"assassin's creed used to be so good," and other statements from the clinically deranged

I fucking spit my water out at 1:16 when you said “drag like queens” top tier line

Unsure if you already know or not, but in Origins it went into the ring finger thing. Bayek accidentally cut off his ring finger in a fight and that led to the tradition of the self-sacrifice. I think in AC2 when they brand Ezio's finger that's their way of carrying on the tradition without brutalizing themselves. Fantastic video btw.

I think it's very telling that I can literally hear Woodkid performing in my head whenever I see any shot from the Revelations trailer but don't even remember the trailers for anything after AC3

Maybe it’s because I only watched the live action movie that one time, but I’ve believed that Abstergo and the Templars were basically the same organization and that the story was using the Knight’s Templar as bankers to draw a through line between them and modern corrupt corporation. And this really helps with binding the modern day plot together with what you’re doing during the actual game. Too bad the only thing they ever actually do is fight over the magic control everyone devices and no matter the result no one sees that specific macguffin again. To all stories that go the Illuminati angle - please, make it obvious that the current state of the world came out of some of the plans of the secret society partially working. I can’t believe I need to say that.

7. Great video. The reading of the wiki actually made me laugh out loud. And, yeah. It’s a shame the games lost the focus it had on parkour and traversal to instead be more about combat and… grinding levels.

I'm almost done with AC Brotherhood, I think its the best "complete package" in all series. ACII feels unfinished before it. Even if both 2 and Brohood have lot of heart put into them honestly. But I agree with rest of your video. Those AC Lore of real life figure readings had me wheezing too 22:24

Perfectly articulated why Assassin's Creed is so frustrating to me, it feels like a whole heap of wasted potential. Got the Ubisoft problem where every game is full of "ideas" and "mechanics" that are never fully developed, and the whole sci fi angle the series took is just infuriating in how poorly it's utilized. There is not enough historical action/adventure games, and I feel this franchise sucked up all the oxygen for any studio trying to make one, though this may change with how poorly Ubisoft is doing these days. Imagine if we got a game about the actual Hashshashin, in my head it would play a lot more like Hitman than whatever AC is supposed to be, but at this point it's just wishful thinking.

I wonder what could happen if assassin's creed had a competitor. There are lots of other stealth action open world games but there's noone really trying to pick up the pieces of the ideas that AC establishes and fails to live up to. Nobody is trying to make AC style parkour that I'm aware except arguably mirror's edge, and the three-dimensional city-oriented stealth gameplay created by AC style parkour is something nobody else at all is trying.

The only Ubisoft open world (tm) that doesn't have two Kojima cutscenes as an intro, to my knowledge is Ghost Recon Wildlands. If you skip the cutscene you're just plopped into the starting region with three other dudes and two pickups, and have the first miniboss questline highlighted-- completely, optional, you can go for other targets. Naturally, in their infinite wisdom, Ubisoft brought back the long intro cutscenes for the sequel, Breakpoint. Great vid btw. I should replay AC1.

The parkour, the environments and the assassin fantasy are why I keep returning to the originals. A big reason simply being just how much the traversal and parkour engages my brain (for a lack of a better phrase). Playing the games my eyes dart all around the screen looking for routes to take, ways to wall run and side eject my way to the fastest way up. And I also play with the mini-map disabled, so I need to be up on the rooftops to be able to tell where I'm going. I also play with the home-brew rule of avoiding unnecessary killing, meaning that the parkour gets to shine more and I have to once again use my environment to reorient myself after fleeing in whichever way was most convenient. Incidentally the no unnecessary killing forces me to do any combat as fast and efficiently as possible to avoid enemy backup showing up. On the games factions having unclear ideologies I have to disagree with, as funny as representing them as each factions respective EULA was. But the ideological conflict has clearly been "peace by absolute freedom" vs "peace by a strong guiding hand", "humans can achieve piece" vs "peace must be forced upon humans". Anarchism vs Totalitarianism. The phrase "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" is also more than just edgy pseudo intellectualism (though with it originating from Nietzsche allegedly quoting Hasan-i Sabbah it can easily fall the in the wrong hands). At least I parse it as "Truth is only relative to our perception, often belief is the only limiting factor". Funnily enough part of Edward's character arc had him take the creed as a free pass to do as he wishes and later taking it more as a springboard for wisdom. A very similar line to the creed is that of "A wise man knows that he knows nothing" or "True wisdom is knowing what you don't know" attributed to Confucius. That said, even as a big stinking AC nerd I can understand why the ideological conflict might have been lost on many. One aspect I loved about the first game was how much philosophy it had in the limelight, which is why AC2 disappointed me with how much less complex its villains were. Some almost feeling like you could expect to see them twirl their mustache. Perhaps better for a grand audience captivating revenge plot, but less so for a plot about conflicting ideologies. AC3 tried to correct that course and present more nuanced antagonists, which was one of my favorite parts of that game and Haytham is a fan favorite antagonist for a reason. Laureano Torres from AC4 was also a fantastic antagonist for how much mutual respect there was between him and Edward in the end scene. Now in regards to the past parkour systems of the games I don't think that a system similar to the once in Unity/Syndicate would make for the perfect system. The flashiness of that system was one of the reasons why it was so clunky and if we want the same amount of moves we're gonna get a lot of the same problems. But another reason I wouldn't want a similar system is that I really loved in AC1 all the way to AC: Rogue how the player character and all the NPC's had the same physics system for moving around. Not just because it made the player feel more grounded to the world, but also due to how it allowed the player to physically interact with all the NPC's. Whereas in Unity NPC's felt like almost a completely visual element. Sure they might have had more animations, but you couldn't shove anyone gently or less gently. And not just that, but also in the parkour the player often didn't feel like a physical entity in the game, probably because the system was now so animations based that the player character had no consistency to their moves anymore. The game would blatantly drag the player through the air to get the across jumps they shouldn't be able to perform. I'll disagree with you on the Kenway/America's-saga parkour engine being the weakest. It had perfectly fluid and weighty looking animations/physics and it even had completely manual side ejects (albeit with a much shorter window than the Altaïr/Ezio engine when wall running). However its greatest downfall was making sprinting and climbing share one button. It would've been incredible to use had sprint been on high profile and climbing been high profile plus "jump". Because the single button solution caused a lot of unwanted climbing. The second downfall of the second iteration of the parkour engine was the cities. Havana being the only city perfectly suited for parkour, with its shorter buildings and narrower streets, similar to the cities of AC1. I'm skeptical over that we'll ever see an AC game that lives up to the series potential with how blindly profit-driven Ubisoft can be and with Ubisoft's bad habit of gutting mechanics that don't see an immediate success (often due to the poor tutorialization addressed by the video). My optimism lies in the hope that one day a smaller studio tries to replicate the mechanics from the first games and fully utilize them. Said optimism compounded by having played AC: Bloodlines on an emulator and realizing just how little would actually be needed to deliver a solid AC-like game. P.S. AC2 funnily enough had a tutorial for side ejects, but it was optional side content redeemable from the Uplay rewards page as the "Auditore Family Crypt". IIRC the last Assassin crypt in Venice also had a mandatory side eject, can't remember if it told the player how to perform it though. It even needed to be performed under time-pressure.

the fact that Buzz Aldrin is still alive in October 2023 makes him being in this series feel even weirder

By the way, "Marionette system" is now literally the lost technology of the First Civilization, because Ubisoft has no developers who could make it left. And plot suffered because original writers weren't given creative freedom they needed and then even completely removed from the development only to be replaced by people who learned the story from Wikipedia

this video is exceptionally funny to me, in that you mentioned Syndicate 0 times

You were already making great points, but the Just Cause 3 aside was so good I had to pause the video on my TV, find my phone, write this out, and subscribe. I don't think I've ever encountered anyone else that correctly assesses the "3 steps forward 2 steps back"-ness of that game

There’s also a hidden parkour trick in older games: hold A+B after jumping off a ledge and you’ll land on a person and take no fall damage

If there's one thing that Ubisoft absolutely loves, it's making systems simpler and more convenient until they're no longer interesting. And more Ubisoft-bashing on the discord, you say? I just found the channel and that's a tempting offer.

"A funny, larger than life Italian man is pretty much peak masculinity to a 14 year old." Wario? Edit: I paused the video, wrote this comment, and then the next line was about mario lmao

emi u are very based

7 or something. God bless.

Your Youtube channel being deleted was part of a Templar plot, as revealed in Assassin's Creed: The Network.