Stop it. just because this game and this video is about that, doesn’t mean the entire series as a whole isnt great. Don’t go too far because of this vid bro
@@keekersneakers3259 He's not wrong though. Ubisoft has done more wrong than right with Assassin's Creed and it all started with them firing the creator because he wanted to end it.
The story feels like Ubisoft gave its writers a set of things they wanted it to include, ordered them to finish in one week, and made the game out of the first draft with no editorial reviews at all.
The workplace conditions of ubisoft and broken state of the game’s entire online service is proof that this is dead on 😭 it feels like they had the health and damage properly balanced, then ubisoft came in and went “nerf the characters stats and we’ll sell 5-minute passes to play with the intended balancing”
Thts the problem with 10 difrebt companies working on 1 big game .they make content then when things would need to be changed or altered to make it better is to much work now so they dont do it.thts what unity is
20:40 I can't count the number of times in Unity I was fighting a hoard of 15 guys and absolutely slaying them until 6 of them decided to whip out the glock and end my life before I could even reach them.
Not many people know this (I don't think I've ever seen anyone else mention it, at least on UA-cam) but you can semi reliably dodge gun shots by zig zag manual jumping on flat ground; this is also useful for passing through crowds faster as you won't get the jog speed penalty (although passing through crowds in general is a very reliable way to avoid getting hit because someone from the crowd will get shot instead). I think you know but in case you need a reminder, manual jump is left stick input and high profile + tap freerun up button.
tbh, i honsetly dont get it, if you are fighting 15 fkin guys and most of them have guns of course couple of em gonna pull it out and fk u then and there, as long as you keeo the melee combat below 1v4 it bever becomes an issue. how is this a criticism of the combat , what do ppl want? do they want to deflect the bullet like sekiro(damm i fkin love sekiro) but that would break the semi realism... just dont 1v20 simple. maybe, they should let you grab and "human shield" enemies that are low on hp, ehich would encourage you to whittle down couple guy tonlow hp and keep them around wuthout outright k^lling them so that u can use these fatigue dudes and shield when need arise if u fight 1v15 and stuff i guess maybe,
@@btchiaintkidding7837 I guess I should have clarified my point. I used an extreme example but what I was trying to get across is that very often during fights enemies will back up to shoot you, and when you disengage other dudes to stop the ones shooting at you the others will draw their guns and the cycle continues.
@@GrismarPicklemelt the quickshot feature is technically made to solve this exact scenario, the problem is most people won't be able to divide attention to the ones backing away in the heat of combat, hence the camera won't be targeting said further enemy. All enemies shoot from pistol range to make sure you can always shoot them back (snipers die in one hit regardless of the player damage level too), you see someone backing away and immediately focus the camera onto him and quickshot; it's a skill you can master. Quick dropping smoke or stun bombs makes this easier because remember, you're an Assassin, use all your arsenal to your advantage (tools are dirt cheap for a reason). There is nothing inherently wrong with the combat system _in theory_ (i.e. when we ignore bugs and glitches), discouraging prolonged combat is good and encouraging tool use to add another layer of mastery, while raising the skill ceiling to boot, is great.
@@shira_yone quickshot never seemed to work correctly from what I saw, but maybe I was just using it wrong. It's been quite a while so I'm not 100% sure.
I think the difficulty with the French Revolution, similar to the American Revolution, is that so many events are well documented. AC3 was basically a tour of the entire war for independence to the point people mocked Connor for somehow being at every notable event. Lots of the best parts of the Revolution are in this game but they needed more focus and cohesion with the other aspects of the story. The narrative of the French Revolution would have made much more sense if it felt like the Assassins and Templars were actually meddling in the Revolution instead of feeling incidental, and the star crossed lovers of Arno and Elise could have worked so well but all of these stories needed to be tied much closer together.
The thing is they do touch on this in the coop missions. I played through them solo and while they could be tedious, it actually felt like you were doing your part to influence the revolution, and everything that came after. One mission involves you saving a politician and busting the Austrian spy cell in Paris in 1792, another has you break into the Jacobin Hall and cutting off the leadership of the party while they try escape into the catacombs, something that feels very genuine to the Assassin cause. The problem lies in how in each mission Arno feels like a faceless husk, because to anybody you're playing with that's what you're meant to be. Really Ubi needed to integrate them more into Arno's story instead of it feeling like a side-campaign, the especially the coop missions in 1794 since they'd be great for re-integrating him into the brotherhood after his exile
Glad to see someone critically analyzing this game and not just giving it the “hidden gem” treatment. I did a play-through of the entire series recently and Unity frustrated me the most out of all of them(on a moment-to-moment basis, especially with stealth). Plenty of great potential, but the honest truth is that it doesn’t live up to it. Still beautiful though!
@@ArkenwayHa, I feel the same about people who constantly praise the older ones to spite the new ones. I have played Unity recently, for what it's worth. I still adore it. It has a *spark* for me, despite its myriad flaws.
I think the nostalgia for the classic style AC games and hatred against RPG route that ubisoft went with the new AC games is the reason why Unity is being seen as "Underrated" or "Hidden Gem" AC game.
@@Arkenway Totally agree. I find myself disagreeing with the online consensus frequently, and tbh it’s kind of frustrated me because it’s kept me away from AC games I ended up enjoying a lot(Odyssey/Syndicate) and hyped me up for ones that were kinda mid. It’s definitely a series that you need to form your own opinions on, and not rely on what the popular takes are.
@@kristianwhite1061 Agreed. I'm one of those weirdos that genuinely enjoyed Valhalla. The internet would make it sound like that's impossible. And I can't stand Black Flag. Gotta have your own takes and just try stuff out and see if it's for you or not
I think the best way to describe this game, both for good and ill, is "It has its moments". It has its moments where the Parkour works and looks amazing, but it also has its moments where it is incredibly clunky to control and watch. It has its moments where the combat looks like a choreographed spectacle, but it also has its moments where it just stops functioning. It has its moments where the stealth is the best in the series, but it also has its moments where it has literally the worst. It has its moments where the story and acting flow wonderfully, but it also has its moments where it is almost as bad as Valhalla if not worse. It has its moments. But its good moments are often not enough to outweigh its bad moments.
Somebody else commented that “wasted potential” applies to the series as a whole, and while that may be true, i feel like it applies wayyyyy more to Unity than any other entry in the franchise.
@@gaellorenzo3006lol the rolling can still cause you to be hit 9 times out of 10 you’ll roll and just get slapped by another guy anyway it’s a garbage feature compared to the human shields be honest.
@@currieisyummie3420 It doesn't take away from the fact that the problem persists. Previous games' problem was the same. You need to be in combat against someone in order to use human shields, and somehow, you need to be in combat in order to dodge. I still thinking dodging is better, since you can do that action even if the one shooting you is the only one in combat with you.
@@KingkuntaGG yeah in co-op, a mode where you're lucky to find even one player to join you and forced to play solo (which is almost unplayable in that state) has little to relate to the main story. Why the fuck would they make the French revolution a side quest in a game that's about the French revolution.
@@KingkuntaGG It was literally advertised to be part of the French revolution even the fucking E3 trailer. And even if the setting wasn't the French Revolution why the fuck is nearly every assassin's Creed where the historical set pieces completely entangle with what you're doing. AC1 you're in the crusades taking out major influencers and even get involved in heading into the battlefield, AC2 you have front row seats to the Pazzi Conspiracy and it is absolutely important to Ezios Revenge quest, Brotherhood Rodrigo Borgia's failed escape, Revelation the battle for the throne of Sultan which also plays a piece in Ezios appeasement to Suleiman to find all they keys to Altair's library, ACIII completely involved in the entire American revolution the battle for bunkerhill, riding with Paul Revere, Battle for Chesapeake etc. all play a part with the main plot to get key to the temple, ACIV do I really I have to explain the personal journey during the Golden Age of Piracy it has to Edward's eventual joining to the Brotherhood. If you take the French Revolution out of Unity you'd miss absolutely nothing. It has little to do with what's going on and has no stake in the plot compared to previous and future historical set pieces in the series including Odyssey and Valhalla.
This is now my favorite review or analysis of AC Unity I've ever seen. I thank you for making this video, and for also highlighting one critical point many creators who cover it _wish_ more people would actually hear whenever we say it. We _do_ complain and we _are_ often honest about the issues this game has, across the board. We really do deserve better than AC Unity, we deserve what AC Unity _promised_ to be, and it's something they never properly returned for a genuine second attempt at.
That is very high praise, thank you. And thank you for the role you have played in showcasing the reality of Unity beyond both the buggy launch and hype that came years later. I've watched your videos for a long time, and without them I do not think nearly as many people would understand both the potential and the flaws of the game. And again, thank you for allowing me to use your quote in the video. It really does mean a lot that you commented, I wish you the best.
The story is exactly why I still haven't finished this game. While the gameplay can be a lot of fun, the story is so boring I can't bring myself to continue story missions a lot of the time. Just find myself doing side content around the city and soaking in the views. Great review bro!
I barely made it through a second playthrough because of how much I hate the story and the gameplay. The story is such a mess and whiplash. The prologue is flawed but solid. The first act drops Arno's characterization immediately. The second act was just senseless drama. The third act was alright, but the monologue at the end felt undeserved. So many plot threads just left hanging at the end of it all.
I think that while the game was ahead of its time in terms of graphics, the story was mediocre at best, not engaging. The mechanical/gameplay changes were a step in the right direction, but it all felt so clunky and janky. Parkour was sometimes unresponsive and the animations unnatural, as if Arno was defying gravity with his long horizontal jumps. Stealth was something that Syndicate improved, adding whistling and a better cover system. I guess combat wasn't the worst, but I wasn't a fan. The unavoidable gun shots were annoying.
The architecture in the game is a lot bigger and complicated than in other games so they had to make jumps like this, and 3/4 of the story was cut because Ubisoft needed to release the game in 2014, and Devs spent 5 years on the game as it is, most of it was creating the city itself and animations, etc. At the time on a brink of generations developers aimed too high for a new gen of consoles but overestimated them. Still the game is great and has very repayable missions and requires skill to play. Recently a mod came out called ACU Fixes,it fixed a lot of annoying things in gameplay
The story could've been great. Revolutionary France and you're the son of an assassin who gets fostered by a Templar grandmaster. But they just couldn't hack it lol
As someone who love and enjoys Unity, saying the story is mediocre is a massive understatement; it's just bad. Unlike the gameplay mechanics which are indeed just as rushed and broken yet full with unmet potential, you can actually work around the system to have a sliver of fun out of them; on the other hand you just have to deal with the shite story as it was. They were already setting up Arno as this detective kind of character (even got his discount sherlock side missions). I can only imagine if the story is actually an engaging detective story where Arno follows the trail of Germain's conspiracy using his wits, finding clues and leads throughout his investigations with the help of his fellow assassins and/or historical figures (just like Altair and Ezio were); but no he just got magic memory read when he kills people that conveniently lead towards the next target. What a joke. Legit back when the game first released I was already not as mad as most people, but the story gave me conniptions right away. It was especially disappointing considering the last main game that at a glance seemed like the least Assassin centered story (AC4) at the time, was actually among the best in character development and philosophy from the series. What Ubisoft should've rip-off from The Witcher games shouldn't have been the open world RPG-lite gameplay, it should've been the detective-esque story structure.
The story isn't that bad, and parkour depends on your skill to understand how it works. You're mediocre at learning how the parkour works, then no wonder you can't play it neither 😂
@@nightmarepegasus4141 Lmao, it's been perfectly explained in the video that no matter how well you understand the parkour, sometimes the game will just not do whatever you want it to do. You're telling that to a player who prefers the AC1-Revelations parkour system over any other, I know perfectly how to control the characters in these games and they always respond how I want them to. It's not the case in Unity. And it doesn't change the fact that some of the animations are simply unnatural.
@@clunkwestweed4541exactly what I was thinking dude, it's really wierd how the fan base of both franchises are split, but Zelda could keep it's identity, the critical acclamate, and can bring back stuff from the old formula to improve the new one. Mean while AC is completely fucked in all ways.
@@matheusfernandesdocarmo922 That's where lays the difference between a studio given the proper freedom to act and made by a studio (yes, technically other studios like Monolith helped, but in a more "help with 3D assets and world assembling", not the core design and physolophy behind it) composed of peoples that understand the game and work to bring a cohesive vision to reality resulting in two of the most critically and public success of the last twenty years... and a studio mainly guided by the corporate suits, guiding every step of the development to deliver mediocrity after mediocrity to the point that fan themselves forget what even made Assassin's Creed good to begin with...
@@endertuber8300 Totally agree man, AC isn't the type of game that can receive yearly releases, or be sustained by a live service as they tried in the RPG trilogy, or split the project in parts for a bunch of studios work on. AC is a platform, stealth, action adventure, open world game, focused in narrative and single player experience, for all this elements come to fruition, you need time, really good talent and a really narrow and strong vision, everything the series is lacking in some shape or forme since AC 2. Is really sad seeing how Zelda grow, evolve and change because of new design philosophies that AC brings to the table, two generations ago, while AC is lurking in the mud, failing to live to smallest of expectations, like being a Assassin in a Assassin's Creed game !!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@matheusfernandesdocarmo922 Yep... as I always say: AC went bad from the moment AC1 released in 2007 under the Ubisoft banner... imagine if it had a development like a Witcher game... with AC2 coming out in 2011/2012 with the same jump in quality from Witcher 1 and Assassin of Kings, with yet another jump in quality like Wild Hunt... yet again, wasted potential we'll never get to experience properly
Thank you, God that we have an honest analysis of this game. I really wanted to love this game when it came out but everything noted in this video was what I noticed and had to accept as it was unfortunately never properly capitalized on. And ever since it baffles me that people want to go back to this. But I get it, they want the idea of what Unity was trying to be but never was. Hell, I want Unity to be what it never was, too.
How is it this hard for you people to understand the concept, that you still say "it baffles me that people want to go back to this"? Even tho you admit it yourself, that what *we* want is not Unity itself, but a game that actually capitalizes on what Unity failed to?
@@tarnishedpose There are plenty of people online that want to go back to the systems that are currently present in AC Unity. If you were as aware or as smart as you thought you were, that shouldn't have been a surprise. Be careful who you call "you people".
@@LeonJohnson-yi3hg You can actually just tap it once and it will stay crouch unless you did a sprint assassination (which is not advisable considering it takes so long than a normal crouch assassination)
For a while I've felt that Unity is incredibly ambitious, but Syndicate is consistently forgotten as the closest the series has got to perfecting its core ideas. Everything may be simplified from Unity, but it all works and is entirely readable. The carriages and boats provide unique parkour challenges Stealth has less options (no disguise for example) but has AI that responds realistically I, like all fans, want the ideas of Unity to be returned to. But whenever I want that type of game, Syndicate always attracts me more for these reasons
@@sosaysjaySyndicate did have, I feel, a woeful story, though - with some of the worst celebrity [historic] cameos in the entire series... I think I rolled my eyes at every one. It wasted the twins, too, especially Evie. Gorgeous setting, but it wasn't enough to make me endure the story till the end, and despite buying the DLC I didn't ever finish that, either.
@@SabiJD Syndicate handled cameos the same way modern-day Simpsons episodes handled them. In your face and doesn't mesh into the story. "Hey, look! So-and-so is in our game/show! Look how cool they are in our signature art style!"
"Kill two dads in one hour" Oh, my god, how did I forget this? I was in hysterics when this unfolded, it was trying so hard to make me care. Probably not the tone they were going for.
You've quickly become one of my favorite channels, Jay. I like how you go in-depth with your points on and give a new perspective on them in a video essay format. Your channel will reach greater heights. Keep up the good work!
AC Unity, for its story, is like a trilogy but your just getting the cliffnotes all compacted into one game. And yet even then, you feel like the cliffnotes are leaving out many details.
You forgot the "jumping cloth physics" in-between camera cuts!. Also, the fact that there's no safe profile to start a new game off. You literally can't start a new game without somehow deleting your previous profile or just replay individual missions through the progression tracker.
Unity had amazing potential but itclearly needed an extra year of development. The game can be quite enjoyable and does some impressive things - it has huge crowds, ceautiful buildings and pretty flashy parkour. Unfortunately, it also cut a lot of great features from the previous games or went in the wrong direction. Overall it feels unfinished and broken. The parkour has cool animations, but it's clunky, imprecise and floaty. The combat is harder than before, but it's repetitive, uninteresting and it lacks the flair of previous games. The stealth is functional but barebones and unimaginative. Unity has so many fundamental issues that go well beyond bad performance or bugs: The controls are clunky and imprecise; stealth kills and finishers often don't connect with enemies in believable ways; you can't use the hidden blade in combat; there are very few gadgets and they don't have any interesting combat moves (like the hidden pistol, rope dart or even snares had in previous games); you can't carry bodies (why? All games since ACII had that feature); you can't have multiple weapons like the sword and a dagger (you are limited to one main weapon at a time); the cherry bombs are still broken and enemies can't hear them; you can't whistle to attract enemies; there are no combos or finishers with a pistol; regular soldiers don't carry muskets like they did in ACIII; the story is short and uninteresting; Arno becomes boring and loses all his charisma after he becomes the assassin; the romance between Arno and Elise doesn't work; the main villain is weak and forgettable; the piece of Eden makes no sense; the game wasted an opportunity to feature Connor; historical characters are pretty boring (apart from maybe one scene with Napoleon); the side content is weak; there are way too many pointless collectibles; the customization is mid and most cosmetic items are ugly af; the co-op isn't properly integrated into the story and it feels detached from the rest of the game. We could go on for hours. Unity is simply a wasted opportunity. It had some great ideas and it does some things well but overall it's an unfinished and unpolished mess of a game.
Calling your video a good take is an understatement-it hit the nail on the head of why this game is so beautiful yet utterly unplayable. While I didn't experience any bugs on my first playthrough, the story just felt so under done. There were the makings of a good story, but like every other part of this game it needed more time. If they had made Rogue the annual release that year, and gave Unity another year in the oven we'd be looking back at that game now as the game that reinvigorated the series for the next gen. I can't help thinking the series would be more genuinely "Assassin's Creed" had this game been given the time and resources it needed to stand tall. Now every AC game feels like a Witcher knockoff because they over corrected Unity's flaws and chased trends.
Extremely good video Jay. I couldn't stay for all of your points but for the ones I did just so well said. Keep up with the content, can't wait for the next one.
I blindly supported this game as the "best" of the series until this video made me realize why I couldn't even get halfway through the game my most recent time trying. Now I'm actually giving Syndicate a chance and finding it much more enjoyable than Unity was.
I genuinely believe that the combat in old AC games is MISUNDERSTOOD. A lot of people look at the AC combat as Dark Souls players who fixate on difficulty. But here's the thing: ASSASSIN'S CREED COMBAT WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE HARD! It was meant to be COOL! You play as a skilled assassin, so it makes perfect sense that you're able to dispatch of multiple enemies in short time. That's the part of the fantasy of being an assassin! AC combat should never be compared to Dark Souls or other similar games. It should be compared to Batman, Spider-Man or Shadow of Mordor. AC combat is all about style, not difficulty. Anyone can pick up the controller and win a fight by standing still and countering. But that's not how the games were meant to be played! A skilled player who knows all the systems can use a lot of different moves, gadgets and tricks to make the combat more stylish and more interesting. So when people say that "old AC combat is bad" I always want to say "It's not! You just lack imagination". Think about how many different things you can do in Revelations that you can't do in Unity. You can fight with hidden blades, you can fight with your fists, you have a sword and a dagger, you throw knives, shoot a crossbow or use a hidden gun. You can counter with a hookblade to steal money mid-combat or to performa a badass execution. You can disarm opponents and use their swords, axes or spears. You can chain kill enemies with brutal animations. You can throw sand in people's eyes to stun them. You can perform double finishers where Ezio impales one guy on the sword and shoots another one with his gun, you can throw 3 knives at the same time to kill multiple targets, you can throw a big axe or a two-handed sword, you can throw a spear to impale someone, you can spin a spear to kill everyone around you. You can throw a spike bomb on the ground to stun enemies. You can frighten NPCs by detonating a bomb filled with blood. You can throw an explosive bomb that works like a lethal grenade or another one that works like a non-lethal stun grenade. And ACIII has its own set of amazing moves that give combat more depth. You can literally choke an enemy with a snare. You can hang people on trees. You can drag your victim with a rope dart into a bush. You can put an explosive mine on an enemy mid-combat. You can counter with your pistol or shoot 2 people at the same time. You can air assassinate with any weapon including swords, axes, tomahawks, hidden blades, bare hands and even muskets. You can assassinate while running without losing much momentum. There's an animation for double assassination when your 2nd target is behind your 1st one. You can yank people mid-combat with a rope. You can disarm a musketeer and immediately shoot someone with the mustket (but not if it has already been fired). You can take a human shield to protect yourself from a volley of musket bullets. I'm sick and tired of people saying that "old AC comabt had no depth". It's ridiculous. AC Unity combat has no depth! Seriously. What can you do in this game? You press attack, parry or dodge and that's it. There are no interesting gadgets, no flashy finishers, no double kills, no chain kills, no fist combat, no hidden blade combat, no disarming, no nothing. Unity is by far the least interesting combat system in the series. Even RPG games like AC Origins have better combat than this.
I remember I platinumed _Unity_ out of pure spite when it came out, lol. But in doing so, I did learn to appreciate it. People may look back on it with rose-colored glasses now, but I can't really blame them. If they actually worked on that system for a few years & really perfected that level of parkour, it would be amazing. It was a step in the right direction, but it never had a chance to live up to its full potential with that yearly release bs.
ik i'm maybe being negative but this game is perfect for casuals who think they want "old ac back" yet never want to engage in the systems and will never detect or understand the jankyness unless it literally hit them in the face, in my opinion
This may sound weird, but honestly, prior to your videos "social stealth" didn't even register to me as a concept that was missing. Because in the old games it never was more than, well, hire a portable bush or distract some NPCs with the press of a button. When I first heard "social stealth" the term seemed so grand and I wondered what I had been missing in the old games. It sounds like intrigue, infiltration, covert operations. Not thief/courtesan/brawler-flavoured button presses. So I at least don't really miss it, I guess, but I thinks its a bit odd that some people, like, really want them back. Though I still wonder what an AC game might look like with a vastly expanded system based on this premise.
I understand where you are coming from, I do not think that take sounds weird. There are a lot of concepts within AC that sound really cool on paper but got minimal exploration from Ubisoft beyond a conceptual level. AC2 pushed things way forward with systemic blending in different crowds and hiring factions, and AC3 nudged it forward more by letting you blend with any groupings of NPCs, not just specific ones tailored for social stealth. But other than that, innovation was really minimal which I think is part of the reason it wasn't missed that much. I am glad to see it returning in Mirage in what seems to be a much, much more functional form than what we got in Valhalla.
Social stealth was great in Unity. If you killed someone while blending and kept talking, no one would notice. It made stealth killings in plain sight viable. If you didn’t use a lot of social stealth in Unity, you played the game wrong. That’s why there so many NPCs.
@@sosaysjay that's a question that popped into my head a couple of times while watching your videos - all these different systems or ideas that sound great on paper but never really get fully developed. I loved Odyssey for it's expanded (side)quests and exploration, but still it felt a bit undercooked in a way. English isn't my first language, but I think the word I'm looking for is cohesion. It feels like so many moving parts that don't get enough attention because every aspect needs development time. I wonder if it would be beneficial to rotate between them. Have an AC that goes all in on Hitman Style Stealth. Have one that just full on goes Witcher open world with deep Quests and exploration etc. Rotate between them. If Witcher would've had to accommodate Hitman Gameplay, it would be probably pretty bad. Just say "Screw It" and untangle all these many, maybe too many systems into manageable games and flesh them out.
@@PuntilaserI think this is part of their plan, honestly, to cycle between different gameplay styles. They realise they've split the player base. Some like the ship combat, some like the rpg's, some want actual a return to social stealth. If a franchise must go on forever, I guess I can respect this way of going about things. I wonder what codename Hexe will be?
Assassins Creed doesn't have/never has had incredibly in-depth nuanced stealth mechanics in my opinion, I think it's way you're always above or below; on a roof or hanging from it, a lot easier to program this type of stealth; less complex interactions, less likely for them to occur. When you're in front of enemies, you need to literally be rendered invisible; hidden in crowds, grass or again... behind, below or above enemies; it's so simplistic. Even less complex games have improved gamefeel, so they often feel better than AC A lot of people say "comparison is unfair or indirect" I disagree somewhat especially considering the time-disparity; some of these games came out so much longer ago: Dishonored 1, 2/Ghost of Tsushima/Hitman series/Metal Gear Solid I - V/Sekiro, etc.
games really are unlike any other artform or medium, like im watching arno dynamically mix animations to parry each enemy attack and its beautiful and the artistry and technical knowhow on display are insane, and yet if if doesnt feel good its bad simple as that
The way so many people called this a "hidden gem" made me expect a lot going into this on my first playthrough, but man, was I in for a flaming train ride. Honestly, I enjoyed a lot about this, but I think this game has actually become overrated in online circles. Additionally, great video Jay, agree with practically all your points!
Excellent video! I'm playing Syndicate lately and, despite removing manual jump, the game feels far more responsive and consistent than Unity in its moment to moment gameplay. Unity overly focused on fidelity over gameplay which runs contrary to their ambitions of crafting sandbox assassination missions where planning and precise execution should matter. Syndicate got hate for being formulaic, but for a game with significantly shorter development time than Unity, it salvaged the hell out of its wreckage into something that is safely enjoyable.
Syndicate was made by the same group that made brotherhood. They always used to make the most enjoyable games, and Jacob was quickly one of my favourite protagonists, even if evie was boring. Sad to see that those creative minds have left the franchise after Syndicate, and sadder yet to see new people who made odyssey and previously had lower down roles in syndicate development, claiming creative credit for the game. It confused many online.
Syndicate gets a lot of flack for being less ambitious than Unity, but it is a much more functional game. Reduction of input lag alone makes a huge difference in how the game feels. There is also just less to get stuck on because the world is less complex, which has its pros and cons obviously. Personally, I think Syndicate is as good as it could have been in many ways given just how much they had to try and mask instead of fix. Large crowds like in Unity were just too much for the tech, so they were removed. Parkour was really janky so they added the launcher and simplified the world design. Combat was revamped to be much easier but also much less frustrating. Stealth just works better, plain and simple. These are bandaids, not real solutions, and yet they succeed in making the game so much more functional than Unity. Add fantastic side content and a clearer Templar plot to the mix and you're left with a game that I enjoy a lot. I get that the simplification upsets a lot people who wanted to see Unity built upon, but going over everything I did in this video, I'm amazed the game works as well as it does.
Sometimes I got softlocked jumping in Notre Dame and flying forever in place not being able to land. Once I broke my arm apparently and all animations got wonky. I also remember the cartoony "5 guards in a row fall for the same hiding spot" encounters. Missed out on the platinum, because I did not feel like doing the multiplayer sync kills and stuff. Overall I had fun with it, but would never touch it again since it launched.
Great video Jay. Just found your channel, sure you're going to be big. I will say, I don't necessarily think Unity is incredible, but I do have a greater affection for it now than when it launched. But that affection is largly directly due to disappointment with the newer games. Unity isn't perfect by any means, but it feels the prototype amd proof of concept of how they could have furthered the original identity of AC. They may not have been successful, but they were trying to make improvements to stealth and parkour, densify the city architecture and crowds, and put an even greater and emphasis on assassinations. I think Unity could have been the beginning of recitalizing AC, adressing fan concerns of the franchise going stale without needing to completely reinvent it turn it into a whole new genre of game. I'm one of those who is really disappointed in the direction the series went after Syndicate, and I can't help but look back at Unity as a huge missed lesson. Ubisoft just thought we were tired of their formula when Unity got bad reviews. But personally, I just wanted them to refine the formula. Oh, and release a functioning piece of software.
Every time Ubisoft receives criticism for a game, they completely abandon the ideas behind it and instead of improving, they simplify them with very little effort. Unity could have been the bones to a perfect Assassins Creed game with flashy parkour and assassinations.
@@VenomousWolverine yeah, they really do. It's like they don't realize what they have. Criticism doesn't mean everything about it is terrible. Usually we're saying we like what's there but see how it could be even better. Wish they'd stuck it out after Unity.
The issue was, people were very _very_ mad about Unity (and it even directly affected their bottom line as the next game, Syndicate, bombed). It's not just the bugs and Unity's inherently broken state, everyone just didn't see any of Unity's potential nor see what it brought to the table; most people liked how AC4 branched out and became a _"life as a [insert iconic historical group] simulator"_ kind of game and chastised Unity for sticking to the same old Assassin centered story and gameplay. Most, just like you, only realized Unity's massive potential in hindsight; especially after the new games dropped the ball so intensely. Honestly I wouldn't even blame Ubisoft as much, there is zero chance for them to stick it out with Unity and improving it's foundation while risking yet another backlash accusing lack of innovation; *post release* the players were mostly at fault on why they abandoned the series' roots, though Ubi is obviously at fault for releasing the game in it's unfinished state which got people angry in the first place.
@@shira_yone I agree but look at Syndicate. They added rope launcher to decrease parkour, combat was made dull simple by mashing one button and rest of the game was just the same thing. Ubisoft did not improve anything that Unity was not able to achieve. They just said let's dull it down and add simple stuff. Unity's combat was basic but in a way effective because stealth was prioritised. The cover system was not good but we did not see any improvement in Syndicate. I don't think Ubisoft can now even create a game which can rival some of the top games released every year. They just release generic RPGs where one is a shooter, the other is a now a fantasy land.
@@VenomousWolverine I heard plenty of people (especially sane ones that doesn't care too much about parkour) ends up preferring Syndicate over Unity so they must've improved (in comparison to Unity) plenty of other small aspects that adds up.
every few months i get a strong urge to try out unity since as a photo and video guy the tone mapping and lighting in unity is still maybe the best in any game ever, hopefully this video will convince me otherwise cause i couldnt be assed waiting thru the download lol
I'd still recommend you form your own opinion on it rather than just taking a UA-camr's word on it, it is a very flawed game but it is also loved in equal measure in spite of that, although I get it if you just don't wanna install a 40GB game lol
I don't think it's worth it to suffer through all the jank if it's just for photos. It can be enjoyable with the right mindset and motivation, but this one might not carry you through if I were to be quite frank about it.
It's interesting looking at AC nowadays as someone who stopped after AC3. People talking about the newest games to compare them to "older" games like Unity or Black Flag. I'll never buy any AC game ever again but it's kinda wild to see how my man Ezio's legacy turned into fighting dragons.
@@kod8933A bit old, but I would say that Origins and Odyssey, while they're just AC game by name, are far more engaging open world titles with well made action and stealth. They aren't excellent, but you may have a better time playing those than, say, AC3 or Unity.
I think Assassin's Creed as an IP is one that has always suffered from great concepts and ideas executed poorly due to laziness and greed. As much as I love this series, time has showed me I've always enjoyed it more in concept than reality.
AC Unity was the final nail in the coffin for me. I was a long time fan starting with AC 1. But after playing Unity, I knew that the AC that I loved was gone. Both narratively and mechanically.
My problem with AC Unity, is that it is so boring. Arno is completely unlikeable. Ironically his overall story is similar to Ezio, but their actions and how they come across is so different.
They would have had such a good opportunity to explore the different orders by having Arno actually unknowingly develop relationships with the templars, including Elise, before his adopted father gets assassinated and he gets involved with the Assassins the same way he does in the game. One thing AC2 did so well is that it made you invested in killing the targets, no other Assassins Creed game has managed to do that for me to such an extent. The only ones that come close are AC3 and Black Flag.
@@burgerbran I remember him being petty, not really understanding why he’s killing Templars, playing into Germains coup, not listening to his mentors. He’s generally unlikable in the way he speaks to be people. It isn’t until right the very end, he goes onto have a redemption arc. It’s like, the game should have started at the end.
@@zandernewson9933Arno is a character built around being headstrong and impulsive, never questioning his rationale, and jumping into his shoddy plans with no hesitation. He played into Germain’s coup by killing key opponents of him because he never sought the council of his other assassin’s, instead acting without their consent, and leaving them in the dark until he’s already screwed the pooch; he also acts without full knowledge of the situation because he takes information at the surface level, again playing into Germain’s coup, and causing him to make a lot of mistakes. His redemption arc at the end of the game sees him realizing the copious amounts of mistakes he’s making in the form of Elise’s borderline suicidal pursuit of vengeance. Arno decides that the vengeance that he was so recklessly seeking was not more important than Elise. This causes Elise to get upset at him letting their chance at Germain go, and the assassin’s finally get sick of him and kick him out. Then Elise ropes him back into the hunt for Germain, and Arno wraps up the loose ends his sloppy work left untied before going into the final confrontation. Arno ends the game finally realizing how wrong he was, and comes to understand the true meaning of the creed. Arno isn’t meant to be likable-at least not in the sense of him being competent, and his arc was him getting over his arrogance, and becoming a wiser man. Kind of like Edward in a way. Now, did they accomplish what they were setting out to do? Maybe, that’s up for you to decide for yourself, but I think Arno was an okay protagonist.
I didn't dislike him, or find him unlikeable; I just didn't find him likeable, he has little character, or character development; like most Assassins Creed protagonists, I'm just kinda apathetic; they don't make me care, it's like killing off other characters to progress his: their lives mean nothing, so their deaths mean nothing to me too, same with his.
My biggest problem with all the parkour systems after brotherhood (which had a wall jump added to the second one) that they look nice and thats it. Everything is automated and what happens when everything is automated? they got rid of the parkour riddles. You just climb because its cool. Thats it. You dont think anymore you just press a button and the protagonist does everything else. the climbing become so boring it got almost irrelevant in assasins creed syndicate when they implemented the grappling hook.
every time i get the itch to download Unity again i watch a video essay on it and think of something better to feed my SSD AC as a franchise, as a formula is so unique in the industry that even though the individual pieces always fall short, the games feel like more than the sum of their lackluster parts. I *want* to love the games, I *need* something like them to be objectively good, but it's frustrating that Ubisoft just seems incapable. I wonder if they should try something like Bethesda and Fallout NV, where they hand the tools and IP to a different, enthusiastic studio for a game.
I think AC Unity is the closest the series ever got to the IDEA of an Assassin's Creed game that started with AC1, but on practice, it falls so shortly, it's honestly disheartening to see. The parkour system is the perfect parkour system for this idea, but it doesn't work properly most of the time. The stealth system the perfect stealth system for this idea, but i doesn't work properly most of the time. The combat, the story. The only thing I think is done greatly is the world, Paris, it is dense, it is realistic and is a perfect place for an Assassin's Creed experience. It pains me so much that Ubisoft, instead of keeping on with these systems and improving them, to eventually turn them in the best Assassin's Creed experience ever, first completely butchered them with AC Syndicate, and then abandoned them with Origins.
Another big problem, partly mentioned, that in the big picture of the AC series, this game doesn't matter, it doesn't add anything meaningful to the plot. Sure many don't like how the modern day parts pull them out of the immersive gameplay, but they are also necessary for stringing together these games. We had Desmond's story that was actually solid in AC3, but also ended there. In BF and Rogue we had those first person investigation like parts that added a lot to what happened after AC3, and started the Juno plotline (which was dropped, what a shame). But here it's just a big fat nothing, and at the end of the story we also find out there was nothing really to find out. I'd say every other game added something to the AC Lore, except Unity.
The ending was such a slap in the face. "Whoops, looks like we couldn't find the big bad because he could be any of these skulls in the catacombs, but that's OK, we already got what we need, anyway! Kthxbai!" People can say all they want about AC3's ending being bad, because, as the Wachowskis warned with _The Matrix: Path of Neo,_ the "Jesus thing" trope may work from a cinematic perspective, but it won't work in an interactive context like a video game. But good grief, at least that ending gave you something to look forward to, like Juno being the new big bad of the modern day, taking the place of Vidic, and a new generation of Assassins running where Desmond walked. But, like _Unity's_ ending, that plotline ended with a wet fart.
I think you sum it up well. It's hard for people to resolve conflicting ideas about a single thing, so some folk look at this game and see only the failure, others see only the promise. To really understand the game, you have to see both. I think this review captures both nicely. When I look over the AC series, at all the games, and at each individual aspect and feature of each game, a pattern emerges. Everything appears amazing, but falls apart on closer inspection. With few exceptions, all the protagonists are charming and likeable. Yet few actually serve as meaningful protagonists, with anything like a substantial story. Arno's story is based on his love for Elise, and his tragedy would be palpable, if there was much to their relationship beyond the excellent acting and direction of the performers, and, of course, the gorgeous character modeling and quality performance capture. But beneath all those surface aspects is a love story with no depth, not consistency, no real thematic weight. And beyond that, as the series goes on, the entire framing story has become like a dead, rotten limb they refuse to just cut off, instead dragging it from sequel to sequel and flailing it limply as if to say "See, this still works. It's fine." The frame of AC is actually three frames, the present-day vs the past, the philosophical battle between Templars and Assassins, and the legacy of the Isu. But these three frames simply don't line up into a single narrative meaning. Each entry in the series promises this clunky plot will move forward, but instead, it becomes more and more convoluted as it spins it wheels. Unity itself is a series of scenes in search of a story, and the series as a whole is a series of ideas in search of a narrative. The writers seem to think just trotting out the ideas in game after game is enough. Not in my estimation. With each new game, I find myself increasingly at a loss to see the relevance of the present-day frame story, or the purpose of each mention of the Isu to the story at hand. None of it adds up. And as with the stories, the game play is always similarly underdeveloped. Individual bits will be crafted to perfection. The combat in the recent RPG titles manages to have a touch of depth and variety. But once it combines with the story progression, it falls victim to the classic RPG problem. You start underpowered, and by the mid-game, you're so absurdly OP it hardly counts as a game at all, let alone a challenging one. But to me, the series' core problem is best seen in its stealth. Stealth is the core identity of the AC games. But stealth requires polish, and polish is the where these games truly fail. Anyone who's ever done anything artistic for a living knows that the first 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and the last 20% takes 80% of the time. This is where Ubisoft in general, and the AC team in particular, make their fatal mistake. They don't take the time to polish what they've made. They've streamlined their process toward bloat rather than perfection. And so even with games like Valhalla, which isn't riddled with bugs like Unity, nothing is particularly well done. It's not so much a game as a bunch of game components and systems chucked into an engine any old how, in the hopes that fun will emerge on its own. The greatest failure of AC: Unity, to my mind, isn't that the game was bad, but that the wrong lesson was learned. Instead of realizing they needed to make a better game, they decided they should just make one that's totally different. Don't get me wrong, I think the RPG format was a good direction for the series, a natural evolution. But while they didn't end up as badly broken as Unity, they made the same mistake, prioritizing "more" over "better." They took an extra year to develop AC: Origins, but instead of spending that time polishing and perfecting, they spent it bloating. They made larger games, but they're still undercooked. There's a famous Mark Twain quote, “I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.” That sums up everything wrong with AC games. Three frame stories where there should be one. Ten chapters when there should be four. A dozen half-baked game mechanics, all conflicting one another, because they didn't want to take the time to make sure five would interact seamlessly. A game series that tries to be all things to everyone, that never quite pleases anyone.
I liked Unity, but I don't mind your more harsh attitude towards it at all, since I don't think I even remember much of the game. The city was pretty, the customization was cool, the story was bad - that's it. The fact that I don't even remember like 90% of my time with Unity tells me it wasn't that great to begin with
You know, I can excuse most of the problems with this game. I really can. But the story is what kills it for me. How could it manage to have so many good ideas and drop the ball with every single one of them? It's honestly baffling to me. One of the coolest and least explored settings (the French revolution) and they do fuck all with it, serving as a backdrop that barely even sets the mood. Heck, they managed to screw up even the romance plotline which was, in a lot of ways, new to the franchise. And Élise was such a strong character that I honestly wish she was the protagonist. Not to mention it doesn't really go anywhere, it's only set-up with no pay-off? Every time Arno chose love instead of duty, something terrible happened. Now, in the very end, when it's Élise's turn, she doesn't and something terrible also happens. I guess damned if you do, damned if you don't? Like, what's the message here? Duty over love? Love over duty? You're fucked either way? Like there's a couple of ways of fixing it, and it's just a matter of switching Arno's and Élise's position in the fight against Germain. - have *Arno* have to make the same decision he's been making the whole game one last time, but this time he learned from his mistakes and choses duty over love, he loses Élise, but saves the world or whatever. This is just pay-off for finally choosing responsibility, earning him the monologue in the end realizing that sometimes, you can't always have what you want and sacrifices are necessary in the name of a larger cause and even Élise understood that. Which would go perfectly with the backdrop as people were literally dying for a larger cause. - have Arno chose Élise, like he always has and always will and then they could take Germain down together thanks to the power of love or something (I'm not a writer, figure it out lol) and it could conclude in a sweet moment where they have to figure out what to do next now that Arno has been expelled and the Order is in shambles. So now that they have love, they can both chose duty and set out to continue the work that De La Serre and Mirabeu started. An assassin and a templar working together for the greater good and hey, we don't kill Élise for the sake of killing her. Everything else is *whatever*, give it a couple more games to refine it or a few patches and I'm sure it would've been great. But the story... man, what a miss. Like I really wish they would retcon Unity just for the sake of using the french revolution again.
@@trumpflavourednugget9325 Had they let Darby do his thing, we'd have narrative and thematic gems like _Black Flag._ How is it that a game about an interpretation of the titular Creed from an outsider's perspective _hides in plain sight_ as a fun pirate fantasy game?
53:43 I disagree with your take on cosmetics/build customization. - First, they did the (common) mistake of tieing together stats and appearance of a piece of equipment. The "official" appearance of Arno (the one on the cover, trailers, figurines, and skin in AC Rogue) is your starting gear : it's trash stat-wise, and because among other things, HP and tool amount depend on gear, you will ditch this look as soon as possible. You have to choose between good drip and good build ; every weapon does not fit well with every belt/skin, some pieces of gear (mostly belts) also clip awkwardly into each other. -This game was not playtested enough and it can be seen even post-patches in the stats combinations given to the equipment. Hence why only one single family of belt gives both more ammo and more lockpicks (Phantom), along with HP and smoke bombs, making the Legendary Phantom Belt the best belt by far for exploring the open world. -Recoloring is grind-dependent (purchased with Creed Points or obtained after collecting X cockades, it's fine), but inconsistent (example : Legendary Prowler Hood with the Darkest Alley recolor shows green hues when most of it should appear black). Also weirdly no "Templar Black", replacing the blue of the first coloring by black. Realizing many players would prioritize build over style but resent their mismatching outfit, they also gave us "outfits" : skins that hide the exact gear you're wearing, most of them being outfits from the other games up to Rogue, outfits made for other characters in the story(Bellec, Bonaparte) or easy tweaks (recolored Altaïr outfit, Raider outfit but with the Iron mask). I know how time consuming it could have been to add more original outfits ; what I wish they had done is giving us the option to apply the recolors of the main gear to the outfits. That would have been great and fast.
Great take on the customization. A transmog feature would've done wonders for the game. I dunno about anybody else, but running around in a poor district of Paris dressed like a loony with a frilly coat, theater mask, and hood that _glitters_ in the sun is so ridiculous it might as well be a violation of the Second Tenet that desyncs you from the game.
@@jmal Don't forget about the medium heels ! Honestly, Connor also stood out in the crowd. I get the inspiration for the Phantom sets (the Phantom of the Opera + ball outfit), and they clearly leaned towards the ludicrous and memey (Firefly colors) for this co-op game. Not a big issue for me ; but as you said, if only it had transmog.
@@lassassindu5071 Connor can at least pass as a light infantryman or scout if he has his default longcoat colors (also doubles as winter camo), and depending on the dyes he chooses, a frontiersman or a rank-and-file Patriot soldier. Hell, with the green Colonial outfit he can pass as a Hessian soldier (can also double as woodland camo).
Your description of the game as MMO like does a great job of describing why I bounced off the game. I have never been able to enjoy MMOs and Unity's side quests definitely instill the same sense of intense boredom.
You can use the riot crowd event to you advantage, although only once. When infiltrating Palais de Luxembourg in 'Hoarders', you can kill the front gate guards and the crowd will rush in.
This video was needed, everyone was sucking off unity after odyssey and despite me preferring the older style of games Unity is probably my least favourite in the series. It promises everything that I want but fails to deliver at everything
@@yomi2624 stealth is inconsistent as shit and the combat feels like a good idea rather than an actual functional system. Just see what this video says about the stealth and combat and you see why they both suck
@@JamesSmith-ny2gb I've got over 50 hours on unity and I rarely get those stealth bugs / inconsistencies. Maybe I'm just lucky, but my time with stealth in unity has just been plain simple fun, combined with satisfying assassination animations and assassination opportunities. The games far from perfect, which is why I'm sad they decided to give up on these styles of games, but this doesn't warrant the harsh critique of the stealth in the game, especially considering the leap it took fro previous titles.
I had been a huge french revolution geek as a teenager. So I always dreamed about gettint an assassins creed in this time period. The possibilities in terms of story, conflicts, personal motivations for characters, the war between assassins and templars, clash of philosophies seemed endless. For example you could revert the typical start of an ac game, where it isnt the templars who are the ones in power, but the assassins, who are leading the revolution from the shadows, while they are themselves divided in different camps, who dont see eye to eye on where they want the revolution to lead. And while the brotherhood is busy with themselves all the overwhelming events and voilence of the revolution, they fail to see the templars moving in the dark until its too late. They were thought to have died with the old society, but they went through a transformation themselves and infiltrated the revolutionaries. That would have been a great premise imo and even back then I expected something similar at least. But all I got as a story was ... that
The lack of any acknowledgement of Arno’s real father and the events of rogue drive me nuts! I know it’s because of the development timeline etc but still. He was old enough where he would’ve remembered his bio dads death and I’d imagine want to know who killed him. Arno’s voice actor is the best aspect of this game for me personally, and the murder mysteries. Like why would he not try and kill Shay?? Or at least learn who he is?
@@YEY0806 yes also that! I’m sure it’s some generic “died in childbirth” because 1700s, but even like the Frye twins know and mention their mother and that she died from childbirth.
@gracie15928 Oh yeah, I forgot that, too. Still it says something that even a hated game like Odyssey actually has the parents be involved and significant for the story rather than just be forgotten revenge fuel
I'll be 100% honest, Unity is my second favorite AC game, behind Syndicate. I love Arno, and I love exploring Paris and the Café Théâtre. I've also poured many hours into trying to better my skills with the combat and parkour, because of how awesome it looks when it works correctly. That being said, after watching this video through to the end, I think some of your criticisms are absolutely valid. Despite playing Unity for the first time in late 2019-early 2020 on PC after it had been patched, I did find myself getting frustrated with some of the unpolished mechanics, such as the sticky cover system and Arno not obeying button commands. The poor balancing in some of the Co-op Missions can also be a pain, as certain tasks are borderline impossible to complete if you're playing solo - which wouldn't be too bad, if certain weapons and armor pieces weren't locked behind them (this in particular drives me up a wall). Not to mention, the Arno-Elise romance will always frustrate me as well, because it started out so beautifully, only for it morph into a one-sided relationship that made Arno appear like he was developing an increasingly unhealthy obsession with a woman who may or may not still care about him, and even at one point LITERALLY discarded him because he didn't fit in her 'revenge agenda', due to his caring more about her ACTUAL LIFE and wanting to protect her over taking out Germain. But in spite of its clear problems, I can't bring myself to hate this game, because I've genuinely enjoyed a lot of it and still do. I did enjoy watching your video as well; it's always nice to hear varied opinions, whether one agrees with them or not. Good work with editing and scripting this, and thanks for sharing!
Arno and Elise being wasted was my biggest frustration. He, and they as a couple, have such a strong start. But then the story insists on separating them, and wasting time on far less compelling things. I get the feeling Series X BC is the best way to play Unity, though. I had a very smooth experience with very little technical issues or bugs. And whilst it cannot fix all of Unity's issues, playing in French really seals the deal on its setting and atmosphere (just like ACII/Brotherhood in Italian). It at least makes its great moments feel all the better.
Unity may be my favourite diamond in the rough game of all time, honestly. It's a bloated mess, weighed down with feature creep, inconsistent parkour and controls, bugs, WAY too much content, most of which is a total nothingburger, and yet... The game has a spark to it that I've just never been able to shake. I've been a fan of this game since launch day, and my fondness for it only grows with time. Haven't finished the video yet, and I'm sure all of your critiques are totally valid and correct (in the parkour section right now, they are,) but sometimes things are more than the sum of their parts. Anyway, always enjoy your work! Keep it up!!
Apparently Black Flag is getting a remake, and we're still here with the to this day best looking AC game trapped in 30fps and 900p on consoles. What I'd give for a remaster of this game.. Even just a patch!
What a thorough and monumantal breakdown of a game that people are now holding so high up in their minds. We really do deserve better as the fans of the games, and I can only hope that Ubisoft will learn from their mistakes. Even if we don't I'll have another wonderfully written and voiced analysis to re-watch)
I don't think its unfair to hold unity in such high standards. It's not perfect, sure. But for what it did bring It remains my favourite ac game. The black box missions are amazing, the stealth gameplay is the best the franchise has seen (I fucking love the assassination animations). Though janky at times, I find the parkour to be very satisfying, especially combined with the amazing setting. And the co op, though sometimes buggy it created an unrivaled ac experience IMO, especially with friends.
@@yomi2624 it's fair to expect the series you love to improve and get better. Paraphrasing another youtuber Whitelight, this series has never met it's full potential and we as fans just deal with what we actually got, mediocre games at best that bafflingly as of now got it's "peak" in 2009. Anyway nice to meet you fellow Unity enjoyer.
Im pretty sure most of the discussion revolves around the sentiment that it's a hidden gem because of how harshly it was bashed was extreme and many people have found it to be more enjoyable than the original discussion would suggest. More-over, most of us recognise the game has issues and isn't perfect, however, it is a strong foundation of what AC could be. If Unity wasnt such a technical mess it's possible we would have seen that foundation and potential actually met, rather than the homongenised version of big open world AC we have now. Unity is a rather unique game which celebrated what made AC unique, not what was the trending game of the time and many of us wished AC would have continued that route. Many of the comments and criticisims you have for the game all originate from the same issue. The game was rushed and is full of technical issues. The parkour is odd and rough because of the complexity of the map and the rushed nature of the game means they didnt have the time to iron out the poor prediction of your naviagtion. The combat is a great foundation to bridge complexity with simple style. No one is asking for the exact system in Unity with the poor hit registartion, inconsistent timing, guns etc. They're asking for the difficulty, the depth in the dodge, smaller counter timing, counters that dont' kill, heavy and light attacks, perfect parry's, etc. I think Ghost of Tsushima is a perfect example of what people wanted and clearly Sucker Punch saw this potential as well, almost completely taking the system themselves. It's the same with the stealth, it has great ideas, the interiors, crouching and tools you have, along with the more brutal detection system are all great, but it's really held back by the technical isses, with dodgy detection through walls or from extreme distances, cover systrem that didnt work, etc. People want the large crowds of unity but they want it to be technically fixed, not taken verbatim. All of these issues are a result of a lack of time, not poor design. The ideas were there and thats what people wanted to be expanded, most of the discussion is around the missed and lost potential that caused the series to do a harsh left turn into the open world design we have now, while acknowleding how much of a mess that Unity is. I completely agree with you that we deserved better than Unity and this is brilliant video to help combat the loud voices praising the game without talking about its issues.
After recently binginging Ac 1 all the way to unity I feel like the creators really started to drift away from the core themes of the games after Revelations. Especially after the final scene when Ezio explains to Sophia the philosophy of the Creed and telling Altair's remains to rest it felt like a good bye to many core aspects, like the closing of story, but they need to finish Desmond's story so they had to make AC 3 which focused more on the historical setting and the relationship between Connor and haythem. AC 4 felt more like a heroes journey that happend to take place in the AC universe then downhill from there to the point AC is no longer what it once was
I agree 100% with pretty much everything said in this video and I wish that more people understood that Assassin's Creed Unity is a broken game, not just because of the bug's but because of the design flaws. The Combat, Parkour, and stealth don't work as intended at the best of times, I don't know how the parkour was meant to work at all with there being no consistency, no predictability in where Arno will jump, the guards with there guns made me wish you could use human shields or even dodge the bullets like in Syndicate for how silly that was, and the detection being all over the place made me wonder sometimes why I even try. But all of these problems could at least be solved with more time and effort, maybe even with mods if you care to do so, but in my opinion it wouldn't be worthwhile because even if the game worked fine the story and the side missions would still suck. Above all the story's lightning fast pace and skimming over of interesting historical events really just pisses me off, and as if that isn't bad enough the unceremonious dropping of every plot thread besides the love story really leaves you feeling like when you take into consideration everything else wrong with every aspect of this game it there is not a single thing they did well. It's like every mechanic, every element, every part of the plot, everything about the game was half-baked, there isn't a single finished or fully functional aspect of this game and it is just frustrating to play, but despite that it looks so pretty and so people get nostalgic and can't remember how bad it really was, and don't realize how bad it still is, I replayed all of the AC games I own and it really stands out as being so much worse then what came before or after just in terms of being really frustrating almost every minute and almost never really satisfying.
I would encourage you to take a closer look the Kenway movement system next. It includes basically all of the things Unity is credited for, with very little of the unnecessary streamlining that goes strategically ignored. While your breakdown of Unity's movement was highly accurate, the context for it based on previous games left out some important things that honestly make it look even more damning. My video (AC Rogue) Controlled Descents in New York will get you started in the right direction Leo's testing turned out to be a little bit incomplete since he's not that into combat in AC. Everything for swords, maces, and muskets if accurate, but what we figured out recently is that heavy weapons, spears and guillotine guns do have unique heavy attacks that floor every enemy type - even brutes! So your weapon choice essentially changes how much you need to spam staggering strike (You know about the double right? Your clips never show it) vs strategically using heavy attacks while attacking and staggering strikes while defending, at the cost of the clunky control scheme, trying to get over to your circle button if you get attacked while charging one up, which will happen a *lot,* especially if you don't have the ammo capacity to quickshot everyone and need to go for those heavy ground executes. You can even get away with playing without the staggering strike unlocked for a time. Finally, I figured out how to combine a bunch of exploits we figured out over the years and create an entirely new combat style. The smoke bomb breaking combat stance can actually be used to your advantage, and it's not the only way. I showcase it in my most popular video "Unity has hidden blade combat" front and center on my channel, it's impossible to miss, complete with a writeup of how to perform everything. I also made a handy chart of how to instakill every enemy type in the most efficient way possible using everything we know now, both intended and unintended. The real problem with the smoke bomb being the solution for everything is that once you run out of them the game becomes unplayable. I really feel no remorse for breaking the combat system over my knee, but once I can no longer do that and I'm forced to engage with something that is demonstrably not fun, the whole illusion dissipates. This is true of the gunner enemy type, this is true of stealth layouts that are otherwise unapproachable, this is true of abrupt ambushes, this is true of the cover system, this is true of almost every problem you have to solve because you have to solve all of them with smoke bombs Holding high profile helps to widen the targeting radius of double air assassinations, but there's a reason BlackTIE always throws stun bombs too Social stealth is also about how enemies react to what you do. I'm still not good at it, but idea is to trick them into isolating themselves by intentionally creating a minor disturbance, then temporarily vanishing and ambushing then once they reach an advantageous position. What trips me up is that minor disturbances also disturb civilians, so once you begin to work your concealment becomes very thin, very fast. Kinography can really talk your ear off this idea. His video " Ezio Trilogy Social Stealth Guide, Episode 2: Detection and Investigations" is a good place to start. Again, I recommend you look into this for context on this franchise's legacy There is some kind of meta-narrative connecting every main and side mission in this game about the cult of Nostradamus and its connection to De Molay's betrayal, but the religious themes have gone over my head so far. I also haven't finished it all because it's so vast and time-consuming, so maybe one day I'll wrap my head around what the game is trying to tell me Use the blue Paris missions to get some quick money for consumables on minimal side content or low upgrades run. The objectives consist of extremely simple things like assassinating one guy and they pay out multiple times what your average sidequest will give you. The pricing for different items is also extremely unbalanced. Berserks are appropriately expensive, but smoke bombs are only 10 livres, so no matter how poor you are, you can always scrape by on a few smoke bombs. No upgrades is an extremely well-documented challenge run for this that Leo created on a whim one time just to disprove someone making that same point, and it went so well that it turned into an annual tradition and spawned a bunch of even harder variants Can Dead Kings be its own video? I love Dead Kings Let me know if you want to learn more about any of our favorite stealth games. We have our resources organized better on Discord, and if all else fails you can even ask an expert to make sure you have accurate information. If something new is discovered it usually happens there first. You'd be surprised how often we learn new things about decade plus-old games. Just let me know where I can send you a link
I appreciate all the information, I would be happy to check out the Discord. I believe my business email is accessible on the about tab of my channel page if you wanted to send it there. And when you say double, do you mean double staggering strike? I only use it in the body of my video in the scene where I showcase the infinite yellow warning indicator glitch, but I also do spam it in my joke ending against Bellec at the very end of the video.
@@sosaysjayeah, against regulars and agiles it knocks them over so you can earn ground executes without having to wait for a parry Checked your about, checked the description, checked your Patreon, don't see it anywhere
@@icarusgaming6269 Yes, I do that once in the main video and then I knock down Bellec three times at the end. And if you go to About, a section says Details, and View email Address, which you can click to see it
I think most of the praise unity gets this days is due to short video plataforms, the game is simply gorgeous, and the animations are incredible, so seeing it on shorts or tik tok for 30 secs, being optimized by someone who practiced a lot, makes it look a lot better than it really is.
I like the combat and I am dissapointed that AC entirely abandoned it for Syndicate rather than fixing it. It had a really good foundation and the animations were great in my opinion.
21:30 ......you're not supposed to , fighting a large number of enemies is actively discouraged in unity as you're meant to rely heavily on stealth and combat is a last resort , you are supposed to be an assassin after all
There are a lot of games where you are not supposed to fight, but that doesn’t mean they make the combat janky but easy with a single difficult to overcome mechanic. In the Arkham games the combat is fantastic, but if you are seen during a predator section you die fast. In Dishonored you can get easily overcome by combat that has a much higher skill ceiling than Unity but it’s still a more stable system. I’m a believer that if you want to discourage something, raise the skill ceiling, don’t just make it bad
Thank you for putting into words some (yes, SOME) of the frustrations I have with Unity's parkour. I've always chalked it up to me just not being good at it but having at this stage over a decade of twisting and mastering the earlier parkour systems, so just... 'not getting it', but to hear someone lay out a lot of it's systems in words and why they don't work or feel good after a chorus of people and the wider AC community 'vibe' calling it the greatest thing to ever exist, I feel a little less like an insane person now. Those clips from other people showing that most of the time it'll still be a janky weird mess that obviously doesn't go where you want it to even in the hands of very experienced runners are a breath of fresh air.
I think the idea of AC Unity is much better than the actual game that is AC Unity. It's still one of the most gorgeous games I've ever played but so broken mechanically. In a better timeline Ubisoft would have either given the game the time and money it really needed or realized that the issue was not the ideas, but implementation, and expanded the series in this direction.
an interesting thing i thought of this game of how anti revolutionary unity is, ac3 was good at showing both sides of the conflict showing that either side was willing to use and take whatever furthers their individual vendettas, whilst unity is just revolution bad, it’s weird because in the marketing it was shown that you would be fighting for the revolution, killing the kings guards and fighting against tyranny, just for the game to be anti revolutionary boot licking fest. it almost seems that none of the teams we’re communicating at all.
I did have a section on the bizarre politics of this game but I ended up cutting it for time since it is it's own can of worms entirely. AC3 had similar marketing issues where they presented the story as a fight for freedom against British oppressors to secure an American audience, but had a much greyer stakes at play in the actual game. I do not believe AC3 does a good job of presenting the American revolution, but they do at least try to paint the limits of the freedom the colonies were fighting for. Unity's marketing shows Arno storming the Bastille himself, condemning a noble to be torn apart by peasants, chopping down guards to stop Elise's execution, and rallying the masses to stand against the upper class. None of this means anything in the context of the actual game, and the only time he really makes a point about the revolution is in a throwaway line where he expresses that he is glad that the people are fighting for liberty and equality. There is a video on UA-cam titled "The Cowardly Politics of Assassin's Creed: Unity, and History as a Symbol (Full Spoilers)." I can't recommend it because I haven't watched it, but I have been wanting to make time for it. For Ubisoft to be so weary of being political in a game about the French Revolution is shameful in my opinion.
@@sosaysjayanother example of ubisoft not understanding politics whatsoever, but i have learned to not care, because it’s a video game. they make karl marx in syndicate to be a liberal who was anti revolution (democracy is the only road to socialism i thought was the funniest divergence from marxist theory ) , they thought Caesar was overthrown because he wanted to hoard all the land, even though he supported land reforms and distribution of land between the peasantry of the country, the writers were so lazy for origins that they just flipped the ideology of the senate chamber and Caesar. the reason i believe they are so anti revolutionary in unity is because this one of the the first revolutions that had left wing backings, ie the communes. i can understand a more gray take with the american revolution since there were still slaves and the genocide of natives, but the anti french revolution is clear that ubisoft the company comes before the writing team.
@@sosaysjay i just finished the video you recommended watching and yeah, the politics of unity are inherently upholding the systems that keep status quo and making left movements to look tyrannical (i can only wonder what their spin off 2.5d game about the first marxist revolution), but what are we to expect from a multibillion dollar corporation.
@@tenebrisanima9604 1. marxists (such as myself) don’t believe in liberal democracy in terms of achieving a socialist state. 2. if you read the codex they make fun of marxists and starbucks millennials
One of my least favorite things about the game is that, if you accidentally fast travel to the carriage that takes you to the DLC, you can't fast travel back to Paris until you've done the first mission of the DLC.
I honestly think the story could have been saved if Elise was the main character, not Arno. Narratively, it makes far more sense for her to join the assassin's after the templars betrayed her by killing her father. Her staying with the Templars in the first place was non-sensical to me considering what they did. Arno could still be obsessed with her and try to help her but it would be him that dies at the end. Her revenge having cost her the only person she had left in her life. I know Ubisoft is way too cowardly now to give a main game solo female protag, let alone back then, but it sucks that we got stuck with Arno and his story when really, Elise and her role in the narrative is far more interesting.
They were able to do a female Assassin protagonist before with Liberation. Unfortunately, apart from the disguise and whip traversal mechanics, it was a mid game at best, hampered by its portable game trappings (it was first released on the PS Vita and only had graphical improvements in its re-releases). But seriously, Élise should've been the main character. It would perfectly complement Rogue as she would be the polar opposite of Shay in terms of switching sides. Or, if they delayed the game by a year, put her as a secondary playable character and factor Shay (hell, even Connor and the Marquis de Lafayette) into the story to further the connection to past entries in the franchise. We could go on and on, but we can all agree that Unity's story can be summed up in two words: wasted potential.
@@jmal Yeah I know about Liberation but it's a side game so I don't count it. I actually think it's partially why we don't have any solo main game female protags though. Ubisoft did a half assed job with Liberation and when it didn't sell well, blamed it on people not wanted to play as Aveline. They're not the smartest execs up there. But yes, agreed, Wasted Potential should be Unity's actual name, Assassin's Creed: Wasted Potential.
ive played unity on and off for a while and i just cant understand why EVERYONE feels Unity is the best. Black Flag was the highlight for me. Unity might look good and the parkour might LOOK good but it feels hollow and lifeless. Parkour has no weight, gravity FEELING it feels like nothing but animation on the screen. To me. I can kinda get why Unity is the underdog and everyone feels its the best for whatever reason. But to me, it is Dull.
I'm replaying Unity right now as I finally have a PC powerful enough that the game looks how I imagined it would back in 2014 lol. Funnily enough, the one phrase I keep yelling while playing it is "wasted potential". So many good ideas were either implemented extremely poorly, or were dropped immediately in the games after Unity and never revisited. The parkour is so, so close to being right and they never used a system even remotely like it ever again.
I would say Syndicate is a much more improved version of Unity. While parkour is simpler, everything, from traversal, stealth and combat, works as intended. The mission design and side content, in particular the Black Box missions, are pure stealth joy. It's no Masterpiece by any stretch, and I would rather play Origins or Odyssey, but it is a polished version on Unity in some extent.
At this stage, I'd much prefer they let other studios try to make Assassins Creed. Sucker punch, Naughty Dog, Insomniac or Fromsoft Ware perhaps; it's unlikely, but I'd prefer that to Ubisoft.
I played this game on my pc in 2023 for the first time after I put down playing Origin since it was so boring. i think if i went out of my way and started looking for different elements you mentioned in the video, i probably wouldn't have much fun with it, but my god, this game was so much fun and maybe even my favorite assassin's creed ever. This might not have been the perfect assassin’s creed but you can’t deny it, it was a right step towards the right direction and that's much more true when you count the new games too.
I think you are the only one to say that we deserved much better than unity, and i too agree on to it. I understand unity's parkour by watching jcers and leo k, also worth mentioning whitelight's video on parkour of ac But people want ac to be like unity and i am here hoping that we deserve what syndicate should have been. If mirage is return to old ac games without the level of parkour provided on those games, I wonder how long we do catch up to unity which already had its fair share of problems regarding story and parkour. I remember being surprised when i played ac 1 that i could climb buildings. I used to run on street lol. Still my fav ac game. So i started to experiment different things out of it, although nothing worth mentioning but still i felt I had control over the way i jump around. In unity i felt they focused more on graphics and less on story, on top i didn't really liked parkour at all, i was confused at first. And the one thing i was damned at was soo sluggish fighting. Man they moved like slow motion. The most annoying was how inconsistent the game was when i tried to use double assassination. IT DOESNT WORKS . Half the time i spend on manually setting my dart to the target and sometimes it goes throw them. I played unity around covid and people calling it masterpiece while me who just finished rouge and blackflag and didn't liking those games lol. (personally I wanted a return to soul of the game uptill ezio trilogy) But seeing now, even syndicate is more assassin than mr. Viking. But after playing rpg games, i replayed unity after clips i watched. Man it actually felt like an assassin creed fantasy, i basically forgot about parkour at all, i loved how game used its stealth. Still unity has its problems, but with a perfect story and polishing, i think it was closest to what we wanted. Idk how long it will take to catch upto unity and many more to catch upto to what its successor should have been. Its a shame that we usually love games after their sequels, tells alot about this gaming era. Meaning we leave all the criticism we had with it and just want it to return because we have seen somthing way worse. Instead of expecting, we are hoping.
I have never met a more flocking fanbase than Assassin's Creed. A few people say a thing and then everybody bleats the same thing repeatedly as if it's their new gospel. I couldn't believe how much Unity is put on a pedestal. Have they never played it? It's....not amazing.
I actually love unity, BUT I do agree that it's suddenly overrated by fans who are simply copying online opinions they've seen. Perhaps unity is somewhat misunderstood, in my opinion. However, I must still agree that it isn't the best game ever or anything, and actually, syndicate is just a better, more functional unity when it comes to gameplay. Yet that game doesn't get any love from the mindless copy cat fans. I suppose I disagree with much of what you say in this video, yet I agree on some level with the title of this video.
The true tragedy of AC Unity isn't its imperfections, as it certainly had its flaws. Rather, it's that there was immense potential built upon its strengths which was never fully realized. AC fans still marvel at the densely populated cities, dynamic crowds, intricate parkour, expansive non-linear assassination missions with diverse strategies, and the sheer aesthetic brilliance of its graphics. Ubisoft crafted something with enormous potential, but unfortunately, after one misstep, they moved on.
I just want to say that I found this video fascinating despite the fact I gave up on AC after 3. I don't even like this series anymore but your videos and passion for the franchise is always great to watch. Keep up the good work!
Great video and it captures a lot of my feelings towards the game. The idea of AC Unity was always better than the game. Your point about Unity being an imposter Assassin's Creed story is something I heavily agree with, especially compared to Black Flag which dresses itself up as an imposter AC story but in reality is one of the purest AC stories I've ever seen.
I consider this game as generally really fun to play with a strong start but a lackluster and anticlimactic finale and a constant moving of the goalposts with what the actual goal of the main character even is with a pretty meandering plot in the middle. I think even Syndicate, with its pretty bog standard plot still had a more cohesive main antagonist and better sense of progression, wheras in Unity it all kind of goes on for a while and then just abruptly stops. I honestly can't even remember if Arno ever catches the one who actually killed his adoptive guardian, but he definitely doesn't catch the man who killed his father because that would mean confronting Connor and the plot actually suffers by basing a lot of the plot around it but never actually going anywhere.
I always wonder whenever I see someone praising how good the parkour was in Unity if they actually played the game, or just saw some cool video? Yes, you can do some cool stuff in the game. Just like DudePerfect can do crazy things in real life. Both after many retries.
I appreciate that. I just went through your Valhalla stealth video, I wish I had watched it before making my own Valhalla video as it would have helped support some of the points I made. I wish you luck!
Congratulations for the critical analysis of the game, a really good essay, so I would like to point that everything you said is a microcosm of the entire series, AC 1 was more a prototype them a game, is basically a mudded river with heuge chunks of rough diamond, AC 2 in deed is a proof of concept and the rest of Ezio's trilogy expanded and improved what already was there, because of this still so beloved by many, but none of it's concepts was evolved since revelations and some was dropped, the colonial Trilogy was a mess in scope, focus, features and development time, this games starts to show how the production mode and it's cycle in Ubisoft is completely unsustainable, the comination of this miss management is AC unity, where in concept is the peak of the series, the defenitive Assassin's Creed experience, but fallfelt in execution and show how the series is a wasted pontial, never were capable of presenting and executing it's ideas coexively, consistent, deeper and polished. After that , syndicate easily is a parody or a waterdown version of what come before, probably the worst game in the series, so to keep the production cycle Ubisoft brings the RPG trilogy that throw out the window the water with the baby, keeping all the worst aspects that came before and lost everything it was unique to the series in the process.
“Wasted Potential” sums up the entire Assassins creed IP perfectly
Stop it. just because this game and this video is about that, doesn’t mean the entire series as a whole isnt great. Don’t go too far because of this vid bro
There are many AC gems. Missteps here and there don’t invalidate the greatness that’s come out of the IP.
@@keekersneakers3259 He's not wrong though. Ubisoft has done more wrong than right with Assassin's Creed and it all started with them firing the creator because he wanted to end it.
@@keekersneakers3259 there's great ac games but none close to perfect.
@@toxpov3612no game is perfect. But the Ezio trilogy is close to perfect
The story feels like Ubisoft gave its writers a set of things they wanted it to include, ordered them to finish in one week, and made the game out of the first draft with no editorial reviews at all.
The workplace conditions of ubisoft and broken state of the game’s entire online service is proof that this is dead on 😭 it feels like they had the health and damage properly balanced, then ubisoft came in and went “nerf the characters stats and we’ll sell 5-minute passes to play with the intended balancing”
Thts the problem with 10 difrebt companies working on 1 big game .they make content then when things would need to be changed or altered to make it better is to much work now so they dont do it.thts what unity is
That may genuinely be what happened, and certainly nor far off
20:40 I can't count the number of times in Unity I was fighting a hoard of 15 guys and absolutely slaying them until 6 of them decided to whip out the glock and end my life before I could even reach them.
Not many people know this (I don't think I've ever seen anyone else mention it, at least on UA-cam) but you can semi reliably dodge gun shots by zig zag manual jumping on flat ground; this is also useful for passing through crowds faster as you won't get the jog speed penalty (although passing through crowds in general is a very reliable way to avoid getting hit because someone from the crowd will get shot instead).
I think you know but in case you need a reminder, manual jump is left stick input and high profile + tap freerun up button.
tbh, i honsetly dont get it,
if you are fighting 15 fkin guys and most of them have guns of course couple of em gonna pull it out and fk u then and there, as long as you keeo the melee combat below 1v4 it bever becomes an issue. how is this a criticism of the combat , what do ppl want? do they want to deflect the bullet like sekiro(damm i fkin love sekiro) but that would break the semi realism...
just dont 1v20 simple.
maybe, they should let you grab and "human shield" enemies that are low on hp, ehich would encourage you to whittle down couple guy tonlow hp and keep them around wuthout outright k^lling them so that u can use these fatigue dudes and shield when need arise if u fight 1v15 and stuff i guess
maybe,
@@btchiaintkidding7837 I guess I should have clarified my point. I used an extreme example but what I was trying to get across is that very often during fights enemies will back up to shoot you, and when you disengage other dudes to stop the ones shooting at you the others will draw their guns and the cycle continues.
@@GrismarPicklemelt the quickshot feature is technically made to solve this exact scenario, the problem is most people won't be able to divide attention to the ones backing away in the heat of combat, hence the camera won't be targeting said further enemy. All enemies shoot from pistol range to make sure you can always shoot them back (snipers die in one hit regardless of the player damage level too), you see someone backing away and immediately focus the camera onto him and quickshot; it's a skill you can master.
Quick dropping smoke or stun bombs makes this easier because remember, you're an Assassin, use all your arsenal to your advantage (tools are dirt cheap for a reason). There is nothing inherently wrong with the combat system _in theory_ (i.e. when we ignore bugs and glitches), discouraging prolonged combat is good and encouraging tool use to add another layer of mastery, while raising the skill ceiling to boot, is great.
@@shira_yone quickshot never seemed to work correctly from what I saw, but maybe I was just using it wrong. It's been quite a while so I'm not 100% sure.
I think the difficulty with the French Revolution, similar to the American Revolution, is that so many events are well documented. AC3 was basically a tour of the entire war for independence to the point people mocked Connor for somehow being at every notable event. Lots of the best parts of the Revolution are in this game but they needed more focus and cohesion with the other aspects of the story.
The narrative of the French Revolution would have made much more sense if it felt like the Assassins and Templars were actually meddling in the Revolution instead of feeling incidental, and the star crossed lovers of Arno and Elise could have worked so well but all of these stories needed to be tied much closer together.
The thing is they do touch on this in the coop missions. I played through them solo and while they could be tedious, it actually felt like you were doing your part to influence the revolution, and everything that came after. One mission involves you saving a politician and busting the Austrian spy cell in Paris in 1792, another has you break into the Jacobin Hall and cutting off the leadership of the party while they try escape into the catacombs, something that feels very genuine to the Assassin cause.
The problem lies in how in each mission Arno feels like a faceless husk, because to anybody you're playing with that's what you're meant to be. Really Ubi needed to integrate them more into Arno's story instead of it feeling like a side-campaign, the especially the coop missions in 1794 since they'd be great for re-integrating him into the brotherhood after his exile
Glad to see someone critically analyzing this game and not just giving it the “hidden gem” treatment. I did a play-through of the entire series recently and Unity frustrated me the most out of all of them(on a moment-to-moment basis, especially with stealth). Plenty of great potential, but the honest truth is that it doesn’t live up to it. Still beautiful though!
I'm 100% sure that most people who praise this game in UA-cam comments haven't played it recently.
AC online discourse is... something
@@ArkenwayHa, I feel the same about people who constantly praise the older ones to spite the new ones. I have played Unity recently, for what it's worth. I still adore it. It has a *spark* for me, despite its myriad flaws.
I think the nostalgia for the classic style AC games and hatred against RPG route that ubisoft went with the new AC games is the reason why Unity is being seen as "Underrated" or "Hidden Gem" AC game.
@@Arkenway Totally agree. I find myself disagreeing with the online consensus frequently, and tbh it’s kind of frustrated me because it’s kept me away from AC games I ended up enjoying a lot(Odyssey/Syndicate) and hyped me up for ones that were kinda mid. It’s definitely a series that you need to form your own opinions on, and not rely on what the popular takes are.
@@kristianwhite1061 Agreed. I'm one of those weirdos that genuinely enjoyed Valhalla. The internet would make it sound like that's impossible. And I can't stand Black Flag. Gotta have your own takes and just try stuff out and see if it's for you or not
I think the best way to describe this game, both for good and ill, is "It has its moments".
It has its moments where the Parkour works and looks amazing, but it also has its moments where it is incredibly clunky to control and watch. It has its moments where the combat looks like a choreographed spectacle, but it also has its moments where it just stops functioning. It has its moments where the stealth is the best in the series, but it also has its moments where it has literally the worst. It has its moments where the story and acting flow wonderfully, but it also has its moments where it is almost as bad as Valhalla if not worse.
It has its moments. But its good moments are often not enough to outweigh its bad moments.
Definiu perfeitamente
Wonderfully nailed!
👏
A lot like the French Revolution itself it seems
Somebody else commented that “wasted potential” applies to the series as a whole, and while that may be true, i feel like it applies wayyyyy more to Unity than any other entry in the franchise.
Worst part of not being able to counter guns is that previous titles had a solution for that in human shields.
you can roll to dodge gunfire, play the game
@@gaellorenzo3006lol the rolling can still cause you to be hit 9 times out of 10 you’ll roll and just get slapped by another guy anyway it’s a garbage feature compared to the human shields be honest.
@@currieisyummie3420 It doesn't take away from the fact that the problem persists. Previous games' problem was the same. You need to be in combat against someone in order to use human shields, and somehow, you need to be in combat in order to dodge. I still thinking dodging is better, since you can do that action even if the one shooting you is the only one in combat with you.
@@gaellorenzo3006it literally doesn’t work and you can be shot whilst in the dodge animation
@@currieisyummie3420 you just suck lmao
I'll never forgive Unity for focusing on a boring love story instead of the FRENCH REVOLUTION THE GAME IS SET IN
Imagine playing a historical fictional game where you don't interact with the literal historical setting 😂
Late af but those missions are there. Almost all the co-op and side missions relate to the revolution.
@@KingkuntaGGthey’re casuals you’re expecting to much from them.
@@KingkuntaGG yeah in co-op, a mode where you're lucky to find even one player to join you and forced to play solo (which is almost unplayable in that state) has little to relate to the main story. Why the fuck would they make the French revolution a side quest in a game that's about the French revolution.
@@KingkuntaGG It was literally advertised to be part of the French revolution even the fucking E3 trailer. And even if the setting wasn't the French Revolution why the fuck is nearly every assassin's Creed where the historical set pieces completely entangle with what you're doing. AC1 you're in the crusades taking out major influencers and even get involved in heading into the battlefield, AC2 you have front row seats to the Pazzi Conspiracy and it is absolutely important to Ezios Revenge quest, Brotherhood Rodrigo Borgia's failed escape, Revelation the battle for the throne of Sultan which also plays a piece in Ezios appeasement to Suleiman to find all they keys to Altair's library, ACIII completely involved in the entire American revolution the battle for bunkerhill, riding with Paul Revere, Battle for Chesapeake etc. all play a part with the main plot to get key to the temple, ACIV do I really I have to explain the personal journey during the Golden Age of Piracy it has to Edward's eventual joining to the Brotherhood. If you take the French Revolution out of Unity you'd miss absolutely nothing. It has little to do with what's going on and has no stake in the plot compared to previous and future historical set pieces in the series including Odyssey and Valhalla.
This is now my favorite review or analysis of AC Unity I've ever seen. I thank you for making this video, and for also highlighting one critical point many creators who cover it _wish_ more people would actually hear whenever we say it. We _do_ complain and we _are_ often honest about the issues this game has, across the board. We really do deserve better than AC Unity, we deserve what AC Unity _promised_ to be, and it's something they never properly returned for a genuine second attempt at.
That is very high praise, thank you. And thank you for the role you have played in showcasing the reality of Unity beyond both the buggy launch and hype that came years later. I've watched your videos for a long time, and without them I do not think nearly as many people would understand both the potential and the flaws of the game.
And again, thank you for allowing me to use your quote in the video. It really does mean a lot that you commented, I wish you the best.
The story is exactly why I still haven't finished this game. While the gameplay can be a lot of fun, the story is so boring I can't bring myself to continue story missions a lot of the time. Just find myself doing side content around the city and soaking in the views. Great review bro!
I barely made it through a second playthrough because of how much I hate the story and the gameplay.
The story is such a mess and whiplash. The prologue is flawed but solid. The first act drops Arno's characterization immediately. The second act was just senseless drama. The third act was alright, but the monologue at the end felt undeserved.
So many plot threads just left hanging at the end of it all.
While I still mostly enjoy my playtime with Unity, every criticism you made is valid. Fantastic video once again!
I think that while the game was ahead of its time in terms of graphics, the story was mediocre at best, not engaging. The mechanical/gameplay changes were a step in the right direction, but it all felt so clunky and janky. Parkour was sometimes unresponsive and the animations unnatural, as if Arno was defying gravity with his long horizontal jumps. Stealth was something that Syndicate improved, adding whistling and a better cover system. I guess combat wasn't the worst, but I wasn't a fan. The unavoidable gun shots were annoying.
The architecture in the game is a lot bigger and complicated than in other games so they had to make jumps like this, and 3/4 of the story was cut because Ubisoft needed to release the game in 2014, and Devs spent 5 years on the game as it is, most of it was creating the city itself and animations, etc. At the time on a brink of generations developers aimed too high for a new gen of consoles but overestimated them. Still the game is great and has very repayable missions and requires skill to play. Recently a mod came out called ACU Fixes,it fixed a lot of annoying things in gameplay
The story could've been great. Revolutionary France and you're the son of an assassin who gets fostered by a Templar grandmaster. But they just couldn't hack it lol
As someone who love and enjoys Unity, saying the story is mediocre is a massive understatement; it's just bad. Unlike the gameplay mechanics which are indeed just as rushed and broken yet full with unmet potential, you can actually work around the system to have a sliver of fun out of them; on the other hand you just have to deal with the shite story as it was.
They were already setting up Arno as this detective kind of character (even got his discount sherlock side missions). I can only imagine if the story is actually an engaging detective story where Arno follows the trail of Germain's conspiracy using his wits, finding clues and leads throughout his investigations with the help of his fellow assassins and/or historical figures (just like Altair and Ezio were); but no he just got magic memory read when he kills people that conveniently lead towards the next target. What a joke.
Legit back when the game first released I was already not as mad as most people, but the story gave me conniptions right away. It was especially disappointing considering the last main game that at a glance seemed like the least Assassin centered story (AC4) at the time, was actually among the best in character development and philosophy from the series. What Ubisoft should've rip-off from The Witcher games shouldn't have been the open world RPG-lite gameplay, it should've been the detective-esque story structure.
The story isn't that bad, and parkour depends on your skill to understand how it works. You're mediocre at learning how the parkour works, then no wonder you can't play it neither 😂
@@nightmarepegasus4141 Lmao, it's been perfectly explained in the video that no matter how well you understand the parkour, sometimes the game will just not do whatever you want it to do. You're telling that to a player who prefers the AC1-Revelations parkour system over any other, I know perfectly how to control the characters in these games and they always respond how I want them to. It's not the case in Unity. And it doesn't change the fact that some of the animations are simply unnatural.
Bruh how is ur voice so calming..i can hear u read anything and ill believe it
People want AC to be more like Unity again. But there lies the irony. It was Unity itself that made people not want games like it ever again.
The Skyward Sword effect
@@clunkwestweed4541exactly what I was thinking dude, it's really wierd how the fan base of both franchises are split, but Zelda could keep it's identity, the critical acclamate, and can bring back stuff from the old formula to improve the new one. Mean while AC is completely fucked in all ways.
@@matheusfernandesdocarmo922 That's where lays the difference between a studio given the proper freedom to act and made by a studio (yes, technically other studios like Monolith helped, but in a more "help with 3D assets and world assembling", not the core design and physolophy behind it) composed of peoples that understand the game and work to bring a cohesive vision to reality resulting in two of the most critically and public success of the last twenty years... and a studio mainly guided by the corporate suits, guiding every step of the development to deliver mediocrity after mediocrity to the point that fan themselves forget what even made Assassin's Creed good to begin with...
@@endertuber8300 Totally agree man, AC isn't the type of game that can receive yearly releases, or be sustained by a live service as they tried in the RPG trilogy, or split the project in parts for a bunch of studios work on. AC is a platform, stealth, action adventure, open world game, focused in narrative and single player experience, for all this elements come to fruition, you need time, really good talent and a really narrow and strong vision, everything the series is lacking in some shape or forme since AC 2. Is really sad seeing how Zelda grow, evolve and change because of new design philosophies that AC brings to the table, two generations ago, while AC is lurking in the mud, failing to live to smallest of expectations, like being a Assassin in a Assassin's Creed game !!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@matheusfernandesdocarmo922 Yep... as I always say: AC went bad from the moment AC1 released in 2007 under the Ubisoft banner... imagine if it had a development like a Witcher game... with AC2 coming out in 2011/2012 with the same jump in quality from Witcher 1 and Assassin of Kings, with yet another jump in quality like Wild Hunt... yet again, wasted potential we'll never get to experience properly
Thank you, God that we have an honest analysis of this game. I really wanted to love this game when it came out but everything noted in this video was what I noticed and had to accept as it was unfortunately never properly capitalized on.
And ever since it baffles me that people want to go back to this. But I get it, they want the idea of what Unity was trying to be but never was. Hell, I want Unity to be what it never was, too.
Even as someone who were able to enjoy the game, I wouldn't even recommend it to my worst enemies.
How is it this hard for you people to understand the concept, that you still say "it baffles me that people want to go back to this"? Even tho you admit it yourself, that what *we* want is not Unity itself, but a game that actually capitalizes on what Unity failed to?
@@tarnishedpose There are plenty of people online that want to go back to the systems that are currently present in AC Unity.
If you were as aware or as smart as you thought you were, that shouldn't have been a surprise. Be careful who you call "you people".
Holding the trigger to crouch was a horrible idea. Glad syndicate and other games changed it to a button press
@@LeonJohnson-yi3hg
You can actually just tap it once and it will stay crouch unless you did a sprint assassination (which is not advisable considering it takes so long than a normal crouch assassination)
For a while I've felt that Unity is incredibly ambitious, but Syndicate is consistently forgotten as the closest the series has got to perfecting its core ideas. Everything may be simplified from Unity, but it all works and is entirely readable. The carriages and boats provide unique parkour challenges
Stealth has less options (no disguise for example) but has AI that responds realistically
I, like all fans, want the ideas of Unity to be returned to. But whenever I want that type of game, Syndicate always attracts me more for these reasons
I’ve always appreciated Syndicate’s consistent stealth, strong blackbox settings, vertical interior layout, and improved enemy AI.
@@sosaysjaySyndicate did have, I feel, a woeful story, though - with some of the worst celebrity [historic] cameos in the entire series... I think I rolled my eyes at every one.
It wasted the twins, too, especially Evie.
Gorgeous setting, but it wasn't enough to make me endure the story till the end, and despite buying the DLC I didn't ever finish that, either.
@@SabiJD Syndicate handled cameos the same way modern-day Simpsons episodes handled them. In your face and doesn't mesh into the story. "Hey, look! So-and-so is in our game/show! Look how cool they are in our signature art style!"
"Kill two dads in one hour" Oh, my god, how did I forget this? I was in hysterics when this unfolded, it was trying so hard to make me care. Probably not the tone they were going for.
I cracked with "now Arno gets double the character development"
You've quickly become one of my favorite channels, Jay. I like how you go in-depth with your points on and give a new perspective on them in a video essay format. Your channel will reach greater heights. Keep up the good work!
I appreciate that, thank you
AC Unity, for its story, is like a trilogy but your just getting the cliffnotes all compacted into one game. And yet even then, you feel like the cliffnotes are leaving out many details.
You forgot the "jumping cloth physics" in-between camera cuts!. Also, the fact that there's no safe profile to start a new game off. You literally can't start a new game without somehow deleting your previous profile or just replay individual missions through the progression tracker.
Gotta get my snacks ready for this video. I love the long ones.
Unity had amazing potential but itclearly needed an extra year of development. The game can be quite enjoyable and does some impressive things - it has huge crowds, ceautiful buildings and pretty flashy parkour. Unfortunately, it also cut a lot of great features from the previous games or went in the wrong direction. Overall it feels unfinished and broken. The parkour has cool animations, but it's clunky, imprecise and floaty. The combat is harder than before, but it's repetitive, uninteresting and it lacks the flair of previous games. The stealth is functional but barebones and unimaginative.
Unity has so many fundamental issues that go well beyond bad performance or bugs:
The controls are clunky and imprecise; stealth kills and finishers often don't connect with enemies in believable ways; you can't use the hidden blade in combat; there are very few gadgets and they don't have any interesting combat moves (like the hidden pistol, rope dart or even snares had in previous games); you can't carry bodies (why? All games since ACII had that feature); you can't have multiple weapons like the sword and a dagger (you are limited to one main weapon at a time); the cherry bombs are still broken and enemies can't hear them; you can't whistle to attract enemies; there are no combos or finishers with a pistol; regular soldiers don't carry muskets like they did in ACIII; the story is short and uninteresting; Arno becomes boring and loses all his charisma after he becomes the assassin; the romance between Arno and Elise doesn't work; the main villain is weak and forgettable; the piece of Eden makes no sense; the game wasted an opportunity to feature Connor; historical characters are pretty boring (apart from maybe one scene with Napoleon); the side content is weak; there are way too many pointless collectibles; the customization is mid and most cosmetic items are ugly af; the co-op isn't properly integrated into the story and it feels detached from the rest of the game.
We could go on for hours. Unity is simply a wasted opportunity. It had some great ideas and it does some things well but overall it's an unfinished and unpolished mess of a game.
Calling your video a good take is an understatement-it hit the nail on the head of why this game is so beautiful yet utterly unplayable. While I didn't experience any bugs on my first playthrough, the story just felt so under done. There were the makings of a good story, but like every other part of this game it needed more time. If they had made Rogue the annual release that year, and gave Unity another year in the oven we'd be looking back at that game now as the game that reinvigorated the series for the next gen. I can't help thinking the series would be more genuinely "Assassin's Creed" had this game been given the time and resources it needed to stand tall. Now every AC game feels like a Witcher knockoff because they over corrected Unity's flaws and chased trends.
Extremely good video Jay. I couldn't stay for all of your points but for the ones I did just so well said. Keep up with the content, can't wait for the next one.
I appreciate that. This was a big project, but it is my hope that I can keep future videos shorter to be more respectful of time.
I blindly supported this game as the "best" of the series until this video made me realize why I couldn't even get halfway through the game my most recent time trying. Now I'm actually giving Syndicate a chance and finding it much more enjoyable than Unity was.
I genuinely believe that the combat in old AC games is MISUNDERSTOOD. A lot of people look at the AC combat as Dark Souls players who fixate on difficulty. But here's the thing: ASSASSIN'S CREED COMBAT WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE HARD! It was meant to be COOL! You play as a skilled assassin, so it makes perfect sense that you're able to dispatch of multiple enemies in short time. That's the part of the fantasy of being an assassin! AC combat should never be compared to Dark Souls or other similar games. It should be compared to Batman, Spider-Man or Shadow of Mordor. AC combat is all about style, not difficulty. Anyone can pick up the controller and win a fight by standing still and countering. But that's not how the games were meant to be played! A skilled player who knows all the systems can use a lot of different moves, gadgets and tricks to make the combat more stylish and more interesting. So when people say that "old AC combat is bad" I always want to say "It's not! You just lack imagination".
Think about how many different things you can do in Revelations that you can't do in Unity. You can fight with hidden blades, you can fight with your fists, you have a sword and a dagger, you throw knives, shoot a crossbow or use a hidden gun. You can counter with a hookblade to steal money mid-combat or to performa a badass execution. You can disarm opponents and use their swords, axes or spears. You can chain kill enemies with brutal animations. You can throw sand in people's eyes to stun them. You can perform double finishers where Ezio impales one guy on the sword and shoots another one with his gun, you can throw 3 knives at the same time to kill multiple targets, you can throw a big axe or a two-handed sword, you can throw a spear to impale someone, you can spin a spear to kill everyone around you. You can throw a spike bomb on the ground to stun enemies. You can frighten NPCs by detonating a bomb filled with blood. You can throw an explosive bomb that works like a lethal grenade or another one that works like a non-lethal stun grenade.
And ACIII has its own set of amazing moves that give combat more depth. You can literally choke an enemy with a snare. You can hang people on trees. You can drag your victim with a rope dart into a bush. You can put an explosive mine on an enemy mid-combat. You can counter with your pistol or shoot 2 people at the same time. You can air assassinate with any weapon including swords, axes, tomahawks, hidden blades, bare hands and even muskets. You can assassinate while running without losing much momentum. There's an animation for double assassination when your 2nd target is behind your 1st one. You can yank people mid-combat with a rope. You can disarm a musketeer and immediately shoot someone with the mustket (but not if it has already been fired). You can take a human shield to protect yourself from a volley of musket bullets.
I'm sick and tired of people saying that "old AC comabt had no depth". It's ridiculous. AC Unity combat has no depth! Seriously. What can you do in this game? You press attack, parry or dodge and that's it. There are no interesting gadgets, no flashy finishers, no double kills, no chain kills, no fist combat, no hidden blade combat, no disarming, no nothing. Unity is by far the least interesting combat system in the series. Even RPG games like AC Origins have better combat than this.
I remember I platinumed _Unity_ out of pure spite when it came out, lol. But in doing so, I did learn to appreciate it. People may look back on it with rose-colored glasses now, but I can't really blame them. If they actually worked on that system for a few years & really perfected that level of parkour, it would be amazing.
It was a step in the right direction, but it never had a chance to live up to its full potential with that yearly release bs.
ik i'm maybe being negative but this game is perfect for casuals who think they want "old ac back" yet never want to engage in the systems and will never detect or understand the jankyness unless it literally hit them in the face, in my opinion
Really every AC is for casuals, so in that sense Unity fits in
I think people miss it cause it looks really good
Perfect tell for those kind of people is when they glaze Unitys objectively clunky and unresponsive parkour but hey it just looks so cool right?
DUDE, I was waiting in the combat part for you saying something about the guns. Got so relieved when you started talking about them ❤️ love the vid.
This may sound weird, but honestly, prior to your videos "social stealth" didn't even register to me as a concept that was missing. Because in the old games it never was more than, well, hire a portable bush or distract some NPCs with the press of a button. When I first heard "social stealth" the term seemed so grand and I wondered what I had been missing in the old games. It sounds like intrigue, infiltration, covert operations. Not thief/courtesan/brawler-flavoured button presses. So I at least don't really miss it, I guess, but I thinks its a bit odd that some people, like, really want them back. Though I still wonder what an AC game might look like with a vastly expanded system based on this premise.
I understand where you are coming from, I do not think that take sounds weird. There are a lot of concepts within AC that sound really cool on paper but got minimal exploration from Ubisoft beyond a conceptual level. AC2 pushed things way forward with systemic blending in different crowds and hiring factions, and AC3 nudged it forward more by letting you blend with any groupings of NPCs, not just specific ones tailored for social stealth. But other than that, innovation was really minimal which I think is part of the reason it wasn't missed that much. I am glad to see it returning in Mirage in what seems to be a much, much more functional form than what we got in Valhalla.
Social stealth was great in Unity. If you killed someone while blending and kept talking, no one would notice.
It made stealth killings in plain sight viable. If you didn’t use a lot of social stealth in Unity, you played the game wrong.
That’s why there so many NPCs.
@@sosaysjay that's a question that popped into my head a couple of times while watching your videos - all these different systems or ideas that sound great on paper but never really get fully developed. I loved Odyssey for it's expanded (side)quests and exploration, but still it felt a bit undercooked in a way. English isn't my first language, but I think the word I'm looking for is cohesion. It feels like so many moving parts that don't get enough attention because every aspect needs development time. I wonder if it would be beneficial to rotate between them. Have an AC that goes all in on Hitman Style Stealth. Have one that just full on goes Witcher open world with deep Quests and exploration etc. Rotate between them. If Witcher would've had to accommodate Hitman Gameplay, it would be probably pretty bad. Just say "Screw It" and untangle all these many, maybe too many systems into manageable games and flesh them out.
@@PuntilaserI think this is part of their plan, honestly, to cycle between different gameplay styles. They realise they've split the player base. Some like the ship combat, some like the rpg's, some want actual a return to social stealth. If a franchise must go on forever, I guess I can respect this way of going about things. I wonder what codename Hexe will be?
Assassins Creed doesn't have/never has had incredibly in-depth nuanced stealth mechanics in my opinion, I think it's way you're always above or below; on a roof or hanging from it, a lot easier to program this type of stealth; less complex interactions, less likely for them to occur. When you're in front of enemies, you need to literally be rendered invisible; hidden in crowds, grass or again... behind, below or above enemies; it's so simplistic. Even less complex games have improved gamefeel, so they often feel better than AC
A lot of people say "comparison is unfair or indirect" I disagree somewhat especially considering the time-disparity; some of these games came out so much longer ago: Dishonored 1, 2/Ghost of Tsushima/Hitman series/Metal Gear Solid I - V/Sekiro, etc.
I love the fantasy this game presents but it is really bad objectively. Like Whitelight said, the IDEA of Unity > Unity.
games really are unlike any other artform or medium, like im watching arno dynamically mix animations to parry each enemy attack and its beautiful and the artistry and technical knowhow on display are insane, and yet if if doesnt feel good its bad simple as that
The way so many people called this a "hidden gem" made me expect a lot going into this on my first playthrough, but man, was I in for a flaming train ride. Honestly, I enjoyed a lot about this, but I think this game has actually become overrated in online circles. Additionally, great video Jay, agree with practically all your points!
Honestly one of th only e assassin's creed youtubers worth taking seriously
@Nah-wg6dw or just completely milk toast takes who dont engage critically with the series at all
Who are the other ones?
@@glibchubik4090 leo k, jcers, ssj lang, kinography and a few others
@@Zikuto_Don't forget lazerass, master ASSassin and altair stealthass.
@@alexandruacatrinei1032 do you just not like them or something? They didn’t do anything wrong so idk why you’re hating
Excellent video! I'm playing Syndicate lately and, despite removing manual jump, the game feels far more responsive and consistent than Unity in its moment to moment gameplay. Unity overly focused on fidelity over gameplay which runs contrary to their ambitions of crafting sandbox assassination missions where planning and precise execution should matter. Syndicate got hate for being formulaic, but for a game with significantly shorter development time than Unity, it salvaged the hell out of its wreckage into something that is safely enjoyable.
Syndicate was made by the same group that made brotherhood. They always used to make the most enjoyable games, and Jacob was quickly one of my favourite protagonists, even if evie was boring. Sad to see that those creative minds have left the franchise after Syndicate, and sadder yet to see new people who made odyssey and previously had lower down roles in syndicate development, claiming creative credit for the game. It confused many online.
Syndicate gets a lot of flack for being less ambitious than Unity, but it is a much more functional game. Reduction of input lag alone makes a huge difference in how the game feels. There is also just less to get stuck on because the world is less complex, which has its pros and cons obviously. Personally, I think Syndicate is as good as it could have been in many ways given just how much they had to try and mask instead of fix. Large crowds like in Unity were just too much for the tech, so they were removed. Parkour was really janky so they added the launcher and simplified the world design. Combat was revamped to be much easier but also much less frustrating. Stealth just works better, plain and simple.
These are bandaids, not real solutions, and yet they succeed in making the game so much more functional than Unity. Add fantastic side content and a clearer Templar plot to the mix and you're left with a game that I enjoy a lot. I get that the simplification upsets a lot people who wanted to see Unity built upon, but going over everything I did in this video, I'm amazed the game works as well as it does.
@@sosaysjay well made points there. I do agree to be fair.
Sometimes I got softlocked jumping in Notre Dame and flying forever in place not being able to land. Once I broke my arm apparently and all animations got wonky. I also remember the cartoony "5 guards in a row fall for the same hiding spot" encounters. Missed out on the platinum, because I did not feel like doing the multiplayer sync kills and stuff. Overall I had fun with it, but would never touch it again since it launched.
Great video Jay. Just found your channel, sure you're going to be big.
I will say, I don't necessarily think Unity is incredible, but I do have a greater affection for it now than when it launched.
But that affection is largly directly due to disappointment with the newer games.
Unity isn't perfect by any means, but it feels the prototype amd proof of concept of how they could have furthered the original identity of AC.
They may not have been successful, but they were trying to make improvements to stealth and parkour, densify the city architecture and crowds, and put an even greater and emphasis on assassinations.
I think Unity could have been the beginning of recitalizing AC, adressing fan concerns of the franchise going stale without needing to completely reinvent it turn it into a whole new genre of game.
I'm one of those who is really disappointed in the direction the series went after Syndicate, and I can't help but look back at Unity as a huge missed lesson. Ubisoft just thought we were tired of their formula when Unity got bad reviews. But personally, I just wanted them to refine the formula. Oh, and release a functioning piece of software.
Every time Ubisoft receives criticism for a game, they completely abandon the ideas behind it and instead of improving, they simplify them with very little effort. Unity could have been the bones to a perfect Assassins Creed game with flashy parkour and assassinations.
@@VenomousWolverine yeah, they really do. It's like they don't realize what they have. Criticism doesn't mean everything about it is terrible. Usually we're saying we like what's there but see how it could be even better.
Wish they'd stuck it out after Unity.
The issue was, people were very _very_ mad about Unity (and it even directly affected their bottom line as the next game, Syndicate, bombed). It's not just the bugs and Unity's inherently broken state, everyone just didn't see any of Unity's potential nor see what it brought to the table; most people liked how AC4 branched out and became a _"life as a [insert iconic historical group] simulator"_ kind of game and chastised Unity for sticking to the same old Assassin centered story and gameplay.
Most, just like you, only realized Unity's massive potential in hindsight; especially after the new games dropped the ball so intensely. Honestly I wouldn't even blame Ubisoft as much, there is zero chance for them to stick it out with Unity and improving it's foundation while risking yet another backlash accusing lack of innovation; *post release* the players were mostly at fault on why they abandoned the series' roots, though Ubi is obviously at fault for releasing the game in it's unfinished state which got people angry in the first place.
@@shira_yone I agree but look at Syndicate. They added rope launcher to decrease parkour, combat was made dull simple by mashing one button and rest of the game was just the same thing. Ubisoft did not improve anything that Unity was not able to achieve. They just said let's dull it down and add simple stuff. Unity's combat was basic but in a way effective because stealth was prioritised. The cover system was not good but we did not see any improvement in Syndicate.
I don't think Ubisoft can now even create a game which can rival some of the top games released every year. They just release generic RPGs where one is a shooter, the other is a now a fantasy land.
@@VenomousWolverine I heard plenty of people (especially sane ones that doesn't care too much about parkour) ends up preferring Syndicate over Unity so they must've improved (in comparison to Unity) plenty of other small aspects that adds up.
Another great, and necessary, video.
Unity will always be a game I really like but it's hard to truly love, for all the reasons you lay out here.
This game really needs a current-gen remake imo
I think they should remake the entire franchise from the first game onwards. The lore and identity is so beyond fucked there's no salvaging it.
every few months i get a strong urge to try out unity since as a photo and video guy the tone mapping and lighting in unity is still maybe the best in any game ever, hopefully this video will convince me otherwise cause i couldnt be assed waiting thru the download lol
I'd still recommend you form your own opinion on it rather than just taking a UA-camr's word on it, it is a very flawed game but it is also loved in equal measure in spite of that, although I get it if you just don't wanna install a 40GB game lol
I don't think it's worth it to suffer through all the jank if it's just for photos. It can be enjoyable with the right mindset and motivation, but this one might not carry you through if I were to be quite frank about it.
It's interesting looking at AC nowadays as someone who stopped after AC3. People talking about the newest games to compare them to "older" games like Unity or Black Flag. I'll never buy any AC game ever again but it's kinda wild to see how my man Ezio's legacy turned into fighting dragons.
How the fuck are you gonna suffer through 3 and then skip the "better in every way" pirate 4?
@@frenchynoob don't find pirates interesting
@@kod8933A bit old, but I would say that Origins and Odyssey, while they're just AC game by name, are far more engaging open world titles with well made action and stealth. They aren't excellent, but you may have a better time playing those than, say, AC3 or Unity.
I think Assassin's Creed as an IP is one that has always suffered from great concepts and ideas executed poorly due to laziness and greed. As much as I love this series, time has showed me I've always enjoyed it more in concept than reality.
AC Unity was the final nail in the coffin for me. I was a long time fan starting with AC 1. But after playing Unity, I knew that the AC that I loved was gone. Both narratively and mechanically.
My problem with AC Unity, is that it is so boring. Arno is completely unlikeable. Ironically his overall story is similar to Ezio, but their actions and how they come across is so different.
what's so unlikeable about him? i thought he was a good character tbh, but it's been a while since i played unity so idk
They would have had such a good opportunity to explore the different orders by having Arno actually unknowingly develop relationships with the templars, including Elise, before his adopted father gets assassinated and he gets involved with the Assassins the same way he does in the game. One thing AC2 did so well is that it made you invested in killing the targets, no other Assassins Creed game has managed to do that for me to such an extent. The only ones that come close are AC3 and Black Flag.
@@burgerbran I remember him being petty, not really understanding why he’s killing Templars, playing into Germains coup, not listening to his mentors. He’s generally unlikable in the way he speaks to be people. It isn’t until right the very end, he goes onto have a redemption arc. It’s like, the game should have started at the end.
@@zandernewson9933Arno is a character built around being headstrong and impulsive, never questioning his rationale, and jumping into his shoddy plans with no hesitation. He played into Germain’s coup by killing key opponents of him because he never sought the council of his other assassin’s, instead acting without their consent, and leaving them in the dark until he’s already screwed the pooch; he also acts without full knowledge of the situation because he takes information at the surface level, again playing into Germain’s coup, and causing him to make a lot of mistakes.
His redemption arc at the end of the game sees him realizing the copious amounts of mistakes he’s making in the form of Elise’s borderline suicidal pursuit of vengeance. Arno decides that the vengeance that he was so recklessly seeking was not more important than Elise. This causes Elise to get upset at him letting their chance at Germain go, and the assassin’s finally get sick of him and kick him out. Then Elise ropes him back into the hunt for Germain, and Arno wraps up the loose ends his sloppy work left untied before going into the final confrontation.
Arno ends the game finally realizing how wrong he was, and comes to understand the true meaning of the creed. Arno isn’t meant to be likable-at least not in the sense of him being competent, and his arc was him getting over his arrogance, and becoming a wiser man. Kind of like Edward in a way. Now, did they accomplish what they were setting out to do? Maybe, that’s up for you to decide for yourself, but I think Arno was an okay protagonist.
I didn't dislike him, or find him unlikeable; I just didn't find him likeable, he has little character, or character development; like most Assassins Creed protagonists, I'm just kinda apathetic; they don't make me care, it's like killing off other characters to progress his: their lives mean nothing, so their deaths mean nothing to me too, same with his.
My biggest problem with all the parkour systems after brotherhood (which had a wall jump added to the second one) that they look nice and thats it. Everything is automated and what happens when everything is automated? they got rid of the parkour riddles. You just climb because its cool. Thats it. You dont think anymore you just press a button and the protagonist does everything else.
the climbing become so boring it got almost irrelevant in assasins creed syndicate when they implemented the grappling hook.
every time i get the itch to download Unity again i watch a video essay on it and think of something better to feed my SSD
AC as a franchise, as a formula is so unique in the industry that even though the individual pieces always fall short, the games feel like more than the sum of their lackluster parts. I *want* to love the games, I *need* something like them to be objectively good, but it's frustrating that Ubisoft just seems incapable. I wonder if they should try something like Bethesda and Fallout NV, where they hand the tools and IP to a different, enthusiastic studio for a game.
I think AC Unity is the closest the series ever got to the IDEA of an Assassin's Creed game that started with AC1, but on practice, it falls so shortly, it's honestly disheartening to see.
The parkour system is the perfect parkour system for this idea, but it doesn't work properly most of the time.
The stealth system the perfect stealth system for this idea, but i doesn't work properly most of the time.
The combat, the story. The only thing I think is done greatly is the world, Paris, it is dense, it is realistic and is a perfect place for an Assassin's Creed experience.
It pains me so much that Ubisoft, instead of keeping on with these systems and improving them, to eventually turn them in the best Assassin's Creed experience ever, first completely butchered them with AC Syndicate, and then abandoned them with Origins.
great to see your in depth thoughts on Unity - I look forward to your videos
Another great video, underrated UA-cam channel
“splinter cell blacklist came out the year before unity” *matt damon saving private ryan aging gif*
Another big problem, partly mentioned, that in the big picture of the AC series, this game doesn't matter, it doesn't add anything meaningful to the plot. Sure many don't like how the modern day parts pull them out of the immersive gameplay, but they are also necessary for stringing together these games. We had Desmond's story that was actually solid in AC3, but also ended there. In BF and Rogue we had those first person investigation like parts that added a lot to what happened after AC3, and started the Juno plotline (which was dropped, what a shame). But here it's just a big fat nothing, and at the end of the story we also find out there was nothing really to find out. I'd say every other game added something to the AC Lore, except Unity.
The ending was such a slap in the face. "Whoops, looks like we couldn't find the big bad because he could be any of these skulls in the catacombs, but that's OK, we already got what we need, anyway! Kthxbai!"
People can say all they want about AC3's ending being bad, because, as the Wachowskis warned with _The Matrix: Path of Neo,_ the "Jesus thing" trope may work from a cinematic perspective, but it won't work in an interactive context like a video game. But good grief, at least that ending gave you something to look forward to, like Juno being the new big bad of the modern day, taking the place of Vidic, and a new generation of Assassins running where Desmond walked. But, like _Unity's_ ending, that plotline ended with a wet fart.
I think you sum it up well. It's hard for people to resolve conflicting ideas about a single thing, so some folk look at this game and see only the failure, others see only the promise. To really understand the game, you have to see both. I think this review captures both nicely.
When I look over the AC series, at all the games, and at each individual aspect and feature of each game, a pattern emerges. Everything appears amazing, but falls apart on closer inspection. With few exceptions, all the protagonists are charming and likeable. Yet few actually serve as meaningful protagonists, with anything like a substantial story. Arno's story is based on his love for Elise, and his tragedy would be palpable, if there was much to their relationship beyond the excellent acting and direction of the performers, and, of course, the gorgeous character modeling and quality performance capture. But beneath all those surface aspects is a love story with no depth, not consistency, no real thematic weight.
And beyond that, as the series goes on, the entire framing story has become like a dead, rotten limb they refuse to just cut off, instead dragging it from sequel to sequel and flailing it limply as if to say "See, this still works. It's fine." The frame of AC is actually three frames, the present-day vs the past, the philosophical battle between Templars and Assassins, and the legacy of the Isu. But these three frames simply don't line up into a single narrative meaning. Each entry in the series promises this clunky plot will move forward, but instead, it becomes more and more convoluted as it spins it wheels. Unity itself is a series of scenes in search of a story, and the series as a whole is a series of ideas in search of a narrative. The writers seem to think just trotting out the ideas in game after game is enough. Not in my estimation. With each new game, I find myself increasingly at a loss to see the relevance of the present-day frame story, or the purpose of each mention of the Isu to the story at hand. None of it adds up.
And as with the stories, the game play is always similarly underdeveloped. Individual bits will be crafted to perfection. The combat in the recent RPG titles manages to have a touch of depth and variety. But once it combines with the story progression, it falls victim to the classic RPG problem. You start underpowered, and by the mid-game, you're so absurdly OP it hardly counts as a game at all, let alone a challenging one.
But to me, the series' core problem is best seen in its stealth. Stealth is the core identity of the AC games. But stealth requires polish, and polish is the where these games truly fail. Anyone who's ever done anything artistic for a living knows that the first 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and the last 20% takes 80% of the time. This is where Ubisoft in general, and the AC team in particular, make their fatal mistake. They don't take the time to polish what they've made. They've streamlined their process toward bloat rather than perfection. And so even with games like Valhalla, which isn't riddled with bugs like Unity, nothing is particularly well done. It's not so much a game as a bunch of game components and systems chucked into an engine any old how, in the hopes that fun will emerge on its own.
The greatest failure of AC: Unity, to my mind, isn't that the game was bad, but that the wrong lesson was learned. Instead of realizing they needed to make a better game, they decided they should just make one that's totally different. Don't get me wrong, I think the RPG format was a good direction for the series, a natural evolution. But while they didn't end up as badly broken as Unity, they made the same mistake, prioritizing "more" over "better." They took an extra year to develop AC: Origins, but instead of spending that time polishing and perfecting, they spent it bloating. They made larger games, but they're still undercooked.
There's a famous Mark Twain quote, “I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.” That sums up everything wrong with AC games. Three frame stories where there should be one. Ten chapters when there should be four. A dozen half-baked game mechanics, all conflicting one another, because they didn't want to take the time to make sure five would interact seamlessly. A game series that tries to be all things to everyone, that never quite pleases anyone.
Content like this is why I’m subscribed, thank you.
I liked Unity, but I don't mind your more harsh attitude towards it at all, since I don't think I even remember much of the game. The city was pretty, the customization was cool, the story was bad - that's it. The fact that I don't even remember like 90% of my time with Unity tells me it wasn't that great to begin with
Bro this video was fucking NEEDED
I’m so sick of people telling me Unity is fixed and is the peak of Ac, this game brainwashed so many people
I always want another assassin creed game set in French Revolution, such a waste of perfect setting for Assassin Creed
You know, I can excuse most of the problems with this game. I really can. But the story is what kills it for me. How could it manage to have so many good ideas and drop the ball with every single one of them? It's honestly baffling to me. One of the coolest and least explored settings (the French revolution) and they do fuck all with it, serving as a backdrop that barely even sets the mood. Heck, they managed to screw up even the romance plotline which was, in a lot of ways, new to the franchise. And Élise was such a strong character that I honestly wish she was the protagonist. Not to mention it doesn't really go anywhere, it's only set-up with no pay-off? Every time Arno chose love instead of duty, something terrible happened. Now, in the very end, when it's Élise's turn, she doesn't and something terrible also happens. I guess damned if you do, damned if you don't? Like, what's the message here? Duty over love? Love over duty? You're fucked either way?
Like there's a couple of ways of fixing it, and it's just a matter of switching Arno's and Élise's position in the fight against Germain.
- have *Arno* have to make the same decision he's been making the whole game one last time, but this time he learned from his mistakes and choses duty over love, he loses Élise, but saves the world or whatever. This is just pay-off for finally choosing responsibility, earning him the monologue in the end realizing that sometimes, you can't always have what you want and sacrifices are necessary in the name of a larger cause and even Élise understood that. Which would go perfectly with the backdrop as people were literally dying for a larger cause.
- have Arno chose Élise, like he always has and always will and then they could take Germain down together thanks to the power of love or something (I'm not a writer, figure it out lol) and it could conclude in a sweet moment where they have to figure out what to do next now that Arno has been expelled and the Order is in shambles. So now that they have love, they can both chose duty and set out to continue the work that De La Serre and Mirabeu started. An assassin and a templar working together for the greater good and hey, we don't kill Élise for the sake of killing her.
Everything else is *whatever*, give it a couple more games to refine it or a few patches and I'm sure it would've been great. But the story... man, what a miss. Like I really wish they would retcon Unity just for the sake of using the french revolution again.
The execs heavily meddled with what Darby mcdevitt was trying to do with the story *sigh*
@@trumpflavourednugget9325 Had they let Darby do his thing, we'd have narrative and thematic gems like _Black Flag._ How is it that a game about an interpretation of the titular Creed from an outsider's perspective _hides in plain sight_ as a fun pirate fantasy game?
53:43 I disagree with your take on cosmetics/build customization.
- First, they did the (common) mistake of tieing together stats and appearance of a piece of equipment. The "official" appearance of Arno (the one on the cover, trailers, figurines, and skin in AC Rogue) is your starting gear : it's trash stat-wise, and because among other things, HP and tool amount depend on gear, you will ditch this look as soon as possible.
You have to choose between good drip and good build ; every weapon does not fit well with every belt/skin, some pieces of gear (mostly belts) also clip awkwardly into each other.
-This game was not playtested enough and it can be seen even post-patches in the stats combinations given to the equipment. Hence why only one single family of belt gives both more ammo and more lockpicks (Phantom), along with HP and smoke bombs, making the Legendary Phantom Belt the best belt by far for exploring the open world.
-Recoloring is grind-dependent (purchased with Creed Points or obtained after collecting X cockades, it's fine), but inconsistent (example : Legendary Prowler Hood with the Darkest Alley recolor shows green hues when most of it should appear black). Also weirdly no "Templar Black", replacing the blue of the first coloring by black.
Realizing many players would prioritize build over style but resent their mismatching outfit, they also gave us "outfits" : skins that hide the exact gear you're wearing, most of them being outfits from the other games up to Rogue, outfits made for other characters in the story(Bellec, Bonaparte) or easy tweaks (recolored Altaïr outfit, Raider outfit but with the Iron mask). I know how time consuming it could have been to add more original outfits ; what I wish they had done is giving us the option to apply the recolors of the main gear to the outfits. That would have been great and fast.
Great take on the customization. A transmog feature would've done wonders for the game. I dunno about anybody else, but running around in a poor district of Paris dressed like a loony with a frilly coat, theater mask, and hood that _glitters_ in the sun is so ridiculous it might as well be a violation of the Second Tenet that desyncs you from the game.
@@jmal Don't forget about the medium heels !
Honestly, Connor also stood out in the crowd. I get the inspiration for the Phantom sets (the Phantom of the Opera + ball outfit), and they clearly leaned towards the ludicrous and memey (Firefly colors) for this co-op game. Not a big issue for me ; but as you said, if only it had transmog.
@@lassassindu5071 Connor can at least pass as a light infantryman or scout if he has his default longcoat colors (also doubles as winter camo), and depending on the dyes he chooses, a frontiersman or a rank-and-file Patriot soldier. Hell, with the green Colonial outfit he can pass as a Hessian soldier (can also double as woodland camo).
you forgot the replayability, on pc its literally impossible to replay the story and the game is boring once you finished everything
Really good video. Your effort deserve way more attention
Your description of the game as MMO like does a great job of describing why I bounced off the game. I have never been able to enjoy MMOs and Unity's side quests definitely instill the same sense of intense boredom.
You can use the riot crowd event to you advantage, although only once. When infiltrating Palais de Luxembourg in 'Hoarders', you can kill the front gate guards and the crowd will rush in.
This video was needed, everyone was sucking off unity after odyssey and despite me preferring the older style of games Unity is probably my least favourite in the series. It promises everything that I want but fails to deliver at everything
That's an exaggeration. You can't ignore the stealth gameplay or satisfying combat
@@yomi2624 stealth is inconsistent as shit and the combat feels like a good idea rather than an actual functional system. Just see what this video says about the stealth and combat and you see why they both suck
@@JamesSmith-ny2gb I've got over 50 hours on unity and I rarely get those stealth bugs / inconsistencies. Maybe I'm just lucky, but my time with stealth in unity has just been plain simple fun, combined with satisfying assassination animations and assassination opportunities. The games far from perfect, which is why I'm sad they decided to give up on these styles of games, but this doesn't warrant the harsh critique of the stealth in the game, especially considering the leap it took fro previous titles.
@@yomi2624 have you though? 50 hours? Sorry I just don’t believe you
@@yomi2624 50 ain't a lot
I had been a huge french revolution geek as a teenager. So I always dreamed about gettint an assassins creed in this time period. The possibilities in terms of story, conflicts, personal motivations for characters, the war between assassins and templars, clash of philosophies seemed endless. For example you could revert the typical start of an ac game, where it isnt the templars who are the ones in power, but the assassins, who are leading the revolution from the shadows, while they are themselves divided in different camps, who dont see eye to eye on where they want the revolution to lead. And while the brotherhood is busy with themselves all the overwhelming events and voilence of the revolution, they fail to see the templars moving in the dark until its too late. They were thought to have died with the old society, but they went through a transformation themselves and infiltrated the revolutionaries. That would have been a great premise imo and even back then I expected something similar at least. But all I got as a story was ... that
The lack of any acknowledgement of Arno’s real father and the events of rogue drive me nuts! I know it’s because of the development timeline etc but still. He was old enough where he would’ve remembered his bio dads death and I’d imagine want to know who killed him. Arno’s voice actor is the best aspect of this game for me personally, and the murder mysteries.
Like why would he not try and kill Shay?? Or at least learn who he is?
Honestly, the biggest mystery is who and what Arno's mother is? There's like no mention at all
@@YEY0806 yes also that! I’m sure it’s some generic “died in childbirth” because 1700s, but even like the Frye twins know and mention their mother and that she died from childbirth.
@gracie15928 Honestly, I can only think of Conner and Ezio's mothers ever actually being in the story, and only Connors mom had a role.
@@YEY0806 yes, and Kassandra/Alexios. I like the stories better when they have parental involvement on some level, personally.
@gracie15928 Oh yeah, I forgot that, too. Still it says something that even a hated game like Odyssey actually has the parents be involved and significant for the story rather than just be forgotten revenge fuel
Wait you didn't play AC Unity in French?
1:19:10 - when i played the game for the first time i expected it to be 1/3 not 2/3 of the runtime.
I'll be 100% honest, Unity is my second favorite AC game, behind Syndicate. I love Arno, and I love exploring Paris and the Café Théâtre. I've also poured many hours into trying to better my skills with the combat and parkour, because of how awesome it looks when it works correctly.
That being said, after watching this video through to the end, I think some of your criticisms are absolutely valid. Despite playing Unity for the first time in late 2019-early 2020 on PC after it had been patched, I did find myself getting frustrated with some of the unpolished mechanics, such as the sticky cover system and Arno not obeying button commands. The poor balancing in some of the Co-op Missions can also be a pain, as certain tasks are borderline impossible to complete if you're playing solo - which wouldn't be too bad, if certain weapons and armor pieces weren't locked behind them (this in particular drives me up a wall). Not to mention, the Arno-Elise romance will always frustrate me as well, because it started out so beautifully, only for it morph into a one-sided relationship that made Arno appear like he was developing an increasingly unhealthy obsession with a woman who may or may not still care about him, and even at one point LITERALLY discarded him because he didn't fit in her 'revenge agenda', due to his caring more about her ACTUAL LIFE and wanting to protect her over taking out Germain.
But in spite of its clear problems, I can't bring myself to hate this game, because I've genuinely enjoyed a lot of it and still do. I did enjoy watching your video as well; it's always nice to hear varied opinions, whether one agrees with them or not. Good work with editing and scripting this, and thanks for sharing!
Arno and Elise being wasted was my biggest frustration. He, and they as a couple, have such a strong start. But then the story insists on separating them, and wasting time on far less compelling things.
I get the feeling Series X BC is the best way to play Unity, though. I had a very smooth experience with very little technical issues or bugs.
And whilst it cannot fix all of Unity's issues, playing in French really seals the deal on its setting and atmosphere (just like ACII/Brotherhood in Italian). It at least makes its great moments feel all the better.
Unity may be my favourite diamond in the rough game of all time, honestly. It's a bloated mess, weighed down with feature creep, inconsistent parkour and controls, bugs, WAY too much content, most of which is a total nothingburger, and yet... The game has a spark to it that I've just never been able to shake. I've been a fan of this game since launch day, and my fondness for it only grows with time. Haven't finished the video yet, and I'm sure all of your critiques are totally valid and correct (in the parkour section right now, they are,) but sometimes things are more than the sum of their parts. Anyway, always enjoy your work! Keep it up!!
Apparently Black Flag is getting a remake, and we're still here with the to this day best looking AC game trapped in 30fps and 900p on consoles. What I'd give for a remaster of this game.. Even just a patch!
What a thorough and monumantal breakdown of a game that people are now holding so high up in their minds. We really do deserve better as the fans of the games, and I can only hope that Ubisoft will learn from their mistakes. Even if we don't I'll have another wonderfully written and voiced analysis to re-watch)
That is kind of you, I am glad you enjoyed the video.
I don't think its unfair to hold unity in such high standards. It's not perfect, sure. But for what it did bring It remains my favourite ac game. The black box missions are amazing, the stealth gameplay is the best the franchise has seen (I fucking love the assassination animations). Though janky at times, I find the parkour to be very satisfying, especially combined with the amazing setting. And the co op, though sometimes buggy it created an unrivaled ac experience IMO, especially with friends.
@@yomi2624 it's fair to expect the series you love to improve and get better. Paraphrasing another youtuber Whitelight, this series has never met it's full potential and we as fans just deal with what we actually got, mediocre games at best that bafflingly as of now got it's "peak" in 2009.
Anyway nice to meet you fellow Unity enjoyer.
Im pretty sure most of the discussion revolves around the sentiment that it's a hidden gem because of how harshly it was bashed was extreme and many people have found it to be more enjoyable than the original discussion would suggest. More-over, most of us recognise the game has issues and isn't perfect, however, it is a strong foundation of what AC could be. If Unity wasnt such a technical mess it's possible we would have seen that foundation and potential actually met, rather than the homongenised version of big open world AC we have now. Unity is a rather unique game which celebrated what made AC unique, not what was the trending game of the time and many of us wished AC would have continued that route.
Many of the comments and criticisims you have for the game all originate from the same issue. The game was rushed and is full of technical issues. The parkour is odd and rough because of the complexity of the map and the rushed nature of the game means they didnt have the time to iron out the poor prediction of your naviagtion. The combat is a great foundation to bridge complexity with simple style. No one is asking for the exact system in Unity with the poor hit registartion, inconsistent timing, guns etc. They're asking for the difficulty, the depth in the dodge, smaller counter timing, counters that dont' kill, heavy and light attacks, perfect parry's, etc. I think Ghost of Tsushima is a perfect example of what people wanted and clearly Sucker Punch saw this potential as well, almost completely taking the system themselves. It's the same with the stealth, it has great ideas, the interiors, crouching and tools you have, along with the more brutal detection system are all great, but it's really held back by the technical isses, with dodgy detection through walls or from extreme distances, cover systrem that didnt work, etc. People want the large crowds of unity but they want it to be technically fixed, not taken verbatim.
All of these issues are a result of a lack of time, not poor design. The ideas were there and thats what people wanted to be expanded, most of the discussion is around the missed and lost potential that caused the series to do a harsh left turn into the open world design we have now, while acknowleding how much of a mess that Unity is. I completely agree with you that we deserved better than Unity and this is brilliant video to help combat the loud voices praising the game without talking about its issues.
After recently binginging Ac 1 all the way to unity I feel like the creators really started to drift away from the core themes of the games after Revelations. Especially after the final scene when Ezio explains to Sophia the philosophy of the Creed and telling Altair's remains to rest it felt like a good bye to many core aspects, like the closing of story, but they need to finish Desmond's story so they had to make AC 3 which focused more on the historical setting and the relationship between Connor and haythem. AC 4 felt more like a heroes journey that happend to take place in the AC universe then downhill from there to the point AC is no longer what it once was
I agree 100% with pretty much everything said in this video and I wish that more people understood that Assassin's Creed Unity is a broken game, not just because of the bug's but because of the design flaws.
The Combat, Parkour, and stealth don't work as intended at the best of times, I don't know how the parkour was meant to work at all with there being no consistency, no predictability in where Arno will jump, the guards with there guns made me wish you could use human shields or even dodge the bullets like in Syndicate for how silly that was, and the detection being all over the place made me wonder sometimes why I even try.
But all of these problems could at least be solved with more time and effort, maybe even with mods if you care to do so, but in my opinion it wouldn't be worthwhile because even if the game worked fine the story and the side missions would still suck. Above all the story's lightning fast pace and skimming over of interesting historical events really just pisses me off, and as if that isn't bad enough the unceremonious dropping of every plot thread besides the love story really leaves you feeling like when you take into consideration everything else wrong with every aspect of this game it there is not a single thing they did well.
It's like every mechanic, every element, every part of the plot, everything about the game was half-baked, there isn't a single finished or fully functional aspect of this game and it is just frustrating to play, but despite that it looks so pretty and so people get nostalgic and can't remember how bad it really was, and don't realize how bad it still is, I replayed all of the AC games I own and it really stands out as being so much worse then what came before or after just in terms of being really frustrating almost every minute and almost never really satisfying.
I hope more people can for 1 second let go of there beliefs and open there eyes. Good video from a better man.
I would encourage you to take a closer look the Kenway movement system next. It includes basically all of the things Unity is credited for, with very little of the unnecessary streamlining that goes strategically ignored. While your breakdown of Unity's movement was highly accurate, the context for it based on previous games left out some important things that honestly make it look even more damning. My video (AC Rogue) Controlled Descents in New York will get you started in the right direction
Leo's testing turned out to be a little bit incomplete since he's not that into combat in AC. Everything for swords, maces, and muskets if accurate, but what we figured out recently is that heavy weapons, spears and guillotine guns do have unique heavy attacks that floor every enemy type - even brutes! So your weapon choice essentially changes how much you need to spam staggering strike (You know about the double right? Your clips never show it) vs strategically using heavy attacks while attacking and staggering strikes while defending, at the cost of the clunky control scheme, trying to get over to your circle button if you get attacked while charging one up, which will happen a *lot,* especially if you don't have the ammo capacity to quickshot everyone and need to go for those heavy ground executes. You can even get away with playing without the staggering strike unlocked for a time. Finally, I figured out how to combine a bunch of exploits we figured out over the years and create an entirely new combat style. The smoke bomb breaking combat stance can actually be used to your advantage, and it's not the only way. I showcase it in my most popular video "Unity has hidden blade combat" front and center on my channel, it's impossible to miss, complete with a writeup of how to perform everything. I also made a handy chart of how to instakill every enemy type in the most efficient way possible using everything we know now, both intended and unintended. The real problem with the smoke bomb being the solution for everything is that once you run out of them the game becomes unplayable. I really feel no remorse for breaking the combat system over my knee, but once I can no longer do that and I'm forced to engage with something that is demonstrably not fun, the whole illusion dissipates. This is true of the gunner enemy type, this is true of stealth layouts that are otherwise unapproachable, this is true of abrupt ambushes, this is true of the cover system, this is true of almost every problem you have to solve because you have to solve all of them with smoke bombs
Holding high profile helps to widen the targeting radius of double air assassinations, but there's a reason BlackTIE always throws stun bombs too
Social stealth is also about how enemies react to what you do. I'm still not good at it, but idea is to trick them into isolating themselves by intentionally creating a minor disturbance, then temporarily vanishing and ambushing then once they reach an advantageous position. What trips me up is that minor disturbances also disturb civilians, so once you begin to work your concealment becomes very thin, very fast. Kinography can really talk your ear off this idea. His video " Ezio Trilogy Social Stealth Guide, Episode 2: Detection and Investigations" is a good place to start. Again, I recommend you look into this for context on this franchise's legacy
There is some kind of meta-narrative connecting every main and side mission in this game about the cult of Nostradamus and its connection to De Molay's betrayal, but the religious themes have gone over my head so far. I also haven't finished it all because it's so vast and time-consuming, so maybe one day I'll wrap my head around what the game is trying to tell me
Use the blue Paris missions to get some quick money for consumables on minimal side content or low upgrades run. The objectives consist of extremely simple things like assassinating one guy and they pay out multiple times what your average sidequest will give you. The pricing for different items is also extremely unbalanced. Berserks are appropriately expensive, but smoke bombs are only 10 livres, so no matter how poor you are, you can always scrape by on a few smoke bombs. No upgrades is an extremely well-documented challenge run for this that Leo created on a whim one time just to disprove someone making that same point, and it went so well that it turned into an annual tradition and spawned a bunch of even harder variants
Can Dead Kings be its own video? I love Dead Kings
Let me know if you want to learn more about any of our favorite stealth games. We have our resources organized better on Discord, and if all else fails you can even ask an expert to make sure you have accurate information. If something new is discovered it usually happens there first. You'd be surprised how often we learn new things about decade plus-old games. Just let me know where I can send you a link
I appreciate all the information, I would be happy to check out the Discord. I believe my business email is accessible on the about tab of my channel page if you wanted to send it there.
And when you say double, do you mean double staggering strike? I only use it in the body of my video in the scene where I showcase the infinite yellow warning indicator glitch, but I also do spam it in my joke ending against Bellec at the very end of the video.
@@sosaysjayeah, against regulars and agiles it knocks them over so you can earn ground executes without having to wait for a parry
Checked your about, checked the description, checked your Patreon, don't see it anywhere
@@icarusgaming6269 Yes, I do that once in the main video and then I knock down Bellec three times at the end.
And if you go to About, a section says Details, and View email Address, which you can click to see it
@@sosaysjayGot it! Had to submit a request on my computer
Smoke bombs are so cheap because the developer realiest their shortcoming and used them as a crutch
I think most of the praise unity gets this days is due to short video plataforms, the game is simply gorgeous, and the animations are incredible, so seeing it on shorts or tik tok for 30 secs, being optimized by someone who practiced a lot, makes it look a lot better than it really is.
I dunno, I think the main influence was fans needing a stick to beat the A/RPG era with - and the ACII stick got broke due to overuse...
I like the combat and I am dissapointed that AC entirely abandoned it for Syndicate rather than fixing it. It had a really good foundation and the animations were great in my opinion.
21:30 ......you're not supposed to , fighting a large number of enemies is actively discouraged in unity as you're meant to rely heavily on stealth and combat is a last resort , you are supposed to be an assassin after all
There are a lot of games where you are not supposed to fight, but that doesn’t mean they make the combat janky but easy with a single difficult to overcome mechanic. In the Arkham games the combat is fantastic, but if you are seen during a predator section you die fast. In Dishonored you can get easily overcome by combat that has a much higher skill ceiling than Unity but it’s still a more stable system. I’m a believer that if you want to discourage something, raise the skill ceiling, don’t just make it bad
Thank you for putting into words some (yes, SOME) of the frustrations I have with Unity's parkour. I've always chalked it up to me just not being good at it but having at this stage over a decade of twisting and mastering the earlier parkour systems, so just... 'not getting it', but to hear someone lay out a lot of it's systems in words and why they don't work or feel good after a chorus of people and the wider AC community 'vibe' calling it the greatest thing to ever exist, I feel a little less like an insane person now. Those clips from other people showing that most of the time it'll still be a janky weird mess that obviously doesn't go where you want it to even in the hands of very experienced runners are a breath of fresh air.
I loved the Shannon Sharpe clip "I got that tahng on me, I got that stick, that tool, I'm packin'" LOOOOL
thank you for this, too many people these days try to retcon reality as if ac unity s only problems were bugs and glitches
I think the idea of AC Unity is much better than the actual game that is AC Unity. It's still one of the most gorgeous games I've ever played but so broken mechanically.
In a better timeline Ubisoft would have either given the game the time and money it really needed or realized that the issue was not the ideas, but implementation, and expanded the series in this direction.
an interesting thing i thought of this game of how anti revolutionary unity is, ac3 was good at showing both sides of the conflict showing that either side was willing to use and take whatever furthers their individual vendettas, whilst unity is just revolution bad, it’s weird because in the marketing it was shown that you would be fighting for the revolution, killing the kings guards and fighting against tyranny, just for the game to be anti revolutionary boot licking fest. it almost seems that none of the teams we’re communicating at all.
I did have a section on the bizarre politics of this game but I ended up cutting it for time since it is it's own can of worms entirely. AC3 had similar marketing issues where they presented the story as a fight for freedom against British oppressors to secure an American audience, but had a much greyer stakes at play in the actual game. I do not believe AC3 does a good job of presenting the American revolution, but they do at least try to paint the limits of the freedom the colonies were fighting for.
Unity's marketing shows Arno storming the Bastille himself, condemning a noble to be torn apart by peasants, chopping down guards to stop Elise's execution, and rallying the masses to stand against the upper class. None of this means anything in the context of the actual game, and the only time he really makes a point about the revolution is in a throwaway line where he expresses that he is glad that the people are fighting for liberty and equality.
There is a video on UA-cam titled "The Cowardly Politics of Assassin's Creed: Unity, and History as a Symbol (Full Spoilers)." I can't recommend it because I haven't watched it, but I have been wanting to make time for it.
For Ubisoft to be so weary of being political in a game about the French Revolution is shameful in my opinion.
@@sosaysjayanother example of ubisoft not understanding politics whatsoever, but i have learned to not care, because it’s a video game. they make karl marx in syndicate to be a liberal who was anti revolution (democracy is the only road to socialism i thought was the funniest divergence from marxist theory ) , they thought Caesar was overthrown because he wanted to hoard all the land, even though he supported land reforms and distribution of land between the peasantry of the country, the writers were so lazy for origins that they just flipped the ideology of the senate chamber and Caesar. the reason i believe they are so anti revolutionary in unity is because this one of the the first revolutions that had left wing backings, ie the communes. i can understand a more gray take with the american revolution since there were still slaves and the genocide of natives, but the anti french revolution is clear that ubisoft the company comes before the writing team.
@@sosaysjay i just finished the video you recommended watching and yeah, the politics of unity are inherently upholding the systems that keep status quo and making left movements to look tyrannical (i can only wonder what their spin off 2.5d game about the first marxist revolution), but what are we to expect from a multibillion dollar corporation.
@@greatgreenteaMate, democracy IS the only road to socialism, so Marx was potrayed in a good way in Syndicate
@@tenebrisanima9604 1. marxists (such as myself) don’t believe in liberal democracy in terms of achieving a socialist state. 2. if you read the codex they make fun of marxists and starbucks millennials
One of my least favorite things about the game is that, if you accidentally fast travel to the carriage that takes you to the DLC, you can't fast travel back to Paris until you've done the first mission of the DLC.
I honestly think the story could have been saved if Elise was the main character, not Arno. Narratively, it makes far more sense for her to join the assassin's after the templars betrayed her by killing her father. Her staying with the Templars in the first place was non-sensical to me considering what they did. Arno could still be obsessed with her and try to help her but it would be him that dies at the end. Her revenge having cost her the only person she had left in her life.
I know Ubisoft is way too cowardly now to give a main game solo female protag, let alone back then, but it sucks that we got stuck with Arno and his story when really, Elise and her role in the narrative is far more interesting.
They were able to do a female Assassin protagonist before with Liberation. Unfortunately, apart from the disguise and whip traversal mechanics, it was a mid game at best, hampered by its portable game trappings (it was first released on the PS Vita and only had graphical improvements in its re-releases).
But seriously, Élise should've been the main character. It would perfectly complement Rogue as she would be the polar opposite of Shay in terms of switching sides. Or, if they delayed the game by a year, put her as a secondary playable character and factor Shay (hell, even Connor and the Marquis de Lafayette) into the story to further the connection to past entries in the franchise.
We could go on and on, but we can all agree that Unity's story can be summed up in two words: wasted potential.
@@jmal Yeah I know about Liberation but it's a side game so I don't count it. I actually think it's partially why we don't have any solo main game female protags though. Ubisoft did a half assed job with Liberation and when it didn't sell well, blamed it on people not wanted to play as Aveline.
They're not the smartest execs up there.
But yes, agreed, Wasted Potential should be Unity's actual name, Assassin's Creed: Wasted Potential.
ive played unity on and off for a while and i just cant understand why EVERYONE feels Unity is the best. Black Flag was the highlight for me. Unity might look good and the parkour might LOOK good but it feels hollow and lifeless. Parkour has no weight, gravity FEELING it feels like nothing but animation on the screen. To me. I can kinda get why Unity is the underdog and everyone feels its the best for whatever reason. But to me, it is Dull.
I'm replaying Unity right now as I finally have a PC powerful enough that the game looks how I imagined it would back in 2014 lol. Funnily enough, the one phrase I keep yelling while playing it is "wasted potential". So many good ideas were either implemented extremely poorly, or were dropped immediately in the games after Unity and never revisited.
The parkour is so, so close to being right and they never used a system even remotely like it ever again.
I would say Syndicate is a much more improved version of Unity. While parkour is simpler, everything, from traversal, stealth and combat, works as intended. The mission design and side content, in particular the Black Box missions, are pure stealth joy.
It's no Masterpiece by any stretch, and I would rather play Origins or Odyssey, but it is a polished version on Unity in some extent.
At this stage, I'd much prefer they let other studios try to make Assassins Creed. Sucker punch, Naughty Dog, Insomniac or Fromsoft Ware perhaps; it's unlikely, but I'd prefer that to Ubisoft.
@@Nah-wg6dw True
I played this game on my pc in 2023 for the first time after I put down playing Origin since it was so boring. i think if i went out of my way and started looking for different elements you mentioned in the video, i probably wouldn't have much fun with it, but my god, this game was so much fun and maybe even my favorite assassin's creed ever. This might not have been the perfect assassin’s creed but you can’t deny it, it was a right step towards the right direction and that's much more true when you count the new games too.
I think you are the only one to say that we deserved much better than unity, and i too agree on to it. I understand unity's parkour by watching jcers and leo k, also worth mentioning whitelight's video on parkour of ac
But people want ac to be like unity and i am here hoping that we deserve what syndicate should have been. If mirage is return to old ac games without the level of parkour provided on those games, I wonder how long we do catch up to unity which already had its fair share of problems regarding story and parkour. I remember being surprised when i played ac 1 that i could climb buildings. I used to run on street lol. Still my fav ac game. So i started to experiment different things out of it, although nothing worth mentioning but still i felt I had control over the way i jump around. In unity i felt they focused more on graphics and less on story, on top i didn't really liked parkour at all, i was confused at first. And the one thing i was damned at was soo sluggish fighting. Man they moved like slow motion. The most annoying was how inconsistent the game was when i tried to use double assassination. IT DOESNT WORKS . Half the time i spend on manually setting my dart to the target and sometimes it goes throw them. I played unity around covid and people calling it masterpiece while me who just finished rouge and blackflag and didn't liking those games lol. (personally I wanted a return to soul of the game uptill ezio trilogy)
But seeing now, even syndicate is more assassin than mr. Viking.
But after playing rpg games, i replayed unity after clips i watched. Man it actually felt like an assassin creed fantasy, i basically forgot about parkour at all, i loved how game used its stealth. Still unity has its problems, but with a perfect story and polishing, i think it was closest to what we wanted.
Idk how long it will take to catch upto unity and many more to catch upto to what its successor should have been. Its a shame that we usually love games after their sequels, tells alot about this gaming era. Meaning we leave all the criticism we had with it and just want it to return because we have seen somthing way worse. Instead of expecting, we are hoping.
I have never met a more flocking fanbase than Assassin's Creed. A few people say a thing and then everybody bleats the same thing repeatedly as if it's their new gospel.
I couldn't believe how much Unity is put on a pedestal. Have they never played it? It's....not amazing.
Thank you for actually acknowledging the flaws of this game and not just blindly praising it because it isn’t the new games
I actually love unity, BUT I do agree that it's suddenly overrated by fans who are simply copying online opinions they've seen. Perhaps unity is somewhat misunderstood, in my opinion. However, I must still agree that it isn't the best game ever or anything, and actually, syndicate is just a better, more functional unity when it comes to gameplay. Yet that game doesn't get any love from the mindless copy cat fans. I suppose I disagree with much of what you say in this video, yet I agree on some level with the title of this video.
The true tragedy of AC Unity isn't its imperfections, as it certainly had its flaws. Rather, it's that there was immense potential built upon its strengths which was never fully realized. AC fans still marvel at the densely populated cities, dynamic crowds, intricate parkour, expansive non-linear assassination missions with diverse strategies, and the sheer aesthetic brilliance of its graphics. Ubisoft crafted something with enormous potential, but unfortunately, after one misstep, they moved on.
I just want to say that I found this video fascinating despite the fact I gave up on AC after 3. I don't even like this series anymore but your videos and passion for the franchise is always great to watch. Keep up the good work!
Great video and it captures a lot of my feelings towards the game. The idea of AC Unity was always better than the game. Your point about Unity being an imposter Assassin's Creed story is something I heavily agree with, especially compared to Black Flag which dresses itself up as an imposter AC story but in reality is one of the purest AC stories I've ever seen.
I consider this game as generally really fun to play with a strong start but a lackluster and anticlimactic finale and a constant moving of the goalposts with what the actual goal of the main character even is with a pretty meandering plot in the middle. I think even Syndicate, with its pretty bog standard plot still had a more cohesive main antagonist and better sense of progression, wheras in Unity it all kind of goes on for a while and then just abruptly stops. I honestly can't even remember if Arno ever catches the one who actually killed his adoptive guardian, but he definitely doesn't catch the man who killed his father because that would mean confronting Connor and the plot actually suffers by basing a lot of the plot around it but never actually going anywhere.
I always wonder whenever I see someone praising how good the parkour was in Unity if they actually played the game, or just saw some cool video? Yes, you can do some cool stuff in the game. Just like DudePerfect can do crazy things in real life. Both after many retries.
Deserved a sub my man. I did only one video so far (on bad Valhalla stealth fittingly), and i can only imagine how much work this took.
Keep at it !
I appreciate that. I just went through your Valhalla stealth video, I wish I had watched it before making my own Valhalla video as it would have helped support some of the points I made. I wish you luck!
Congratulations for the critical analysis of the game, a really good essay, so I would like to point that everything you said is a microcosm of the entire series, AC 1 was more a prototype them a game, is basically a mudded river with heuge chunks of rough diamond, AC 2 in deed is a proof of concept and the rest of Ezio's trilogy expanded and improved what already was there, because of this still so beloved by many, but none of it's concepts was evolved since revelations and some was dropped, the colonial Trilogy was a mess in scope, focus, features and development time, this games starts to show how the production mode and it's cycle in Ubisoft is completely unsustainable, the comination of this miss management is AC unity, where in concept is the peak of the series, the defenitive Assassin's Creed experience, but fallfelt in execution and show how the series is a wasted pontial, never were capable of presenting and executing it's ideas coexively, consistent, deeper and polished. After that , syndicate easily is a parody or a waterdown version of what come before, probably the worst game in the series, so to keep the production cycle Ubisoft brings the RPG trilogy that throw out the window the water with the baby, keeping all the worst aspects that came before and lost everything it was unique to the series in the process.