Gamespresso's Steve provides his thoughts on why Assassin's Creed II and Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag are the best games in the long-running series, as well as suggesting how Ubisoft can get the franchise back on track for Assassin's Creed Victory.
BY JASON MONROE: The very best pirate-themed video games that you should play instead of the disappointment that is Skull and Bones.
PoE: Deadfire, Unless you have a or PS5 or an SSD don't bother, loading times are insane. A minute and a half to go into a room to investigate a desk in an inn and then an additional 1 1/2 minutes to leave the room and then load to leave the inn???
And they never fixed it.
Ubisoft has just released Skull and Bones on PC and consoles. And, from the looks of it, the game wasn’t received well by some gamers. Not only that but it appears that Skull and Bones can be worse than Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, a game that came out a decade ago.
I wanted a Black Flag sequel so bad. It's still my favorite AC entry. The fact that they ignored everything that we loved about that game in this "spiritual successor" is making me enjoy watching this game crash and burn quite a bit. Either do it right or don't do it at all. (I understand the legal binding they got themselves into with the Singapore government to release this game at all costs)
/grabs popcorn
11 years of development. Multiple restarts. All the while people have been saying they don't want some pirate game where you can't even get off your ship. 11 years of people telling Ubisoft all they want is a pirate game that's basically Black Flag without any of the assassin or animus stuff. Yet they still served up this trash that no one wanted, charged $70 for it, and had the balls to call it AAAA.
The Guillemot family honestly needs to be forced out of Ubisoft. They've doubled down on everything players don't like about their games, they want AI to create "rough drafts" of their stories rather than letting their writers do their jobs, and they literally do not give a shit what their playerbase actually wants. 5-6 years ago their stock was worth more than 4x what it's currently worth. The company is dying.
What has happened to developers? How can you possible make a worse looking game 11 years later? It’s honestly mind boggling.
Enough has been said about this game already. The gaming world shrugged when it was announced so many years ago, and instead of listening to all the criticisms from the community back then, Ubi just sailed on and kept making a game nobody really wanted. What a waste of money and effort.
Skull and Bones borrows more than naval combat from Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, but Ubisoft's live-service adventure doesn't compare.
Black Flag was the Pinnacle of pirate games for me. Wild that it’s been 11 years, played it after coming home from college classes every day
Watching Skull and Bones gameplay really shows how important all the AC elements like land exploration and fighting really were in making it such a great game. To go back to just sailing with those basic ass controls a decade later is just sad.
I really do not rate IV. As an Assassin's Creed game it is fairly poor. The story went on some massive tangent which didn't really link the the grander story. I remember, towards the end, the massive tangent just randomly stopped (bare in mind that this tangent had gone on for most of the game) just so an ending could be made that fits in with the Assassin's Creed universe. It was bizarre.
Sailing was fun but like a lot of features in the Assassin's Creed games it was bare bones at best. There was really only one way to level up your ship and such only one way to engage in ship battles. That thing got repetitive fast which was made worse by the challenge decreasing (apart from the legendary ships but there we not many of them). I found after a while I would just quick travel because mini battles became more of a nuisance than fun. For me Assassin's Creed IV is one of the better Assassin's Creed but 2 and Brotherhood are far superior games.
Imo AC2 and AC: Brotherhood were the best.
never really played that many games so i cant comment on anything other than the first and fourth.
1st one was impressive because of the open world and tech. combat was fun and it influenced other games such as the arkham series. stealth was ok, a little stupid but forgivable. the game got boring real quick when it felt like every mission was exactly the same, i found it hard to play it stealthly so everytime i got caught i just charge right in, its not like you can ever die in that game. ending hour or so was very exciting and had a cool cliffhanger.
black flag was fun because of all the naval activities, ac open world and combat is really boring because it is so easy. being out in the sea felt amazing, the naval combat was pretty fun but you needed to upgrade your ship because some battles were near impossible with one hit deaths. cant compare it to any other naval combat games since i havent played any but would love to have a game based on that.
i wish the next ac game would be a little harder, i want something to force me to use more stealh instead of combat because with combat you can technically rush into everything and you are invincible. i am also not talking about the forced stealth sections where you get caught and its game over, i hated those parts because i kinda suck at it.
2 was the best for me, could never really get into the other ones.