Can We REALLY FIX Assassin's Creed's World Design?
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- Опубліковано 3 жов 2024
- From the bustling streets of Florence and Paris to the open landscapes of Ancient Greece and Egypt, we analyse the best and worst examples of environmental design across the Assassin's Creed games.
We'll discuss how Ubisoft has balanced urban and rural spaces, where the series has shined, and where it's stumbled. We'll also explore how the world design can evolve for future games, focusing on making the environments feel more dynamic and engaging.
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#assassinscreed #acshadows #openworld
You can actually fast travel in AC1, from masyaf, after a few memories, you can fast travel from the inner gate to wherever you need to go. After every assassination you can "fast travel" back to masyaf by forwarding to a more recent memory.
Only on PC though, I think.
PC version had some unique content that wasn't on console, plus other quality of life changes such as fast travel. (I wish I had Fast Travel in my original playthrough on PS3 back in the day, but alas...)
Ac needs to stick to city based worlds because it feels less tedious and overwhelming for casual players. Mirage did this perfectly Baghdad was large and the wilderness was decently sized but only necessary for a handful of missions. My ideal world for Valhalla would be that the 4 regions of England are separated into different “maps” you load into like ac2 that way each can represent itself through weather and landmarks. Having each region be significantly smaller would help and doing so can add way more interesting things like random encounters
It's shame that the many, many elements of it doesn't make the game all that good. Yes the city design is fantastic, but man the parkour is so bad and stiff that it can make traversing a nightmare.
Not to mention they made horse travelling so bad in the city. Making the horse's top speed a walk. And the extra parkour options on the horse in brotherhood not there at all.
And a potential great element of game design is just awful. Running away should emphasise parkour. But even running away is bad cause the ai is so OP. Seeing you through walls and enemies that don't even know what you did yet, somehow knowing what you did just because an enemy from far away has detected you.
Overall mirage is a mess and by far one of the messiest game's in the series. Which is saying something considering unity. And ubisoft has issues of getting rid of good ideas with issues instead of fixing them. Like they said they're getting rid of social stealth again instead of fixing it
@@teneesh3376 I think that to create a large city from Origins they chose to eliminate the high profile command and parkour has lost depth. If in AC 1 to Syndicate you can traverse in two totally different manners: normal/fast walk and slow parkour, slow run or fast run and acrobatic parkour, in AC Origins to Mirage you can only run with the left stick or walk if you move less the stick, the other settings has been eliminated, so even the best designed city can be not functional with such a poor system
@@danilostanco1709 yeah, I don't think eliminating high profile would do much if the team did a better job at the commands. In unity and syndicate, the run button really was an unnecessary step to high and low profile buttons.
Unity's problem was that there were too many options that were too much for just two buttons. Snap targeting is only good if there are many button combinations you can input. And from what mods show, even that is pretty clunky.
Ubisoft has to be really careful on trying to make parkour to work really well in this case. A manual jump would really benefit. Especially with the inclusion of a grappling hook. If manual jumping isn't brought back, then the grappling hook is going to feel awful. Let alone parkour
~3:08 I may be in the minority here, but most of it lol, I spent hours just running around the Kingdom map making my own fun as a kid. I remember there's one place with some Roman ruins that I loved just climbing and jumping around on, and another where you can actually get your horse onto a roof by jumping from a nearby ledge which I found hilarious.
Of course not, this is Ubisoft we're talking about. They'd sooner crash and burn before even considering breaking the formula and taking actual risks
Ac shadows is going to be such a mess. Adding Yasuke adds so many issues, including gameplay issues. They need to make a world designed around walking on the ground and parkour. Which is impossible. So they would go more towards historical accuracy rather than fun traversal. Cause both can run on the ground. But parkour is just more fun and should take priority
You should play Tsushima….you’ll understand that it’s not that complicated.
We just want good games.
Tsushima is a phenomenal game but its world lacks in a lot too, most of it is filled with repetative camps and shrines, after a few hours i kinda got bored of exploring and didnt feel that it was super rewarding
one of the most boring open worlds, with repetitive activities and nothing exciting to be discovered.
i cant understand why people think its good or setting new standards to open world designs.
sure it looks pretty, but thats it.
@@RipaStar00
What you described is AC.
You described every single AC game with that one paragraph.
That’s why people like Tsushima, cause it’s just AC but Japan.
“Valhalla looks pretty, but that’s it.”
“Odyssey looks pretty, but that’s it.”
Enjoy the games you like to play.
I disagree. There was a horse in AC3 and it was manageable. The problem with the open world design is that you can literally climb anything. In the older games you had to find fixed points on cliffs and other objects to grab on to
i love your intro! i need one myself, who made it?👀
I just made it myself ◡̈ took a couple of attempts to get the timing right lmao
@@willismakesmovies a man of many talents
I NEVER used a horse in Skyrim. ALWAYS on foot & in sneak.
ur point on needing some "poles and carts" to parkour on is sooo true dude
My biggest issue with shadow is that the Sengoku Jidai. Anyone who studies this period in history knows that there's not really any cities in Japan, you really only have Kyoto which has about maybe a couple hundred thousand, but the rest are just Castle towns. They should have went for the bakamatsu era like rise of the Ronin. You actually have large cities with over a million people at that time. I mean you're never going to get the verticality of old assassin's Creed games just because Japanese buildings were not made that way but you can easily fudge the truth and make every building three or four stories tall. It's historical fiction at the end of the day. So that's my only disappointment, because I know the Sengoku Jidai is a more exciting period, but it's not like they're going to make us fight large scale battles that took place.
I have been trying out Subnautica recently. It has a very well designed open word environment, with seamless transitions between the various underwater biomes, which you traverse using underwater vehicles such as the Seamoth, which acts as your horse in that game.
Cyberpunk 2077 has a similar issue. The world is very pretty but exploring on foot is pointless, as you can’t discover anything worthwhile. It’s as if the game map was designed with driving as its primary mode of transportation. This really discourages me from engaging with its world.
It's the first time that someone says something I always thought about:
-Assassin's tombs with puzzles and riddle are the core of AC, beside the Assassin's Mission
-Ac Black Flag and Rogue were the only two games that took a compromise between a packed city and an open world kinda of feeling, and it worked.
In my opinion this is the only thing that could work, a game with 2-4 dense cities and between them some partially scripted routes for reaching the cities, maybe creating events like a thief that assault you and take your money, a women assaulted or that need your help to reach the city (in this way you traverse and are engaged because you talk with the girl meantime) and some secret patterns of world in which you can reach collectibles or even some Lore clues and documents.
About the Assassins Tombs, they need to return, they created interiors for AC that in my opinion are useful for common palaces that in this way are not the copy and paste, but in my opinion even though I love Notre Dame in Unity during open world, I think that they need to close those locations and they can make some quests were all the historical buildings have some kinda level in which you can find lore related things, artifact like the keys of Romulus etc, but after this scripted mission, they can give you the possibility to unlock the building interior like a separate level/secondary mission, freely explorable, full of details that in open world you can't create, the goal can be that you return in that locations for example, the interior of the tower of London, and if you reach some points with parkour etc, you can access to historical and artistic information about a place, and If you reach secret rooms or location you can access to exclusive historical or fictional documents or some Lore data, Glyph or some Codex.
I'm sorry for the long comment
My question to you is simply if those ideas can work in AC
World design (and possibly the creation of DLC) were changed forever by quicker load times and the horse youre not wrong, beautiful vid as always ma dood much love
True. AC Origins and Odyssey are games where you spend so much time traveling and fast traveling, which makes it a very watered down experience. Even when you gallop in Odyssey, sometimes the landscape rendering has problems catching up with you.
First AC games I played were Rogue and Blackflag. I had SO much fun discovering islands, attacking ships, hunting sharks, and all little by little upgrading my ship and gear. Not perfect games but it was genuinely a blast to unravel their open worlds. Every AC game since then (all the modern ones) all feel so soulless and just exhausting to explore. It's a shame because they're beautiful looking, and I love the idea of exploring a new historical era/region with every game, but I can never play more than a few hours of a modern AC game because like you said, the exploration doesn't feel tailored and exciting, it feels procedurally generated.
Games like Red Dead, GTA, The Witcher, and Tsushima really put other open world games to shame.
Those types of games really set a high bar of expectations, that these other companies just don’t come close.
not just assassins creed but i feel like open world games just arent that fun anymore cause they focus more on size then whats actually in them, now its usually a colectable but in older games like say gta youd get a bunch of different cutscenes and fun stuff for exploring the world
I love your videos dude!
Thanks!
Nice video man! And cool new intro
Autopilot was introduced in AC: Origins, by the way 😉
The open world design is not a simple question. I like just travel, look for nice places, make photos and so on. Also, I like to look for wildlife behavior if any or people, especially if their life differs from mine. For me it's interesting in both real life and in videogames. So, if I have a space with nice places and some non-scripted life, it will be interesting enough to explore. But it would be even better if this space will have some gameplay mechanics. If you need to survive in hot or cold deserts - that's good. If you need to search for the path in swamps - that's good. If you need to climb and descent carefully in mountains - that's good.
Does Witcher 3 Wild Hunt have the same issue-because you have Roach, the mare, you have no reason to explore the open world? The AC RPG series were inspired by W3’s format. I think the open world works in that game because the POI are not too far away. It helps that the story’s compelling too. If the story’s boring, the open world exploration can feel like a chore.
Big open space in frontiers and stuff is realistic. The idea is to be immersive and somewhat realistic.
It can get tedious, yes.... But I understand why they do it.
In my mind Assassin's Creed is an evolution of the 3d platformer collectethon genre.
I think the worst thing is
1st person horse riding it doesn’t work in Farcry6 or rdr2
Counterpoint, Tears of Kingdom/Breath of the wild, immortal fenyx rising all have a horse, and gliding, but are packed with interesting points (except for perhaps the underworld beneath TOTK, but there's some reasons for that. It's AC designers decision to make it so large and empty. I'm playing witcher 3 atm and it's not as bad as AC games, but it still has a lot of empty spaces that are perhaps not necessary.
I hate getting off and on a horse.
i somewhat dissagree with your opinion. the older ac games i feel can't really be judged on their open world not being up to modern standards. that is because its mainly open just to be a believable backdrop for the story to take place in. its not open world to be open world, its open world to enhance the story and make the place believable. hence why we get the leonardo mission in the mountain pass and have no use after that to ever explore unless 100% the game. the same goes for the lands between masiaf and the other cities in ac1. its there to make the cities more believable, so that we don't just go from one setpiece(city) to another. it makes the game world more coherent.
At last, someone that does not blame woke or dei for a game failing and not bad level design and predatory microtransactions. We need to understand why they fail so that we can make games better.
So many dead spaces...
...just like the real world?
The mapsice of shadows is that of Orgins
10:48 that's kind of cinical, isn't it? I always kind of assumed the autopilot is there so you can enjoy the scenery without worrying about piloting the horse ..
Well it's very personal. I don't care about the scenery i can go outside of my house for a walk for a scenery.
I play AC for it's stealth and parkour so just running around on a horse is boring
@@doronharry2857 u can sneak and parkour outside of ur house.
Hopefully
Ac1s kingdom served the purposecor a settimg to show the different populace that was being effect by salidin and the crusaders armies thsts ehy you see huge units of 50 plus soldiers and destroyed villages its meant to show the crusades effect on the world and the conflict your trying to end