My favourite thing to do is to order a bowl of spaghetti in a restaurant, and then loudly take credit for making it because I instructed the chef to add more garlic. After all, the Chef is just a tool that I used to make that spaghetti.
Syndicate (loved), Black Flag (Fun to be a pirate, fun story, but again…that same gameplay loop)
Original Assassin’s Creed (I recognize its groundbreaking nature for its time, but found it kind of underwhelming),
Rogue (got it for free at some point…don’t know where or when or how. But found it similar to Black Flag; fun to be a pirate, but the same gameplay loop)
When I had Game Pass, I also took stabs at Origins and Oddysey.
I think anyone can recognize the loop I’m talking about. Go into an area. find a point that let’s you sync a bunch of little mini games (in AC it’s syncing from high points, in Watchdogs it’s hacking towers, etc…) Then you just randomly do enough side-plot and main plot missions and kill the sub-bosses until you “control” that part of the map and then do it again. Every game. Every Franchise. They all follow the same loop.
It’s only when a game adds something somewhat different to the equation (a grappling hook in Syndicate and a train that is constantly looping through the city or sailing a pirate ship in Black Flag) that it has any sort of novelty for me.
Those cheeky buggars have made the same basic game for over a decade just by changing time periods and art assets.
I’ve always had trouble getting into the Assassin’s Creed games, even though as a history buff they should be right up my alley. There’s something about the Ubisoft generic play-loop that bores me after a certain amount of time. ( I have that same issue with the Total War series…love history, so I should love those games, but for some reason they just don’t click with me).
Weirdly enough, the only AC game that has really clicked with me is (AFAIK) one of the least popular ones, and that’s Syndicate. I think it’s because the setting. Victorian London had a lot of verticality from the various buildings that allowed a very spider-man like experience.
No one exists except me. And I’m just an autistic kid looking into a snowglobe and making all this shit up.
Civic duty, not just for Americans, but for everyone is that if they see an interaction happening with any sort of law enforcement, stop…turn on your phone’s video camera, and record it. The more citizens record every…single…interaction with authority, the harder it is for them to keep the story hidden.