that forced it to launch in such an infamously bad state is still more than present in every facet of the experience in ways that could never be patched as much as fans want an Assassin's Creed game that lives up to the franchise's original Vision I believe we deserve much better than to settle for Assassin's Creed Unity [Music] by far the aspect of unity the people have put on the highest pedestal now that the new games exist is the free running system looking at some of the things that YouTubers are able to pull off online it's easy to see why I mean just look at it there are so many unique animations and it feels like the main character Arno has so much more flexibility in his movement than any other character in this series perhaps the greatest Innovation behind this is the parkour up and down system in the past you were essentially either in a free running state or you weren't but with parkour up and down moving forward climbing and descending now each had dedicated controls and a lot of new and unique animations with parkour up you can run diagonally up a wall spin from a ledge to a rooftop or hop from wall to wall to quickly Ascend a tight Alleyway while with parkour down you can dive to a rope and swing down to street level slide down a church rooftop or twirl down a series of posts to smoothly reach the ground when I look at this system there is one major piece of credit that I have to give it no video game in the entire industry in my opinion has attempted to give us a parkour system this flashy and expansive when it comes to different actions the protagonist can pull off some of these videos make me feel like I'm watching one of the most Innovative mechanics in gaming history but then I actually try to play it myself now don't get me wrong you can look at these videos online and imitate all of the cool stuff that you see people doing with some practice and with time you can start creating your own routes through Paris but one of the reasons so many people bounced off this game when it came out was because actually trying to utilize the parkour system in this game can feel inconsistent obtuse and frustrating why is this what exactly is wrong with Assassin's Creed unity's reversal that makes it so inaccessible to a new player and is it something that can be fixed through practice well for starters any good traversal system requires an ability to read environmental cues to understand what actions you can perform on what parts of the world at its simplest level you have games like Uncharted that will highlight stuff you can climb in bright yellow but in Assassin's Creed you need to be able to climb almost anything so what indicators can you provide to help the player understand how to navigate these worlds the original Assassin's Creed did this by taking cues from the old Tomb Raider games those games revolutionized traversal back in their day by creating platforming challenges that were built on clear grids an experienced player always knew what jumps they could or couldn't make once they had a feel for the spacing of the grid and so once those clear and identifiable rules were put in place players had the freedom to experiment and bend those rules as far as they would go to maximize the potential of the system if you look back at Assassin's Creed it followed a very similar principle there are more contextual moves and Altair will have different animations depending on the distance of the object he is snapping to but at the end of the day the cities of the original Assassin's Creed are very much a series of Cubes when Altair climbs up a wall you know exactly where he will place his hands and if you make a jump you know a fault a year will land on his feet or grab the ledge the predictability of the character's movements also made it easier for the devs to focus on animation blending and transitions which is why it can be so hard to tell when one animation ends and the next begins now as the series went on the grid got less defined and the animations became faster and more realistic by the time we hit the Kenway Saga while the quality of the animations themselves was unprecedented we were starting to see the gaps between animations get clearer as the worlds became too complex to always have a perfect blend of animations to match any scenario that long history lesson brings us back to Arno and the City of Paris Paris is gorgeous itself a Triumph of animation and a piece of art that makes Unity worthy of existence for its inclusion alone I'm amazed every time I boot up this game and look at what still feels like the most meticulously detailed game world I have ever seen from an artistic perspective and yet the Synergy between the Artistry and mechanical side of things can feel lacking at times every wall of Paris has so many handholds and so many obstacles that it feels like a free runner's paradise and yet the grid of the old games feels more vague than ever in a city like Venice and ac2 there are clear paths with posts and poles spaced perfectly apart to accommodate Ezio's animations climbable walls are always just the right height and if there is a platform in front of Ezio he has an animation to get there smoothly these platforms are on the grid they are linear and built to look good but you still have tools like manual jump and catch ledge to escape the grid and exercise more player freedom the world of Paris is so much more complex than Venice but sometimes the seemingly endless handholds and obstacles feel so arbitrarily placed Arno will constantly stretch or compress his animations to reach the next platform because even linear paths do not feel like they were built with his existing animations in mind in ac2 you had platforming on the grid that looked clean and platforming outside the grid that allowed for more player control but in unity the grid is so vague that it might as well not exist at all and objects aren't placed on it with looking smooth in mind that is why the simple Act of jumping from post to post can look so janky in unity but if the grid is less defined does that mean that control and player Freedom are emphasized instead well not really and that's because of a concept that many YouTubers who cover AC Unity have already discussed at length the concept of automation a term so coined by Leo K in this context now J series and Leo Kay can talk about this idea much better than I can so I'd encourage you to look up their channels since there are very much Authorities on the free running in unity compared to me but basically automation is when a character will decide what moves to utilize in any given situation based on context not player input I've talked about this a bit with ac1 doing a jump over a small Gap or a large gap will lead to different animations based on that distance but Unity massively increases the level of automation depending on your exact position and camera movement the game May tie a variety of different actions to the same inputs here is me trying to do the same jump three times before Arno actually does what I expect him to my positioning is only very slightly different each time and yet Arno performs three completely different actions automation Works in cases where the game can reliably guess what action you were trying to perform but Paris is so complex and Arno can go in so many different directions at any given time that the game will consistently guess wrong why does Arno climb some waste high or even taller objects when I'm not pressing parkour up isn't the whole point of Parkour up to avoid that is it really intuitive that the most efficient way to climb certain objects that are slightly taller than Arno is to hold parkour down since his vault hide cap is so bizarrely high why can I only hop to the side when there is something the game identifies I can eject to when side ejects were so reliable in the older games and then we get the icing on the cake that will really turn a lot of people off from this system and many others in this game the input lag and the input queuing that there are situations where Arno can take almost a second to perform certain actions is a huge reason why Unity doesn't pass the field test for so many I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally double tapped the button for a side hop and thought I was safe because Arno only jumped once only for him to register that second jump later when I was already somewhere else entirely and I don't have any proof of this other than my own field test but I do feel like it's worse on Console where the frame rate still stays pretty low even on my PS5 see it really clearly in the lock picking minigame which feels pretty normal on PC but requires me to press the button well before the notch is anywhere near the lockpick Zone on PS5 again I'm not trying to put words in the mouth of someone like jasers and if you want his opinion you can get it from his channel not me parroting what he says but in his parkour tier list that should have more views than it does due to his expertise he talks about how the input lag is so much worse in unity than any other game in the series and how frustrating that can make it to play you really really feel that in all aspects of the game whether that be in the parkour or the combat or honestly even just in the menus sometimes and so I do bring us back to a question I asked a few minutes ago is the Jank at the core of unity's free running something you can circumvent with practice well to an extent yes you can definitely learn how to read the environment and become very proficient at maximizing fun and minimizing frustration but at the same time many of the people whose opinions I respect most when it comes to unity's free running are very open about how much high-level play is spent fighting the game's systems not to expand Beyond its mechanics but instead to even make them work as intended the footage I am showing here is from a YouTuber who dedicates his entire channel to AC parkour and it showcases how frustrating this free running system can be even among skilled players and so yes you can get better at this game and learn how to make it look less choppy but even at the highest level this game is very much about taming and managing unwieldy systems in the older games you would Master the grid so that you could learn how to break it and do cool stuff outside of the preset Pathways laid out for you in unity a significant amount of the time spent learning these systems involves figuring out how to read the environment so that you don't constantly get stuck on things or thrown in directions you don't want to go the whole situation reminds me of Devil May Cry the series is renowned for its complexity for a single player title and the skill gap between someone who just mashes triangle and someone who posts style flexes on YouTube is immense but at the same time that first player is still getting a perfectly fine if simpler view of the game with unity on the other hand the difference between a new player and an experienced player is the difference between an ugly broken mess and a legitimately beautiful chain of animations watching someone like Leo Kay's videos on how to become better at Unity can help players get way more enjoyment out of the game's systems but at the same time creators like himself have been very honest about the fact that the intended mechanics of the game have to be twisted and bent just to function at a basic level now how that harms your experience is going to be based off preference as I said before there remains to this day nothing like Unity when it comes to the free running and when you have a system that allows you to do things no other game in the world can it makes sense for some people to get really into it and appreciate it flaws and all but that is not something that we owe unity and for me I found these problems to be too abrasive and constant to forgive the parkour didn't need another few months in the oven it needed a total overhaul of its systems the world design and animations needed to be built more collaboratively to better mesh with one another scaling down automation would have required totally changing the control scheme to give the player more agency and after all that they still would have needed to smooth out the input lag in the poor animation blending and when you make all of those changes you're really not left with an improved version of unity system you're left with a different system entirely I understand why people say they want something more like Unity when they look at how the systems were simplified in Origins the animations are fantastic and parkour down should have legitimately been in every game since this one because it's so good when it works but I think even a quick look under the hood shows how far Unity was from ever being that amazing Parkour experience we were looking for and regardless of how much you may prefer it to the new systems we still deserve much better than what we got foreign combat is very much in the same boat as the free running and that my initial reaction to this combat system on paper is wow what an improvement as much as people Pine for a return to the older combat systems these days when the Ezio Trilogy was new and exciting the combat was definitely something that got lukewarm reviews this was in large part due to the shallowness of its systems the paired animations meant that combat was beautiful and fluid with blades clashing and oftentimes not making contact with flesh until the killing blow the flip side was that things like positioning weapon type and range were almost meaningless due to the fact that animations were designed to hit regardless of where you were and what you were holding another YouTuber I really like white light has talked about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and game mechanics in a game like Brotherhood exploring anything past the basic counter and chain kill Loop relied entirely on the intrinsic desire to look cool and see new animations because at the end of the day choosing to fight with a dagger versus a spear resulted in minimal changes to how you actually played it was very pretty but people were looking for more depth they wanted to be able to have a one-on-one duel that wasn't a joke because you could just counter every single attack they wanted death to actually be possible in theory Unity system feels like the perfect response we get a system that focuses on timed parries and Dodges instead of counter kills and that ramps up enemy aggression and forces players to think quickly while retaining plenty of canned animations this should have been exactly what players were looking for but my gosh it can feel awful to play first off like the parkour the combat is incredibly choppy is annoying enough in traversal but in combat failure to read enemy movements can mean death so getting hit by attacks that were nowhere near you or that skipped their Telegraph animation can be frustrating there is a clear pause between all attack animations and characters locked in combat will slide around the battlefield and teleport where they need to be in ways that look incredibly awkward it looks nowhere near as fluid as the combat from the yzio trilogy and it retains so much of the sloppiness that we just talked about with the free running but we aren't just talking about looks in Assassin's Creed anymore Unity wants to bring depth to the discussion does it succeed well kind of it definitely does add difficulty but I would argue it does so in a way that's pretty frustrating and unenjoyable your health in the early game is very low and even when you're fully decked out you can die in just a few hits if you go to the wrong neighborhood so far so good right that's what we wanted well I would feel that way if getting hit in this game registered is something that happened when you as a player failed to react in time to an attack here's a phrase kids will use a lot when a game is too hard for them it's not even hard it's just frustrating most of the time this is a lie to make ourselves feel better and that is somewhat the case in unity the enemies are legitimately more aggressive and it can totally be hard to keep track of all the different attacks coming your way but with that in mind there are some aspects of unity's combat that feel relatively simple to navigate without any trouble and I want to go over them let's start with parrying pairing is basically the core of unity's combat and when you get surrounded you're likely to spend as much time on defense as on offense it's not an instant kill like the counter was in ac2 but at the same time it balances out by being easier to pull off the game isn't trying to make it a high skill action like in a game like sekiro you're supposed to be comfortable pairing from the get-go and the game does a lot to help you out firstly the enemy health bar flashes yellow in a way that's pretty difficult to miss it stays yellow for a very long time and you have a really big window to press the button secondly combat can feel very slow which actually helps you here as you see these attacks coming a mile away in fact many of the enemies will let out these goofy full-body Roars to really Telegraph that an attack is coming thirdly the Perry is top tier in how often it can cancel other animations Arno can be in the middle of a finisher kill and still teleport to be in the right position to perform the Parry it can look bad but it will keep you alive in addition to Paris you get a Dodge button and it can be overpowered in certain situations against a single enemy you can be borderline Invincible just by spamming the Dodge enemies also still fall into the same pattern of having specific moves that don't work on them and some that make short work of them these heavy enemies have unblockable attacks but if you get them isolated you'll learn that they really have no way of Defending against yours either when you learn that you can't perfect Parry the first attack from one of these Elites you might be taken aback but they have a three hit combo that ends in a pair you can actually take advantage of Spearman May block everything you throw at them but they can be parried and knocked to the grounds as easily as anyone else every enemy has a solution so with all the odds stacked in your favor why isn't the low Health pool enough to make this feel fair and balanced well that is just it mix in these combat techniques with hours of practice and maybe some help from Lee okay to learn how to quick shot downed enemies to take down any adversary regardless of level and you have a system that you can totally Master pretty quickly but Mastery can only do so much in the face of Jank obviously the Parry is great and gets plenty of telegraph time especially with that big yellow bar above their head but what if that bar Never Comes it's incredibly common for the enemies to attack you without The Telltale marker above their head flashing at all making it easy to lose track of incoming attacks when surrounded by enemies and what if your character just decides not to Parry I can't tell you how many times a combat encounter has started with an enemy ad growing on me which should cause Arno to immediately enter a combat state but instead he doesn't and mash Perry as I may he just gets slapped to start the fight I'm glad the Perry cancels other animations usually sometimes Arno will cancel out of an attack to Parry an enemy behind him but sometimes he will just keep slicing away and you will take the hit the role can be really useful the enemies are still programmed to track your movements no matter where you go they will slide a meter in any given direction to follow you and it can look really awkward and weird and remember that input queuing I talked about Mash roll at the wrong time and Arno may very well roll away a full second after you actually press the button right into an enemy attack speaking of paired animations you get plenty of weapon variety but because of the way the system works there isn't a ton of difference between them a two-handed gun will feel relatively similar to a sword which will feel relatively similar to a spear your attacks will never whiff because that's not how the system works and it's not like range will ever matter and the animation canceling means that speed is also meaningless too because it's not like you're going to get stuck in a big attack at the end of the day the damage stat of the weapon matters much more than any move set because there really isn't any depth in terms of weapon choice every single one of these problems however pales in comparison to this combat's biggest sin the guns let's say you're lucky every Perry cancels as intended every Dodge is timed to Perfection none of the enemy attacks glitch out what happens then I got that thing on me I got that stick I got that tool I'm packing the enemies start pulling out guns that melt your health bar so what do you do he stopped fighting that's all you really can do there are no human Shields and the Dodge is very inconsistent against guns one or two gunmen and you might be able to manage but more than that and you really have no combat tools to counter this so you can throw a smoke bomb and leave or you can throw a smoke bomb and try to kill everyone while they're blind but either way the actual fighting is over and that is where the game's true difficulty comes in because in all honesty this combat system is very solvable it makes some improvements over the older games as far as depth goes but the huge Parry window overpowered attack options and limited enemy move sets mean that you can get this combat system down to a t but no matter how good you get you can't fight large groups of enemies because they will start to shoot you and there will be no counter for that sometimes they'll shoot you with no warning indicator sometimes multiple will shoot at the same time and you won't be able to dodge and sometimes you'll try to run away only to realize that the game has no Dodge mechanic outside of a combat state so you're a Sitting Duck with no options instead of making this combat legitimately difficult enough to incentivize stealth they bypass it entirely by giving enemies an end fight ability if you shouldn't be able to win a fight regardless of whether or not you can win it they could have given the enemies more complex move sets toned down animation canceling and reduced Parry timing but they didn't do that the enemies just shoot you that is artificial difficulty at its most egregious another reason the combat stands out as so bad is that other games have since done very similar systems really well look at ghost of tsushima a lot of this system works exactly like unity's does you have a timed parry and a perfect Parry a role to escape enemy attacks and arrows and a variety of tools to utilize between attacks but in goes to sushima it feels incomparably better to actually play the animations are much faster perfect parries get immediate follow-up instead of having to wait for a sluggish animation hitboxes matter more and allow for your attacks to miss if your positioning is off and the system is all around more complex with its different stances and abilities plus it has some great one-on-one duels while unity's duels are still an absolute joke of easy parries and slow attacks at least the free running is unique for all its problems the combat has been done better by plenty of other Studios goes to sushima has its flaws and it's by no means using the exact same system as Unity but it's because of games like it that we know what a good Parry should feel like what a good Dodge roll should feel like and what a good one-on-one fight should feel like the combat in unity has none of this I've seen people call for a return to unity's combat because they think it feels more like a middle ground between the style focused games of Ezio's era and the new hitbox combat systems but once again I do not really care how good the ideas behind this combat were at the end of the day I care about how it actually felt in my hands from its sluggish animations to its inconsistent mechanics to its artificial difficulty everything about this feels bad to play do I personally like the idea of AC going back to a Parry system with a balance of stylish animations and in-depth abilities sure I do but of all the games to look for inspiration from in that department we deserve way better than regressing back to what Unity was trying to offer us [Music] as I progress through this video you're going to find my thoughts on these different aspects of Assassin's Creed Unity more and more predictable how do I feel about the stealth in this game well lo and behold I think it had great ideas on paper and dropped the ball in execution I get confused when I hear people say they want Assassin's Creed to return to its stealth-based roots as a huge stealth fan I've found that the stealth in every single AC game has been kind of bare bones back in the old days stealth consisted of walking behind or getting above isolated guards to kill them one by one the Kenway Saga added in these stealth zones that on one hand massively increased the options for sneaking around on the ground level but on the other hand also gave players a crutch that ran the risk of making things a bit too dull Unity was the game that was going to make Assassin's Creed a real stealth series no more getting made fun of for not having a Crouch Arno can squat just as deep as snake or Sam Fisher fully fleshed out Interiors would allow for traditional stealth corridors and maze-like paths through lock pickable doors and open Windows no longer would guards be out on their own just waiting to be stabbed you'd actually need to use your stealth Arsenal to manipulate your environment properly if you wanted a chance at getting through any given area unseen like the parkour system it really was a step in the exact Direction fans wanted the series to go at least on paper I honestly think they do a lot more right with this stealth system than they managed with the combat but when we discussed the mechanical problems that plague this game stealth by no means escapes unscathed let's start with the detection system which can make or break any stealth game Enemy detection in unity is predictably very broken first off it's not intuitive exactly which guards will be aggroed if you get seen getting caught in a building Courtyard can have guards on the third floor chasing after you this is made especially frustrating by the snipers who in this game have a ridiculous range of detection it can be tough to so much as poke your head out to survey your surroundings without getting pinged from across the map having to work around enemies who have The High Ground is common in stealth games but in some missions especially Co-op missions where enemies are tuned for more players it's not uncommon to see snipers absolutely littering the rooftops and when one sniper seeing you out of the corner of their eye can mean the entire map knows where you are sometimes that can be frustrating that's on top of the fact that getting seen through certain walls is a pretty regular occurrence in unity while detection can really screw you sometimes it's also very breakable I haven't talked about it a lot yet but the AI in this game is just so stupid want to farm some cover kills camp in the right spot and they'll just run into your blade diligently one at a time wanna absolutely blast one guard away in front of his friends flip a coin chances are if you position yourself right they might be willing to forget that happen pretty quick then comes the famously clunky cover system something that you'll have to use consistently if you want to sneak through any given area the game employs very sticky cover mechanics that pull you hard to the side of Any Given piece of cover and when I say hard I mean hard accidentally press the button in the middle of a hallway and Arno might just dive to the side to hug whatever flat surface he can get his body up against on top of that I think it's a big problem that I had to watch a Lee okay guy just to learn how to get off a box without exposing myself because leaving cover isn't always smooth and intuitive either Unity does give us some tools that can actually bypass a lot of these issues smoke bombs are less op in combat in this game but a lifesaver in stealth using them reactively can get you out of a lot of sticky situations using them proactively can help you get the drop on a group of enemies no matter their number they don't escape iffy detection issues however like here where you see that me deploying a smoke bomb actually gets me caught here despite no one looking at me at the time then we have the Cherry Bomb which is also very useful but only if you understand how Ubisoft screwed it up for whatever reason this sound based device doesn't operate on sound at all but instead online a sight if any obstacle stands between a guard and where you through the bomb it won't even register for them the thing that arguably got the most press prior to release was the Phantom Blade which is essentially a wrist launcher that fires lethal or berserk darts at enemies it basically serves the same purpose as the blow dart from AC4 the tool works great for clearing out snipers or berserking a heavy but it can be very finicky I get more input lag and cueing issues with the Phantom Blade than any other action in the game and I honestly don't even know why I can't tell you how many times I've had to press the button multiple times just to get it to fire once and Visually half the time Arno isn't even pointing the blade at his enemies when he kills them but they're nice enough to drop anyways automatic targeting gets botched as often as it works if there are multiple enemies around you get used to seeing one guard get highlighted only for Arno to betray your trust and shoot someone else entirely and the targeting in general can be iffy even outside of the Phantom Blade stand above two enemies and all you can do is pray that Arnold will actually double assassinate them because oftentimes he'll just decide to Target one and leave the other for a rainy day all of this combines for a traditional stealth system that is Leaps and Bounds more interested in actually giving you stealth tools than the previous games yet is so inconsistent and sloppy that I'd rather just run from Bush to Bush in AC4 despite how meticulously crafted some of your stealth options are but traditional stealth isn't all that Assassin's Creed strives for social stuff has to be discussed because back in unity's day that was still expected social stealth is where you as a player get to actually follow the titular Assassin's Creed and use your environment to your advantage you get to be a blade in the crowd hiding in plain sight throughout the games this became about using the crowd and your environment as a whole to remain invisible to your foes in broad daylight you would hire factions to cause distractions throw money to rile up the crowd blend with a group of people to get closer to a Target or use benches and other hiding spots to escape detection it was cool but by the Kenway Saga I was getting a little weary of social stealth and its lack of Innovations I remember one mission where you tail someone through Kingston and out into the Wilderness outside the city while in an urban environment I would tail them by walking from crowd to crowd to stay invisible while in the wilderness I would walk from Bush to Bush to stay invisible surely if every crowd in this game serve the same mechanical function as a bush there are more ways that Ubisoft could have been innovating this feature and so perhaps Unity would do this unity's enormous crowds were a huge selling point for the game in the lead up to its release thousands of NPCs on screen at any given time sounds pretty fantastic and big they were big and that's about it it's undeniably exciting to find yourself in the center of a seemingly endless crowd totally invisible to your enemies and you actually do have a lot of room to perform assassinations from these crowds which once again exploit the stupid AI but that's it once the novelty of these huge crowds is gone they really are just one big field of grass for all intents and purposes a really big and complex and Visually unstable hiding spot maybe it's asking too much but I wanted social stealth to evolve in ways that allowed me to manipulate the crowds in exciting ways to open up new stealth opportunities but in unity crowds hide you and help you get into some places but a vast majority of your stealth experience is spent in a very traditional manner with no real way to interact with these social systems on top of that you don't have the gentle pushing or tackling options of the older games and so when running through a crowd Arno slows to a frustrating Jog and regularly gets stuck behind NPCs terrible no I wouldn't say so although I will get to some of the technological instability more with these crowds later I just found the social stealth unmemorable there are some really cool missions that let you use the systems a little more but they were too few and far between for me and finally stealth isn't just about what you as a player can do but also about the situations you're put in and Black Box Mission sound like a pretty fantastic place to start there a black box mission in Assassin's Creed is a mission where a Target is somewhere in a particular area and you have to take them out by any means necessary played Hitman played Dishonored it's that but with the mobility of an Assassin's Creed character awesome these are exactly the kinds of missions we as fans wanted when ac1 was announced and while that game didn't really hit the mark in my opinion Unity gives us a lot more to chew on it doesn't tell you what to do or how to do it it gives you a photo points you in the direction of a couple special opportunities and lets you loose I was really glad they added these missions in and while I may not love the game overall they are a highlight of the experience I think they're good I don't think they're great I think anyone who's only played AC games could be blown away by these missions but if you have any experience with Dishonored or Hitman like I said you might find that these missions fall a bit short of expectations while they are advertised to sandboxes where you can kill your target however you want it didn't always feel that way the assassination opportunities often lay out a single linear way you can kill your Target and that can make it feel like there's a correct Canon way to get the job done the missions are by no means created equal some enemies are constantly on the Move giving you different options to get at them others like the king of beggars in your second Black Box Mission will always be in the same place limiting your overall options the Notre Dame has multiple hidden entrances and a really cool cut scene that plays if you set up the kill in the right way meanwhile lafreniere's assassination takes place in what is essentially a big rectangle that he just walks around ad nauseum the game also had me thinking you'd get these really cool cinematic kills every time you use these opportunities but that won't actually come until Syndicate in unity you can get this confessional kill for the very first one but everything after that is just a standard knife to the throat I quite like this Mission near the end where you assassinate latouche you're not infiltrating a building of any kind but instead trying to kill a man on a stage with thousands of people watching it's different and while the snipers take some of the fun out of it I liked actually using the social stealth mechanics a bit more this Mission did however really highlight how vague the game is about some of the assassination opportunities they like to make it a surprise as to what exactly each opportunity does so on your first playthrough you're just going out to these markers because you're told to not really because you know how they'll actually help in this Mission you have the opportunity to find a key that unlocks a cage housing political dissidents awaiting execution so I go to the cage and Arno gets inside and locks himself in okay I didn't really expect that but they then escort me out I am led up the stairs and I kill my target it is cool even though latouche does recognize you right at the end and I'm pretty sure you have to get caught but at the same time this was an entirely linear sequence during which I made precisely zero decisions of my own I think on games like Hitman where every NPC could lead to a disguise that offers a different way to approach the mission or Dishonored 2 where I can kill or spare any of my Targets in such a wide variety of ways and I'm left wishing that Unity did just a little more to make me feel like I was forging my own path through these black box missions Beyond The Independent form of infiltration I was already doing in the regular stealth missions it is unfair to compare it to games like that or black box type stealth is the whole point but I still wish these missions lived up to their potential a little more even outside these black box missions I can't help but continue comparing Unity to better games while it's fantastic that stealth got such a clear Focus Interiors were finally interesting to explore and you could finally Crouch one full console life cycle into the series all of these things were already being done fantastically for a decade in other games Metal Gear Solid 5 one of the most mechanically impressive stealth games ever would come out just one year after Unity we as Gamers knew what a good detection system stealth toolbox and Crouch cover system was supposed to look like but even if we just exclusively look at Ubisoft Splinter Cell Blacklist came out the year before unity and even though many fans felt like it was a watered down stealth experience compared to a game like chaos theory it puts Unity systems to shame the cover system alone that allowed for relatively consistent and cool looking cover transitions makes me baffled that unity's is so bad add some really cool Mobility options and some incredibly stylish kills in both motion and from a neutral stance and sometimes it feels like Blacklist does AC stealth better than Unity does and heck Watchdogs came out right before unity and for all its failures it had better cover and detection mechanics and some of the missions where you have to hack other players without getting caught gave me stronger social stealth Vibes than unity's actual social stealth I don't know how the heck you fix the Parkour in this game and the combat fell too far from The Mark to imagine patches ever solving anything there but stealth you can see a passable stealth system in here so clearly better cover mechanics a refined detection system and tweaks to the tools to make them more intuitive would have gone a long way toward making this the best stealth in the series and a lot of people will still say that it is because at least it tried to pass itself off as a stealth game unlike many of the others in this series but I'm not one of those people I watch online stealth compilations like this one from sad a YouTuber who has created some of the best Unity content on the platform and the high level gameplay they pull off has me floored nothing in the industry looks like this I get that while MGS and Splinter Cell and Hitman may be more well made as stealth games they still don't fully scratch that itch of being able to climb anything and infiltrate anywhere like an AC game can then I watch videos like this one where that same person records 381 attempts to get through this Mission stylishly and has the AI and Mechanics Work in the way they intended through that first checkpoint 20 of those times seeing how inconsistent and broken the stealth can be even at the highest level of play I'm reminded why I don't like the stealth in this game I don't like it because no matter how many more options this game has than the older or even the newer AC games we know what a good stealth system is supposed to feel like other games have shown us that and this is not it beauty is in the eye of the beholder but to say that Assassin's Creed Unity is a gorgeous game is borderline objective setting your Urban exploration game in Revolutionary Paris is setting yourself up for success and the tight alleys and tall buildings are everything AC fans have always wanted Unity was the first game in the series to recreate its City at a one-to-one scale giving it a sense of immensity that no other game in the franchise has really achieved something I hear a lot is that Unity still has the best graphics in the series and you know what in many ways it still does the texture detail on every single building in the city is fantastic and it makes every frame of this game feel artistically dense the devs weren't able to figure out a day night cycle in this game but that almost Works to its benefit we now have baked in lighting and it's a clear standout in unity it just looks so real almost like I can feel the heat radiating off the rooftops as I stand above the city streets as much as I like day night cycles it's gorgeous enough here that I can't say its removal hurts the game all that much in many ways it is the presentation of the game that gives it its reputation if you look at avor's character model she clearly looks much more modern and detailed than Arno does but arno's facial capture is leaps ahead of Valhalla and so everything just looks so much more advanced unity's presentation is in many ways Best in Class I believe Paris is a Triumph and I see stories about how much time and effort went into meticulously recreating that world and I'm grateful for the work the team put in at the same time there are once again still some caveats as far as how the game looks when you're running along the rooftops I could easily see someone hailing this as the best setting in the franchise I have more problems when I'm at the ground level however and that's because of one factor I've already brought up the crowds the crowds in this game might as well be liquid when it comes to how variable their textures are going to be in general only the NPCs closest to you will have their textures fully loaded in and everyone else's will be popping in and out all the time textures have always been variable in AC but Unity is on a whole nother level compared to the gradually fading in flowers of Brotherhood or the instantly appearing guards in AC3 the texture pop in with unity is something that is constant and unavoidable while it is initially technically impressive to see so many NPCs on screen at once it's so abundantly clear that Ubisoft didn't figure out how to do it technologically I find it frustrating when I hear people say that we should return to the large crowds that Unity had because I really don't think they succeeded here having played on PS4 PS4 Pro PS5 and two different PC rigs now I have never seen any meaningful improvements to NPC Poppin through all the beauty sloppiness like that pervades through the entire experience take the cut scenes for example which have that amazing facial capture that we discussed earlier every actor's performance carries over fantastically but in contrast to that a lot of the shots in these cut scenes are close-ups that choose to turn the bokeh blur effect up to a hundred some scenes of the game can downright hurt my eyes and give the characters this weird Aura around their bodies where they clash with that blurred background it looks less like a cinematic technique and more like Arno is using the blur feature on Zoom I also noticed that transitions looked sloppy in this game and I realized upon slowing the footage down that the blur actually disappears one frame before the scene actually Cuts in many cases which makes it feel slower the cinematography if you can call it that in a video game can be very weak action scenes are plagued by take and style Quick Cuts and shaky Cam and it's frustrating to reflect back on a time where that kind of shot selection was common I appreciate that the game is more consistently cinematic than origins or Odyssey but I look at the cut scenes that those games do get and they look so much better when it comes to camera placement it kind of sucks that the game with the best facial animation and some amazing mocap has such ugly camera work also I feel I should mention the accents because so many people did complain about them this is the only game in the series where the actors in general don't do an accent appropriate to the region instead speaking with an English accent here I don't mind this overall because doing an accent doesn't always land but there are definitely places where this works better than others danger not for example flows between English and French perfectly smoothly and I'll spare you your life other actors maybe a bit less so well the Assassins already found severe and what they do but all that aside the overall presentation of Assassin's Creed Unity Remains the best part of the game and I'm always happy to boot it up just to run around and take in the sights even with its flaws but that said running around does tend to be all I do given another big problem I have with unity I don't like the side content Assassin's Creed games live and die by their settings and the best of them will give you the opportunity to engage with fun activities that immerse you further in the experience of either living in the period or being an assassin in that time period let's take Unity within the context of when it came out sandwiched between AC4 and AC syndicate AC4 is set during the Golden Age of piracy and so you can sail your ship hunt for Treasure engage in secret Naval boss battles infiltrate plantations and Forts and go whaling and then on top of that you still have your Suite of assassination contracts along with a set of fully fleshed out narrative missions that see you working for the Brotherhood that 100 feel just as well done as any story missions in that game in Syndicate you explore Victorian London and so you find yourself liberating child laborers engaging in Carriage chases starting gang wars traveling on the roof of a train or honing in your combat skills at the local Fight Club all while maintaining plenty of focus on stealth and assassination Unity by comparison is much less interested in immersing you either in the city of Paris or the Assassin fantasy through its content the most common form of side content is the Paris stories which are generally one-off missions that don't feed into the grander picture of the game they can certainly be interesting but very few of them expand Beyond running somewhere either killing someone getting into a fight or stealing something and then running back it's a far cry from the wide variety of setting appropriate activities you get in the games immediately before and after this one more missions involving the revolution or the Brotherhood would have gone a long way there is minimal dialogue in these missions and while other AC gains will alternate between mocapped cutscenes and this behind the shoulder type view Unity gets neither you walk up to the NPC press interact and their audio track plays it feels very impersonal and Arno almost never says a word before during or after these missions while Odyssey also suffers from repetitive side content at least Cassandra has spoken dialogue for every encounter outside of the main story Arnold feels more like a blank slate avatar for the player than any other character in the series because his personality almost never comes out in any way outside of the mainline cutscenes it brings to mind the homestead missions of AC3 in that game I felt the main character of renunge who missed the mark in the main story but he was redeemed in the homestead missions where we got to see a wiser more idealistic side of him Arno gets nothing like this and you can go dozens of hours without hearing him talk at all things get a bit better with the riddles and murder mysteries which still don't give Arno any personality but actually give the players legitimately difficult puzzles to solve the murder mysteries are still just about walking places and pressing the interact button but in this case it really does work and it's nice having an entirely cerebral set of missions that don't involve any combat the Nostradamus Enigma riddles are A step above that asking you to solve riddles that require a fairly strong knowledge of the time period that the game won't just hand you I felt these riddles were a bit obtuse for me or maybe I was just a bit obtuse for them I'm not sure but I am sure that they do have their audience the last one I want to talk about is the co-op missions which should be the best missions in the game they are actually fully fleshed out missions with their own cutscenes unlike the Paris stories they also let you interact with the French Revolution directly something that as I will discuss more later the game is weirdly against letting you do most of the time and these missions can be fun if you have friends and there was an undeniable level of technical effort put into crafting these compared to all the other side content but if the game felt unstable in single player everything is tenfold in the multiplayer the AI is unwieldy when you are alone so imagine what it's like when it's split between three other players tools work less consistently glitches that I don't see in the single player show up constantly and all of the detection issues feel so much worse in the co-op I also wish that these missions weren't framed as weird objectives given to you by your modern day Handler where once again Arno doesn't speak these were fantastic opportunities to let Arno interact more with the Brotherhood and actually do missions for them as opposed to just doing his own thing like he is for most of the main story but we get none of that instead some lady on a laptop tells us what we need to do and we do it it's all has valuable Templar secrets and he's no good to the Assassins dead get to the notebook then save baton and those are the good co-op missions go over to the heists which are just missions where you walk up to a bunch of different paintings and press interact until the game says you did it and you quickly wonder where the heck the quality from the regular Co-op went these are boring and frustrating for the most part and I had very little desire to return to them side missions really aren't bad in Assassin's Creed Unity but they just felt so mediocre pretty much every game from Brotherhood on had at least one set of side missions that I couldn't wait to do more of from the Leonardo machine missions to the homestead missions to the AC4 Brotherhood missions in unity the side content felt like padding serviceable and sometimes fairly enjoyable padding but fluff nonetheless it didn't add to the setting or the character of Arno in any real way speaking of fluff it's easy to see why 2014 was the year that audiences really started pushing back against bloat in Ubisoft games this is what my map looks like on my 100 save file and it's still a mess and that's not even bringing up all the stupid companion app content that locks certain chests and activities behind logging into the app regularly to ubisoft's Credit Now that the app is dead and buried you have access to all that content from the get-go so I'm not really going to talk about it more so much of the side content is OneNote and so little of it tries to enmesh the player in the fantasy of being part of the French Revolution or a part of the Assassin Brotherhood while Paris is so Central to the experience of unity the content within her feels so shallow compared to a majority of the games in this series it's so beautiful and yet there's a hollowness to this world when it comes to actually having interesting things to do in it [Music] so we know what activities Arno can do in the city of Paris but how exactly does he progress as an assassin himself well the answer to that is kind of complicated no not this complicated but still way too complex and in all honesty financially grows for a primarily single player game so in Assassin's Creed Unity there are a whopping four different currencies that you need to manage which is IOS levels of complex monetization let's go over them one by one first you have levers the actual in-universe currency that Arno canonically uses to purchase consumables and weapons simple enough next we have sync points Assassin's Creed Unity was really the first game in the series to start emphasizing light RPG elements and they come in the form of skills that you can purchase as you progress through different missions you spend sync points to get basic skills like environmental blending and double assassinate but eventually you can be using them on more advanced weapon skills that some people might miss entirely so long as you engage with the co-op missions you should be getting plenty of sync points to get all the skills you need and I didn't think they were terribly paced throughout the experience next we have Creed points this currency is such a stupid name that I wish it didn't exist based on that alone Creed points are by far the most redundant currency in the game you get them from doing anything really and they allow you to upgrade the weapons that you've bought and that's pretty much it nothing that we could not have been able to do with the levers they are also tied to the little title that you get under your name if you happen to be someone who cares about that finally we have the one we all knew would be here Helix credits these are the tokens that you can buy with real money most weapons or armor pieces in the game can be purchased through real life money and you can shell out a hundred dollars at a time through the in-game store single high-level weapon can cost a thousand Helix credits and for a hundred dollars you get twenty thousand meaning you are spending five dollars of real money on the highest level sword that you have access to if you go that route feels gross I'm not going to compare microtransactions to decide which ones are worse in fully priced single player games they're almost always disgusting the XP boosts you can get in the more recent games to speed up progress are just as unacceptable but every time you open up your equipment screen to buy weapons or armor you will see the icon there telling you that you can skip the grind and pick out any weapon you want right off the bat do you have to buy these no they're all available in game but in my playthrough I have 100 of the game I've done all the missions that I can and if I wanted every weapon and armor piece that I don't yet have I would need to spend ninety five thousand one hundred and thirty Helix credits that means I would need to spend five hundred dollars of real money after having done everything in the game and we just talked about what the content is like once you 100 everything that's it you've really done it all the only way I could grind this money if I wanted to would be to leave my game on for a few hours waiting for my income chest to fill up or run heists over and over again which while doable isn't exactly fun and you don't have to get everything in the game I think there is value in games where you can invest in something and take that risk but let's be honest that's not why Ubisoft priced everything beyond what 100 of the game would normally get you they did it because even if you do not have to spend that money there are people out there who will in unity someone could buy the best weapon in the game right at the start and one shot pretty much every single enemy if they want to Ubisoft knew the Wales would come and spend hundreds on unity and while I doubt there were many of them I guarantee they existed and so we have all these ludicrously priced items in unity that have that microtransaction stamp plastered all over them I can really see why some people might get frustrated with the difficulty because of this as well in one of my playthroughs I tried to see what it was like to just stick to the story in unity never doing side content and it can be really rough it can take multiple missions just to get enough money to refill your consumables which can cost thousands in the late game it's ridiculously expensive and that's not even getting into the boosts I didn't even know they existed until relatively recently but they let you boost arno's Health damage or stealth abilities for three minutes with an option to buy premium versions for five that is disgusting I can't imagine anyone ever using them but looking at the balancing issues and enemy health and damage especially in Co-op it's hard to give Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt and imagine they weren't taking these boosts into account when designing these systems outside of mechanical and skill based progression you also have the Cosmetic changes that you can make to your character and these are actually really cool you get a ton of control over your own customization with a pretty solid range of hood torso bracer and leg options along with different belts that basically let you create builds based on what consumables you want to have the most of since we are on the topic of customization I do want to bring up those allegations of sexism that popped up before unity's launch that took up a lot of the press about the game at that time basically there was an interview where the creative director of the game said that they had planned to add female avatars to the co-op but that the option was cut because it would be too much work to add all the customization options and animations this caused immediate uproar and those comments dominated the news articles written about Unity for a long time prior to Launch the situation was really bizarre so in Co-op you play as Arno and everyone else sees themselves as playing as Arno as well but for you they have their face model swapped the multiplayer is meant to be a continuation of the single player experience so it makes total sense that they would only have the animations and customization options for Arno so why didn't they just say that to this day the AC Unity Wikipedia page has a 780 word section dedicated to the co-op gender option controversy they basically had the perfect answer for people who asked why you couldn't customize gender and yet they still threw that to the side and went with the women are too hard to animate answer instead it's just baffling and so with all this in mind I recently took a step back and looked at the sometimes weird sometimes disgusting progression system in unity and I started realizing something about the way Arno silently moved from quest to Quest to scrounge up enough money to afford better gear reminded me of a certain gaming experience but I couldn't put my finger on it despite the RPG elements doesn't really feel like an RPG and as bad as the monetization is it obviously doesn't feel like a mobile game then it hit me the game Assassin's Creed Unity was reminding me of was Final Fantasy 14. the side content and progression system of this game feel like playing an MMO you travel around the region going from quest to quests throughout which the protagonist is a player Avatar with little to no dialogue these quests are generally simple in nature and involve a lot of running places performing a task and running back as a player Avatar your character is given a wide range of customization options that seem tailored to making you stand out in multiplayer letting you hang out in a lobby with a banana man or a man in Black medieval armor it isn't arno's name in the top left corner it's your gamer tag and remember that title under your name again this is a 100 save file and I'm only halfway to the highest level I would need to do everything I've done in this 60 hour save file a second time over just to max out this title that doesn't do anything it clearly wasn't made with single player in mind existing only to flex on other players in Co-op because of limited single player content the game wants you to be running the same quests over and over to get expensive gear and boost your title that's what the end game looks like now don't get me wrong I love Final Fantasy 14 but AC Unity feels like it takes some of the worst aspects of the MMO experience and sticks them in a 60-hour game that's primarily single player no main character in the entire series gets less personality in the side content than Arno and it all reminded me of walking from NPC to NPC performing random tasks in the old realm reborn story of ff14 which in my opinion was the worst part of that game progression in unity is just weird it has way too many forms of currency the in-game economy feels tuned around microtransactions and the systems make navigating this game feel more like an MMO at times than a single player game it feels so unfocused and if there is one aspect of AC Unity I think a lot of people are going to be able to agree Ubisoft shouldn't return to in any capacity regardless of whether or not you think other games May do it worse it would be these progression systems [Music] I have been very cynical so far and I don't like being that way I like talking about successes and triumphs and in any game whatever its flaws a strong story can do a lot to sway me toward giving it the benefit of the doubt that's why after everything I've already talked about it was the story of this game that really cemented it as one of my least favorite in this series Unity gets off to a rousing start by giving Arno not one but two dad death origin stories in the span of 30 minutes Atco when we're doing a gay do we're both shaped by the death of a parent and so Unity gives Arno double the character development by having it happen to him twice while doubling down on a well-worn Trope feels lazy on its own what makes it more frustrating is how the first dad death really just exists to set up the second one it is the adoptive father's death that drives the entire story while arno's biological father is rarely mentioned again if they were going to make the Redundant decision to kill two dads in one hour I would have preferred if they had gone further in depth into the feelings of Shame and fear of loss that Charles's death instilled in Arno instead one dad death is mostly just a stepping stone to a more important dad death at the very least either one of them could have gotten more than a single scene where they actually get back and forth dialogue with Arno but neither of them do the other frustrating thing about the setup for this game is how the events surrounding this second death that of Monsieur delacer are handled everything that happens in unity ties back to arno's own role in his adoptive father's death this happens on the day that Elise delliser's daughter and arno's secret lover slash adopted sister is scheduled to be home from her travels abroad for only one night for reasons that aren't shared with Arno which upsets him because he's at a point in his life where his best friend is reported at the estate so he'd very much like to see her on that day occur your just Mrs delliser's Carriage as it leaves for business and he tells Arno that he has a letter that absolutely must reach him today Arno doesn't know it yet but this letter would warn de lesser of an impending assassination attempt Arnold can tell that this guy doesn't understand efficient side hops so he takes the letter himself and follows de laser to make sure it gets to him on time Arno tracks him to the estate's general where he sees Elise and her father from afar and almost makes it to de lucer unfortunately his Reckless Behavior and bad reputation get in the way and two blacksmiths that he got in a scuffle with earlier follow and jump him Arno is able to handle them but this sends the guards his way and his delivery attempt is thwarted back at square one he asks Olivier a servant of the house who clearly doesn't like him when de laser will be home Olivier tells him he's not expected back until late which at first doesn't bother Arno Because he believes this means he will be able to spend the day with Elise as a note we just saw Elise with her father at the Estates General so I don't know why the heck he thinks she'll be coming back at a different time without him but we'll get back to arno's lack of critical thinking in a second Olivier explains that Elise is actually going to be at a giant party held in her honor at the king's Palace and Arno wasn't invited well surely this was a mistake so he prepares himself to crash that party only camera Zooms in on the letter in his pocket how late is late he asks and Olivier dismisses the question entirely saying he doesn't know so Arno now has a choice to make between Duty and the lease and he chooses Duty he goes back inside to wait for deleiser the game then takes a moment to sit with Arno in his restlessness he walks around the room looking at books he hated reading as a child but perking up remembering the books that Elise liked he doesn't last five minutes Elise over Duty he will slip the ladder under delliser's door he will see it as soon as he comes home he rationalizes to himself but there is clear hesitation the game holds a moment on Arno as he clearly struggles with this decision and knows he should wait but his obsession over Elise wins that fight he wants his moment with her and he gets it in a scene so picturesque that it manages to rise above the awkward texture Poppin that still does burden Even This Moment the two share a Chase they share a kiss and we see that their relationship has blossomed into something passionate and mischievous over the years they seem to bring out the best and worse than one another it only lasts a moment but like Ezio a moment is all he needs one kiss and he is satisfied and he begins to leave the palace a happy man that Elation doesn't last out in the courtyard of the palace a wall away from where his father died 13 years ago he watches monsieu de lesser drop dead Arno runs over and a voice off screen yells for the guards framing Arno for the murder is gone and arno's life is shattered riveting stuff effective especially with the amazing performances of Dan janat and Catherine barabay but I want us to stop here for a moment and reflect on what actually happened let's rewind uh how late is late Arno believes he has to wait for delliser to come home if he wants to go to the party the party for delliser's daughter being held at the Palace of Versailles that seemingly the entire city is attending come on Arno take a wild guess where deleiser is you think he's out having a drink or something go to the party because he's obviously there give him the letter and then find the lease it's perfect but the game doesn't even acknowledge that as a possibility it's very much written as if Arno would have no reason to believe that Elise and her father would be at the same place at the same time and that choosing one would mean forsaking the other but fine let's hand wave that so now the game focuses on arno's boredom and restlessness making it clear to the player that in arno's head his choices firmly between waiting at the estate or going to the party we get all this time where Arno mulls over his options and the story frames this as the point where Arno seals delicere's fate but again de laser is at the party he was never coming home from that party one way or another if Arno had overcome his obsession with Elise and stayed at the estate he would have been sitting on the couch and delicere would have died anyways arno's decision to slip the letter under the door changes absolutely nothing so why does the game zoom in on the letter as Arno tries to leave for the party and why does it focus on his hesitation before slipping the note under the door it's just so baffling that this Central plot point is so muddled what makes it especially frustrating is that there is a strong argument for arno's role in the man's death but his decision to slip the letter under the door had nothing to do with it had Arno been more mature and not made so many enemies the blacksmiths wouldn't have jumped him and he would have gotten the letter to delliser on time but the game never frames it like that and the writers instead seem to want to imply that it is arno's obsession with the leaves that causes him to forsake Duty and go to the party and that eventually gets delisaire killed as a player we just started the game and I already have to engage in some high-level mental gymnastics to make this ostensibly simple plot Point make sense I have to accept that Arno doesn't figure out that deleiser is at the party even though I can think of no other logical conclusion he could have come to and I have to accept that despite the inclusion of this scene with the letter and how much the writers emphasize it nothing that happens after the blacksmith fight actually matters and I shouldn't worry about it this is arguably the most important moment in the game and I can't believe they didn't have their writers do a once over to make sure their simple revenge and betrayal setup actually made sense all right I have to move on because I've spent seven minutes talking about just the intro but luckily I don't feel a need to go into as much detail with individual events from here on out largely due to how the game structures its plot from this point on once Arno dons the hood and the blade the story gets much sparser and much less character driven there are 12 sequences in this game and a majority of them only have two or three missions per sequence by contrast Assassin's Creed 3 had multiple five mission sequences and a total of 46 missions Unity despite having the same number of sequences only has 29 when you take away the rift missions that take place outside of the story now that's not inherently a bad thing we always take quality over quantity but I wouldn't say that the quality is there most sequences have a primary target at the center of them and one of the missions is the Black Box itself that means there are several sequences where you get all your build up investigation and backstory figured out in one Mission and then you assassinate the target in the next this obviously doesn't give room for anyone in the game to shine a whole lot Arno who starts out Charming but witty in a somewhat rude way that sets him apart from Ezio loses a lot of his luster at this point his sarcastic quips start becoming a majority of his dialogue thinly veiling how rarely he has anything of substance to say the few Side characters who do get some play have their own stories played through at warp speed to accommodate the pace of the game Arno gets trained in the ways of the Assassins by Pierre black while they are imprisoned together at the Bastille and the instant Mark he makes is quickly followed up with him fading to the background for most of the story likewise Arno meets duplicitous men like the Marquis De Saad and Napoleon and after a tense moment of initial distrust with both Arna was venting to them like it's a slumber party within a couple lines of dialogue you used me we used one another every time I think I'm getting close to the truth it seems another layer of Filth presents itself [Music] I do hope we're not eyeing the same prize name it certain letters written to the king it makes the story feel so rushed and it makes Arno feel stupidly trusting the targets themselves get it even worse despite having some really cool Black Box missions around them these are some powerfully forgettable targets you learn so little about them and what their role within the order is and Arno never gets the chance to speak with any of them before they die instead of the traditionally fantastic memory corridors after each kill Arno has this strange ability where he can take on their memories to find his next Target these are poorly lit sequences that it best give us information in a very sterile way and at worst try to make us empathize with enemies who had one line of dialogue at the start of the mission why are you showing me this woman's childhood right now I already forgot her name the pacing just feels so off throughout the game and so little happens per sequence because it's trying to juggle so much it's a love story but it's about the French Revolution but it's about the Assassins but it's a character study they tried to do too much and didn't work nearly hard enough to make any individual component work I suppose now is as good a time as any to start talking about these poorly juggled components and I want to focus on three in particular the Assassin Templar conflict the French Revolution and arno's love story all three are a part of the game from the very start but they really get into a Groove in sequence two imprisoned for delliser's death at the Bastille Arno meets an assassin named Pierre black whom I mentioned earlier who reveals to him that his father was an assassin and the delacer was the Templar Grand Master in typical Redemption story fashion the old man trains Arno and they spend two months locked in intense one-on-one combat this is where the revolution comes in we have actually gotten a taste of it already the Estates General in the background of the beginning of the game was the assembly that really started the revolution on its track but the storming of the Bastille here is the moment that really introduces the player to the French Revolution unfortunately after this introduction the revolution plays little to no role in the main plot for about two-thirds of the game so we already have to put that one on hold black and Arno use the chaos to escape and Arno is offered a place with the assassins in what is probably the most effective use of the iconic leap of faith of all time however the Assassins aren't his first stop and we get an update on the third component the love story except there isn't much love there right now Elise reveals she always knew about their conflicted Heritage and that she is now a fully fledged Templar not only that but she knows Arno failed to deliver the letter that would have saved her father 's death may have put this story in motion but it is at this moment where Arno feels he has lost Elise that he is set on his path people sometimes peg this as a Revenge story but it really never was Arno isn't doing what he does to honor de lesser he needs to make things right for Elise because she is what matters to him unfortunately as I said earlier the game hits a bit of a lull here because of the rushed Pace Elise just had her second real scene in the game but she won't pop back up in this story until around the halfway point and so we just watched the title card and now two of the three big components I just mentioned the love story and the Revolution have already been put on ice that leaves the Assassins the component which dominates the first half of the game but has its own set of problems they start out really strong Arno goes to them when he has nowhere else to turn and we are met with a Brotherhood that is mysterious and traditional instead of a variety of quirky personalities like we got in the Ezio Trilogy we have a veritable Army of trained foot soldiers under the command of a council of five but this Brotherhood extends Beyond tradition the mentor of this Branch miribo subverts Expectations by wanting to be a peacemaker to end the war between the assassins and Templars he wants to politicize the assassins and he had set up a truce with deleiser before his death which is why they didn't immediately turn Arno away for joining just to avenge a Templar I thought the ideas behind this were really cool but unfortunately they don't get fleshed out much at all of the five council members I can only remember the names of miribo and black with the other three being entirely disposable beyond the council Arno never interacts with any assassins at his own Rank and they act as faceless goons that occupy The Hideout the biggest problem is that it feels like the writers laid out arno's story and then haphazardly wrote the Assassins around it Arno only speaks with them once permission and that's only in the first half of the game something I'm going to address again later they vaguely Point him in the direction of his first two Targets but it's Elise de Saad and Napoleon that actually give him concrete Intel for his investigation over the course of the story the Assassins train him and equip him but by the time the story catches up with Arno after his two years of training they really have nothing left to offer him beyond the occasional scolding this isn't a one-way problem the Assassins aren't much used to Arno but likewise I struggle to understand what value Arno holds to them he spends two years as a novice off screen so it's implied he was making himself useful somehow but once he graduates to becoming a legitimate assassin we exclusively see him following his own personal Quest why the Assassins let him do this is left vague there's no discernible plot against the Assassins to be found in the first half of the game that would threaten France or the Brotherhood so they really are just letting Arno kill these targets for the sake of de la Ser who truce or not was a Templar but at least they will have more to do once the templar's plot is actually revealed right I'll get to that I like the idea of a main character who uses the Assassins to further his own goals but we don't see any of the compromises required for him to be able to do that despite being a low ranking assassin we never see him take on any grunt work that benefits the council instead of just himself once again it is a travesty that the only real Brotherhood missions were relegated to the co-op we could have fleshed out the council so much more if these missions were integrated with the main story and gave us dialogue between Arno and other Assassins but they failed to give us that and so arno's value to the Assassins is told but not shown so for a chunk of the game here up to the halfway point things are weird Elise has disappeared the revolution is on the back burner and Arno is technically an assassin but his quest still feels entirely personal and disconnected from the Brotherhood this comes to a head in sequence 5 when Arno haven't crossed two names off his list tracks down a Silversmith named Jama who forged the weapon that killed delacer he claims he was a prisoner of a Templar named LaFreniere who had the Lesser killed so he could fill his seat well that's enough for Arno he goes out and finds LaFreniere and kills him only this time believing time was of the essence we didn't get our scene of him asking the Brotherhood for permission first we then get the first scene in the game where we are reminded that there are rules and the Assassins won't just let Arno do whatever he wants killing a man without permission is seen as a gross violation of his Rank and responsibilities and that's not even the kicker he killed the wrong man LaFreniere was an ally of delliser and Arno was tricked by German himself we learned that the Templars like the Assassins were moving toward peace and passivity as Jamal struck back at this perceived corruption by staging a coup and having delliser killed remember when I said that Arno feels stupidly trusting and so what is arno's punishment well nothing they even let him keep control of the delacer investigation again I really wish we got some idea as to why Arno was worth keeping around to them because we don't see him benefit the assassins in a meaningful way and yet at the same time we see them tolerate a lot from him either way we are wrapping up sequence five and the Assassins warn Arno not to go killing without permission anymore remember that it'll be important later on the plus side lafreniere's death brings Elise back into The Fray but maybe not in the best way LaFreniere was actually elise's only remaining Ally among the Templars and so Arno has to go and find her to save her from German's men since she is now his only remaining threat he dances around the fact that he murdered the only person left on her side and on top of that by killing LaFreniere he seemingly dissolved the largest Forest standing in German's way leaving only Elise after Arno kills him that military force that LaFreniere was rallying are just gone they are not shown again this was a civil war before and now it's just Elise versus the entire Templar order and it's all arno's fault you'd think she'd be mad about that but it is literally never acknowledged neither the Assassins nor Elise hold Arno accountable for single-handedly Paving the way for their enemies Ascension remember earlier in this game when a misplaced letter was a big enough sin to jumpstart the entire plot of the game I guess things are just different now the two instead reconcile and decide to work together again however while The Chemistry Between the actors is still present their interactions have become much colder due to the harsh years apart this is realistic but I found myself missing the interesting banter which has been replaced by a bunch of scenes where Arno basically hangs by her like a sad puppy and I wanted more meaningful scenes between them just as we start getting an idea of the true plot of the game with Sherman's emergence we are pulled on a mid-story tangent Arno decides he hasn't fully communicated just how much he loves Templars to the council so he straight up brings Elise to them for help this upsets everyone but miribo who is always up for peace talks but the issue is tabled to avoid escalation in The Hideout unfortunately next time we see maribo he is dead in his bed with a trail leading straight to Elise Arnold doesn't suspect her for a second but to be fair he doesn't seem to suspect anyone in this game for a second he's a gullible guy after some detective work Arno finds the real killer Atop The San Chapelle black remember black the guy from the beginning of the game he gets to matter again so that's cool and remember the inklings of a more passive and political assassin Brotherhood well this scene would have hit a lot harder if we got more than just inklings apparently just like Jamal with the Templars beleck believes that the Assassins have lost their way and that peace with Elise would have been the last straw a coup was necessary and he wants Arno on his side wait what you want Arno on your side this guy hasn't shut up about his Templar Pals for the entire game I know your heart is set on keeping the peace but bringing Monsieur de lesser's killer to Justice would count for something wouldn't it I owe it to the memory of Monsieur delacer to uncover the truth [Music] yes he was what game have you been playing Black was there for all of these scenes how did he not realize that Arnold was just there to avenge his favorite Templars anyhow you get this awful fight and after a limp attempt to get some last minute Sympathy by showing that black saved arno's forgotten first dad once we have now lost the only two assassins who have had any personality in this entire game which does not bode well for their part of the story except now we reach sequence 8 and things actually start improving nothing really comes of this mini [ __ ] narratively and the idea of the Assassins helping Elise is just straight up dropped but it acts as a bit of a narrative reset and Arno is finally told to stop worrying about his own problems and actually start being an assassin he's given a real mission for the first time in this game sneak into the king's study and steal some documents I'll be honest arno's response to this is a bit frustrating more Fetch and carry work I imagine please Arno tell us what Fetch and carry work you have been doing I desperately want to know these people have tolerated you for so long that you must have been clearing out entire country's worth of Templars off screen for them to have kept you around that aside how can an assassin sneak into a royal study well because the Paris commune has declared itself an open Insurrection against the king remember the French Revolution the thing this game is supposed to revolve around but that we haven't seen any real signs of since the storming of the Bastille at the beginning it's back and on top of it all Arno and Elise are now actually working together in Earnest in sequence 8 two-thirds into this game The Love Story the assassins and the revolution are all front and center again finally and so with some help from Elise you assassinate a Templar who has been restricting food to rile up the populace a captain of the French army who was leading the September massacres and a Templar politician who cast the final vote to execute the king finally we get targets who are actually impacting France and have a clear role within the Templars something we really didn't get for the entire first half of the game the Assassin plot is at its best the revolution is finally ramping up and the romance is about to Peak as well when Elise finds herself in some trouble she and Arno end up fleeing in a hot air balloon in what is probably the most exciting set piece of the entire game with adrenaline high and their investigation actually bearing fruit the pair finally rekindled their romance in the skies above Paris it's all coming together and if it sticks to Landing then maybe I can excuse some of the sloppiness that we've been dealing with so far with all the pawns off the board Arno and Elise are ready for germa he is in attendance at the king's execution and they try to go and intercept him but it's a trap and Arna was once again forced to choose between Duty and Lee's he chooses the same way he always has and Jeremiah escapes this infuriates Elise who may have warmed up to Arno again but has in no way cooled off in her desire for Revenge killing Juma is all that matters to her and since Arno is just in the way she drops him then and there Arno who can't catch a break is promptly reprimanded for attempting an assassination on paris's highest stage and the Assassins expel him too and you know what good for them remember when I said Arno actually took on a real Mission from the Assassins that didn't tie into his own selfish goals back in sequence 8 well that wasn't a sign of great things to come that is literally the last time we see the Assassins until this expulsion scene I said to remember that miribo told Arno not to go killing without permission back in sequence 5 right well that was the last time that Arno ever brings up a Target to the council the Assassin sanctioned the first two out of nine primary targets yelledarno for the third and then don't show up for a single one after that it's not until sequence 8 that we finally have real events involving the Revolution and a concrete plot from the Templars here were the Assassins finally have a threat worth acknowledging that extends Beyond arno's personal Revenge Quest is where the Assassins utterly disappear from this story postmiribo they show up a single time before this expulsion it's mind-boggling that the writers just forgot about the Assassins giving them precisely zero involvement with this story in the second half of the game if you want to show us that this branch of the Assassins is useless then do it show us the Fetch and carry work show us them ignoring leads give us a reason for Arno to go Rogue we really get none of that so let's reflect then what do we get in this game what do the Assassins actually do they train Arno yes but what then you could argue that they lead him to severe but they wouldn't have even known that severe was deleiser's killer if Arno didn't tell them after that every Target is discovered either through arno's magic memory leech or with help from his non-assass and allies how would this game have been different if Arno had been expelled before he even killed his first Target it wouldn't have arno's Quest is entirely independent from them once he becomes an assassin and the only time they impact the plot in a way that isn't strictly performative is when they briefly start killing each other in the middle of the game when all is said and done the primary purpose that the Assassins actually managed to serve is that they let Arno be a part of a rivaling organization to Elise giving them this Romeo and juliet-esque Forbidden Love that's really it and so what happens next for the Assassins then nothing that's the final scene that they are in the Assassins as they pertain to this narrative are done what a waste in the end the Assassins feel more shoehorned into this game than almost any other in this series despite how prominent they are throughout I mean look at AC4 Edward is not an assassin and his interactions with the Brotherhood are limited and yet the Assassins get way more screen time in his game than in unity and the philosophies of the assassins and Templars are integral to his own Journey Odyssey a game set before assassins or Templars even exist puts much more effort into prioritizing the series essential themes of how much Liberty one should compromise for the sake of peace Valhalla a game where I made a video spending several minutes talking about how badly done the Assassin vs Templar plot was had a version of the Hidden ones with a clear purpose in the story than the Assassins get in Assassin's Creed Unity write the assassins out of this game and almost nothing changes I think unity's liberal use of traditional iconography gives people the illusion that it is truer to its roots than it actually is and while the Assassins are physically in this game more than some others I think this is one of their least developed iterations so now there are two sequences left and the entire purpose of the assassins in this story has been wrapped up and the love story is on hold again but at least we still do have the revolution the King has finally been executed so let's get into it now we get to see the reign of terror right no Arno gets drunk and wallows in his sadness for the entire penultimate sequence remember all those cinematic trailers where Arno is fighting his way through what clearly seems to be the reign of terror turns out that gets to be two forgettable missions in the final chapter of the game Elise for whatever reason changes her mind and with no one Having learned anything from this little detour they return to The Fray they target Maximilian Robespierre one of the most recognizable figures from the French Revolution now anyone with a basic knowledge of the French Revolution knows that shoving rub a spare into the game in the Final Chapter and introducing him after his downfall has already begun is confounding his name is synonymous with the reign of terror and the reign of terror is synonymous with the French Revolution so why do neither play a meaningful role in AC Unity it's beyond me with these two rubber spare emissions done the revolution is a wrap in this story as well they really dropped the ball here and they made the revolution a barely their backdrop to an already paper-thin story having the King's death happen in sequence 10 and for so little of the Revolution to be explored after that is just such a shame characters like Robespierre do show up in the co-op missions but as I said those don't really tie back into the main story in any way there is so much that they could have done with this setting and yet there is so very little in the side content or the main story that immerses me in the French Revolution sucks and so there is only one pillar of this narrative left the Love Story the purifying Shema who has armed himself with the sword of Eden so he can shoot lasers at us for a dumb looking boss fight in the commotion Arna was trapped beneath some rubble and now it is Elise who gets to make a choice she is not Arno she leaves him and charges in for her revenge Arno is able to wiggle free but he's too late her blade clashes with the sword of Eden and the ensuing explosion kills her instantly the only person that motivated Arno to do anything at all in this game is gone she gets no final words as he hovers over her body and the cold Silence of this moment is allowed to sit longer than almost anything ever does in this narrative for the first time Arno is indeed motivated by Revenge he slowly pushes his blade through German's head but it doesn't matter Elise is gone and that is how this story ends this love story is by far the most effective of those primary components I mentioned earlier it is shallow it shouldn't have taken half the game to start up again and we didn't get half the scenes between the two of them that would have Justified the emotions that this honestly effective ending deserved but the pair are charmingly acted and in their story you can see a glimpse of a deeper message about Obsession revenge and how Nationwide conspiracies and revolutions can seem trivial in the shadow of personal grief it's a shame that this story gets drowned out by the sloppiness of everything else the game wraps up with one final unearned monologue from Arno talking about his new interpretation of the Creed as if this game did anything to make the Assassins or their philosophy worthwhile in the entire game and then we hit credits oh what a mess that was once again good ideas French Revolution great place to explore that freedom versus peace story that we get in Assassin's Creed Assassins and Temple are straying from their roots and getting marred in politics that sounds like a great idea go on Splinter factions of both organizations causing Civil Wars to break out that sounds cool but like the rest of this experience any great ideas to come out of the writing room were mashed into a paste and processed with the rest of this cobbled together mess of a video game terrible pacing means I don't care about any of the characters the Assassin Temple our conflict is a thimble deep despite its potential the revolution is absolutely wasted and the half-baked Love Story somehow emerges as the best part of this story I don't think a lot of people actually want to return to the storytelling in unity I think some people want to return to the type of story that unity's trailers made us think it would tell but don't let the hood and the blade fool you this is far from a traditional Assassin's Creed story that respects its roots and even more importantly it's far from a good story [Music] thank you the potential of AC Unity was crystal clear the traversal system is borderline revolutionary the story brushes against tackling legitimately subversive themes the combat and Stealth have clearer design philosophies than any of the past games and the world is heart-stoppingly beautiful at times there are moments where I scale a building and Crest over a rooftop to see a cityscape that takes my breath away and in these moments I think to myself perhaps I am being too harsh the highs like that are so very high and so non-existent anywhere else in this industry but within seconds I am always brought back down to earth these elements could have been great if they worked but they simply did not my immersion in the world is Shattered by hideous texture popping and Hollow side content my enthrallment in the parkour is ruined by choppy animation blending and overly automated systems the interesting story ideas couldn't even stay consistent through the first 10 minutes of the game and the stealth in combat systems catch fire on a minute to minute basis but the potential must still mean something right well it can the people online who show you how fantastic Unity can look are not lying to you the people who I consider most influential when it comes to showcasing what this game can be at its best are usually very honest and vocal about the flaws of this game but are willing to push through to the Innovations beneath Leo K said it best in a review of sorts he did a few years back he says 99 of unity High skill gameplay and Tech is literally the borderline academic field of study that governs when and where and why and how all of these janky situations come up being good at this game is defined as successfully evading these scenarios and being unfair to the game back broken as the game may be there is a level of Freedom that exists deep within that a player who is willing to put in the work can dig out and that is awesome I would never tell someone they shouldn't be having fun with a game they like but at the same time I do not believe the triumphs of these creators erase the many failures of Ubisoft when it comes to this game if you have to fight that hard to enjoy a game something did go wrong on the development end and I simply cannot excuse the flaccid mess that encapsulates every good idea in this game I do not owe Ubisoft the work of building a worthwhile experience out of their broken mechanics when it was their corporate greed and cut Corners that made Unity what it is this video is ridiculously long and I appreciate you if you've made it this far and if you just skip to the end I can't blame you there either but trust me when I say I cut out a lot of negative criticism in order to keep this at least marginally respectful of your time I didn't bring up the terrible modern day story that is so meaningless that I could just fill you in on the whole thing in a sentence or two but I'm still not going to because it's just that bad I didn't talk about the completely one-sided tie-in with AC Rogue which solves the mystery of arno's first dad's death but never gets acknowledged because Unity was probably fully scripted by the time Rogue started development I barely touched on the marketing campaign they gave us three CG trailers all of which portrayed Arno as a champion of the Revolution only to make him barely interact with the revolution at all I didn't talk about the DLC which is a legitimately fun time that actually gives Arno more narrative focus and desperately needed closure but which was for me too little too late and finally I didn't bring up the glitches because truly they just distract from the real problems in unity the game is messed up with or without glitches and people use the they just hated it because it was broken excuse quite a bit but just because I don't focus on them here doesn't mean they're not there I was experiencing a wide variety of glitches every time I hit the record button this game in its patch state is still one of if not the glitchiest game I've ever played when I look at the sum of unity's Parts Each of which is mangled and mutilated in their own ways I see a bad game not a flawed Masterpiece not a Hidden Gem not a rough product on the brink of something amazing just the same bad game it was in 2014 and every year after patches are none I understand how it feels to look at unity and wish that was the direction the series went even as a big Origins and odyssey fan I know I would still rather have the urban social stealth simulator where you spend your time investigating targets and taking them out in creative ways but vision isn't enough a bad game with bad ideas and a bad game with good ideas are both bad games people see Unity as the antithesis of a game like Valhalla but while the basic design philosophies may be in direct opposition with one another I see unity and Valhalla as birds of a feather Rush development half-baked ideas technical instability and terrible microtransactions are all Hallmarks of the greed of modern Ubisoft and they are just as present in unity as they are in Valhalla I may rank Valhalla as my least favorite AC game but I do want you to know that between it and unity the contest is very close I know we can have a game where the parkour is exciting but functional where the combat and Stealth have depth that stands apart from other games where the world is full of immersive things to do and reasons to explore and where the story is told competently and respectfully but Unity never even got close to being that game we've seen the footage from Mirage and while it looks like it could be a lot of fun it's clearly not going to innovate the parkour and the social stealth in especially meaningful ways chances are Ubisoft has no intention of giving us the game so many people have asked for since ac1 but even if I don't believe Ubisoft will ever even give us that game that doesn't mean I can't believe we deserve it because as I've said so many times now I know we deserve better than the creative and Technical slap in the face that is Assassin's Creed Unity that was a ride thank you for sticking with me I hope if you disagree with me you'll be willing to talk about it in a civil way in the comments because I know a lot of people are passionate about this game and I'd love to chat about it here or on my patreon which I have Linked In My description but otherwise that is finally all I have for today have a great day and please do take care of yourself [Music] foreign

Channel: So Says Jay

Views: 127,087

Keywords:

Id: JNmOrmXGn0E

Length: 95min 21sec (5721 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2023