Assassins Creed Shadows

[cyberdemon]

It’s finally here folks, feudal Japan. It’s on of the next mainline project after Mirage with Hex

YouTube

https://youtu.be/oXmjOTJhzE8

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[JagdPanther]

Welp. This may bring me back to the AC universe.

[cyberdemon]

The thread name needs an update. It is now Assassins Creed Shadows.

Trailer in 2 days

[CIRQUAN]

Not really an AC fan, but might try this one.
Loved Black Flag. Have Odyssey on Steam but file size is ridiculous. -_-

[Renegade334]

Originally Posted by CIRQUAN

Not really an AC fan, but might try this one.
Loved Black Flag. Have Odyssey on Steam but file size is ridiculous. -_-

Odyssey is, by and large, the largest (in terms of traversable surface area, including the sea) and biggest (in terms of scope) Assassin's Creed ever made. I mean, I've been replaying it from scratch for a week already and even now after completing the main campaign, I still find the sheer amount of content crammed in...just staggering. The problem is that many of the smaller locations (camps, forts) are pretty much copy-and-paste (though nowhere near as bad as Hogwarts: Legacy's locations), but the unique areas like Olympia, Athens, Sparta, Argos, Mykonos and Korinthia are an absolute work of art and add their own regional spice and brand of uniqueness. The writing and mission designs are nowhere near the level of Witcher 3: the Wild Hunt's (the AC "RPG saga", which started with Origins and ended with Valhalla and introduced many changes in game mechanics, is said to have been made in response to W3TWH), though.

So, yeah, big filesize due to big stomping grounds...and that's not counting the final DLC (The Fate of Atlantis), which adds three different mythological worlds/maps. There is also an educational expansion pack called the Guided Tour, by the way.

Odyssey still ranks very high on the list of AAA games that take a heck of a long time to complete (another grave offender in this category is Ghost Recon: Wildlands, also by Ubisoft). It was so big that Ubisoft had to come forward and reassure players that Valhalla wouldn't be as long as its predecessor, the map wouldn't be as big, but would be more dense and diverse in terms of content.

[Renegade334]

YouTube

https://youtu.be/vovkzbtYBC8

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Set in the late Sengoku period, with two characters: Naoe the Shinobi and Yasuke the Samurai. Both have their distinctive playstyle. (Kinda reminiscent of Jacob and Evie from Syndicate)
Apparently, you also get to create, train and kit your own...Shinobi league? (callback to AC2B?)
Out November 15.

P.S. Yasuke is all but guaranteed to be this actual historical figure (an actual Afro Samurai!). If so, we might get to see Oda Nobunaga's campaign all the way to his suicide after the Honno-ji incident. Bonus characters would be Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Akechi Mitsuhide and Tokugawa Ieyasu...for starters.

[cyberdemon]

Wow they actually went with him. I saw talks but wasn’t sure. Guess they needed some diversity to set this apart from Ghost of Tsushima. Glad they at least have set characters though. Odyssey and Valhallas indecisiveness annoyed me. Just hope they learned from Syndicate and do better with 2 protags. Maybe go Pokémon on it and create 2 games but they interlap at times

[JagdPanther]

Argghhh....... they're really gonna bring me back to AC with this, aren't they. A playable shinobi basically means I have to.

[belatkuro]

I believe this is the first AC protagonist to be based on a historical figure. All protagonists have been original characters and they interact with historical figures, like with AC2 Ezio being friends with Leonardo Da Vinci.

Curious to see how the story will be told since with OC protagonists they can do anything with them. Sure, the AC franchise has never been for historical accuracy but putting a historical figure as the protagonist is a first time so I wonder if they'll aim for an original story or incorporate parts of the history of this figure. Which kind of railroads the plot a bit if one were to look up details of the protag's actual history and they follow some of it in the game plot, like Yasuke's involvement with Oda Nobunaga. Being historically inaccurate made AC do what it wants while staying true to the history and feel of the time period it's in.

Not that I'll be playing this as I haven't even finished ACIII yet. I've always wanted to play through each AC game in their release order and didn't want to jump to the new ones. I just never did do it as the years went by.

[Kanon]

Originally Posted by cyberdemon

Wow they actually went with him. I saw talks but wasn’t sure. Guess they needed some diversity to set this apart from Ghost of Tsushima. Glad they at least have set characters though. Odyssey and Valhallas indecisiveness annoyed me. Just hope they learned from Syndicate and do better with 2 protags. Maybe go Pokémon on it and create 2 games but they interlap at times

I saw plenty of people predicting they would use Yasuke as soon as the game was announced to take place in Japan. Purely for diversity reasons.

Originally Posted by belatkuro

I believe this is the first AC protagonist to be based on a historical figure. All protagonists have been original characters and they interact with historical figures, like with AC2 Ezio being friends with Leonardo Da Vinci.

Curious to see how the story will be told since with OC protagonists they can do anything with them. Sure, the AC franchise has never been for historical accuracy but putting a historical figure as the protagonist is a first time so I wonder if they'll aim for an original story or incorporate parts of the history of this figure. Which kind of railroads the plot a bit if one were to look up details of the protag's actual history and they follow some of it in the game plot, like Yasuke's involvement with Oda Nobunaga. Being historically inaccurate made AC do what it wants while staying true to the history and feel of the time period it's in.

Not that I'll be playing this as I haven't even finished ACIII yet. I've always wanted to play through each AC game in their release order and didn't want to jump to the new ones. I just never did do it as the years went by.

Nobunaga will definitely be involved. Yasuke is not a bad choice since there are only fairly vague records of his life (to this day, people fight over whether he was actually a samurai or not), and he completely disappeared from historical records after Nobunaga was defeated so you can do whatever you want with him.

I haven't played an AC game in a long time but I might be interested in this one. I'll wait for reviews. How long the game is will be a factor, I love ancient Greece but I've never touched Odyssey because of how absurdly long it is.

[Renegade334]

High-res character reference guide for Naoe and Yasuke, detailing their outfits.

[JagdPanther]

Originally Posted by Renegade334

High-res character reference guide for Naoe and Yasuke, detailing their outfits.

Images like that shouldn't get me so hyped.

[Renegade334]

YouTube

https://youtu.be/FjAzNpMYTxw

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[Renegade334]

YouTube

https://youtu.be/6Ci-skojW0M

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[JagdPanther]

That looks good, but it's going to be really hard to beat Ghost of Tsushima for beauty.

I do love me a good snowy Japanese landscape, though.

[Liddo-kun]

was excited to hear about this game, a fan of the previous ones. But then I heard Japan does not like it..

at 2 min of the video. The like vs dislike ratio in Ubisoft's japanese account is 2k like vs 26k dislikes.

I'm going to look first at some gameplay trailers before deciding whether to buy or not.

[JagdPanther]

Originally Posted by Liddo-kun

was excited to hear about this game, a fan of the previous ones. But then I heard Japan does not like it..

at 2 min of the video. The like vs dislike ratio in Ubisoft's japanese account is 2k like vs 26k dislikes.

I'm going to look first at some gameplay trailers before deciding whether to buy or not.

Serious question: Does anyone know if the other AC games have fared well in Japan?

[serenade_beta]

Japan's biggest problem with this game is that the developers are trying to sell the game's content as historically accurate and blackwashing their history

[Jaden]

I've never played an AC game, how historically accurate are they in general?

The interesting accounts of Yasuke are all about Nobunaga's fascination with him, and contain little of what Yasuke actually did. He wasn't really a main character in real life, so some embellishment is going to be necessary in order to make him into one.

[Renegade334]

Originally Posted by Jaden

I've never played an AC game, how historically accurate are they in general?

Sssssssomewhat historically accurate if grossly simplified in order to create a leaner narrative and make allowances for the Templar-Assassin plot that takes place in the background.

For example, AC:Origins never showed Cleopatra VII Philopator's half-sister, Arsinoe IV, who actually pushed Julius Caesar back into the sea during the latter's attempt to seize Alexandria and actually kept him at bay until she was betrayed by her main backer (at which point she was sent into exile until Cleopatra and Mark Antony decided she was better dead than alive), and Valhalla's Siege of Paris DLC did not establish Rollo as one of the (three) main leaders of the siege despite him appearing in the main storyline as a recruitable crewmember for your Viking longship. There are plenty of historical side characters and events that don't show up or are barely mentioned.

Many historical characters, from Cesare Borgia (AC2:Brotherhood) to Kleon (Odyssey), Savonarola (AC2), Ivar the Boneless (Valhalla) and Jack the Ripper (Syndicate), die by your hand, often not just because of their real-life actions but also because they were secretly involved in the Templar-Assassin affairs in some way or another.

And then you have Ubisoft's blatant artistic license such as the gigantic mythological statues in Odyssey (some of which would make the Colossus of Rhodes look like Warhammer 40K tabletop figurines), that completely fictitious city in Origins' Hidden Ones DLC (the city of Arsinoe never existed, and the Nabateans were not Egyptian colonists for that matter!). Maps are also not to scale, which is how the game allows you to see the Pyramids of Giza all the way from Alexandria in Origins. And then there's the whole "what if George Washington got his hand on a mystic relic that allowed him to create a parallel world in which he is a tyrant?" DLC from AC3 that created a rather controversial precedent in the Assassin's Creed series: it allowed the writers to embark on bigger "what-if" plots with magical elements that have become more and more prevalent, a trend that reached its crescendo with Odyssey (the Atlantis DLC and the mythical beasts in the base game) and Valhalla (the Asgard sequence). Mirage made somewhat of an effort to cut back on those more fanciful elements, but I fear the damage has been done already.

It's usually the small details (sprinkled through side quests and even the educational "Guided Tour" DLCs) and the ability to behold famous monuments as they stood in their prime (Athens and Delos in Odyssey are just works of art, and York/Jorvik in Valhalla is just gorgeous) - or how they were thought to look like - that draw you in. In Origins, Ubisoft even implemented a very thought-provoking theory by a French engineer (using internal ramps to pull stones further and further up) to explain how Pyramids were built...a very convenient theory that incidentally presents the player with secret passages towards hidden rooms.

The interesting accounts of Yasuke are all about Nobunaga's fascination with him, and contain little of what Yasuke actually did. He wasn't really a main character in real life, so some embellishment is going to be necessary in order to make him into one.

For Yasuke, that's one of the main gripes the Japanese are currently nurturing: all they know of him - and thus are willing to see him as - is that he was a retainer of Nobunaga rather than some sort of elite warrior cavorting around the country like some sort of knight errant. Nobunaga was impressed by Yasuke's stature and kept him by his side (almost like a curiosity, if I may put it this way), and though there is speculation he might have taken part in one battle, he didn't do much and disappeared rather quickly from the pages of History after his master died.