fascinated by the way AC Shadows has literally thousands of lines of recorded dialogue and barely any actual plot. it's all just like [new guy you are fighting] 'Ah, honor ... but is it truly honor?' [you] 'meaningless dialogue choice' [new guy] 'I will be pleased to die at your hand' - ThreadSky

beijingpalmer.bsky.social • 6 days ago

fascinated by the way AC Shadows has literally thousands of lines of recorded dialogue and barely any actual plot. it's all just like

[new guy you are fighting] 'Ah, honor ... but is it truly honor?'
[you] 'meaningless dialogue choice'
[new guy] 'I will be pleased to die at your hand'

Comments

sadnehs.bsky.social•5 days ago

Ubisoft has a way of workflowing and pipelining all the passion out of their developers and games.

prchovanec.bsky.social•6 days ago

Plot is a Western preoccupation.

miyurosewood.bsky.social•6 days ago

Is it a Bioware dialogue menu 1,2,3,4 again?

Are they trying to take FO4 cake?

beijingpalmer.bsky.social•6 days ago

on the other hand you can tackle every castle like you're Luke Cage and the daimyo owes you 200 mon, so that's good.

clearwind.bsky.social•6 days ago

What's 16th century Japanese for "Where's my money, honey?"

bluesotka.bsky.social•5 days ago

Westerners writing anything set in Japan:
"Honor"

bicyclehater.bsky.social•6 days ago

I Like This Asses Creed Game Because I Do Not Give A Shit About Plot I Just Like To Stab People In The Face And Pet Dogs

bakakuma.tv•6 days ago

*laughs in canonical mode*

unavaleable.bsky.social•6 days ago

the decision to have dialogue choices but for them to not mean anything was so dumb, really wanted to have their cake and eat it too

baptistelerak.bsky.social•6 days ago

"Have their cake and eat it too" seems to be the tagline for AC Shadows' development.

unavaleable.bsky.social•6 days ago

yup. they wanted to please everyone because they really, really needed it to work

unavaleable.bsky.social•6 days ago

also like all of the non mocapped cutscenes are *rough* and ubisoft *loves* them

beijingpalmer.bsky.social•6 days ago

massive contrast with the (superior across the board) Ghost of Tsushima. also they're ... really bad at making distinctive faces for middle-aged Japanese men? which is a problem since that is literally 90 percent of the characters.

miyurosewood.bsky.social•6 days ago

Iirc, they don't "make" them. It's a patented function to generate face out of generic mesh. Which was patented before Oblivion was out and still used by Ubisoft and (with mods) by Bethesda and few others. The "race" part of that generator is stereotypical, just limit brakets on parameters.

miyurosewood.bsky.social•6 days ago

If racial template is very limiting, all faces would be "same". Which was "exactly how it is in reality" by opinion of algorithm's creator (where he's absolutely wrong).

unavaleable.bsky.social•6 days ago

i think the single biggest mistake gameplay wise was to not have yasuke have real stealth/traversal progression, cus like Naoe starts weak at combat but can become OP at it, the reverse should be true (to some degree) with Yasuke and stealth

xanderoconnor.bsky.social•6 days ago

Yasuke also arguably starts like too strong at combat? At least after a knowledge level or two and a dozen points focused on long katana and with decent gear you are just replenishing adrenaline and health constantly.

Still fun but further upgrades are more just “ok now I’ll get godly with

xanderoconnor.bsky.social•6 days ago

this other weapon, although not because I need to, just for variety”.

Him getting sneaky could be fun (and would make some sense given his friends) but going the Odyssey route of “increasingly a full on demi god” that you have fight whole armies and such would work too.

nicholasventure.bsky.social•6 days ago

The generally accepted idea is that the game was originally just Naoe as the playable character, but they liked Yasuke and decided to make him a playable character somewhere further along the development timeline. So that may explain some of it?

baptistelerak.bsky.social•6 days ago

I think the more likely reason is that they wanted a female MC for the third time in a row and again for the third time in a row management mandated a male option, so Yasuke was the compromise.

unavaleable.bsky.social•6 days ago

That makes sense and also scans because Ubisoft has literally done something like that with every mainline game (sideline a female player character) since syndicate

unavaleable.bsky.social•6 days ago

the free form mission design really fucked the story because the roots (kinda like Unity, but more so) are there but the follow-through is fucked because the pacing is horrible because the writers have no control over how things develop

unavaleable.bsky.social•6 days ago

its definitely the most refined of the RPG era AC games but they made conscious choices that have held it back from being great

redoubters.bsky.social•6 days ago

"Go anywhere, play the game *your way*" design has been a disaster like 95% of the time games try to do it

and in all of those cases would just be much better served with a tightly designed gameplay experience

sesspackman.bsky.social•6 days ago

20 plus hours in - still haven't unlocked Yasuke.

ryanwu2438.bsky.social•6 days ago

This has always been the issue with dialogue trees, there is theoretically multiple compelling journeys people can take through a stort by adopting different sets of animating values but the need to constantly give players the choice between those values
...

ryanwu2438.bsky.social•6 days ago

It means that the decisions you make can't affect the direction of story *too* much, so you end up getting a very milquetoast story where you're a very incidental player. It's antithetical to what we think of as good narrative.

ryanwu2438.bsky.social•6 days ago

I said dialogue trees, I should've said moral choice systems and all that.

themilesturner.bsky.social•5 days ago

...you mean it's a post-AC3 Assassin's Creed game?

seanvaljean.bsky.social•6 days ago

The Ubisoft model. Writing that intentionally says nothing. Hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to anti-art.

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