Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2016-01-07 07:42 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2016-01-07 07:42 pm
Entry tags:
No, You Don't Hear The People Sing, Because That Was A Different Revolution.
I'm playing Assassin's Creed: Unity!
And I've barely progressed the story at all. I'm spending so much time just arsing around in the streets of Paris, climbing up buildings, trying to solve murders, gazing in awe over the city. It's a ridiculously beautiful game.
I've been making disjointed notes as I go along, and I'm going to dump them here:
THAT SCENE BETWEEN TINY ARNO AND HIS FATHER AT THE BEGINNING WAS REALLY CUTE. I'M SO UPSET. I'm sorry I killed your dad when I was being Shay, Arno!
Everything is so beautiful! Except, for some reason, Arno's hair, which looks like it's stumbled in from a previous console generation and doesn't know what it's doing on this guy's head.
Arno loses two fathers within the first two hours of gameplay. That's the most Assassin's Creed thing I've ever seen. (He's also the second protagonist in the series to lose a father figure specifically because he does the wrong thing with an important document.)
This is a ridiculously overblown initiation ceremony. But Arno's drugged-up rebirth sequence was really cool.
...aaaaand first crash of the game! (I'd just spent ages buying equipment, too.)
Oh, it turns out that it's because I hadn't signed into my PSN account, and so the PS4 hadn't downloaded the patch to make Unity not completely broken. The... six-gigabyte patch. Wow. I knew Unity was famously bug-ridden when it was first released, but I hadn't realised it would need quite that much patching up.
Come to think of it, that does explain why Arno kept refusing to draw his sword while I desperately hammered the Square button. ARNO.
(The drugged-up initiation ceremony was still great, though. Very Kingdom Hearts during the de la Serre sequence, with all the wobbly floating buildings and moving platforms.)
The city feels far more alive than any of the locations in previous games. There are so many people on the streets; there’s so much going on. I’m really impressed by the PS4’s sheer capacity for getting things on the screen.
Right now I’m running around in Edward Kenway’s outfit, because Arno’s mismatched collection of clothes looks ridiculous. I just want to be able to buy things for the stat boosts without having to worry about whether leather goes with linen.
I find Creed Points hilarious and I don’t know why. YEAH, WELL DONE FOR HIDING IN A HAYSTACK, YOU EARN FIFTY CREED POINTS.
Who could the murderer be? Is it the woman at the end of a trail of blood leading from the crime scene, who's claiming that the victims got what they deserved? Or is it the victim's distraught wife? This detective business is tricky.
And then I hit the bizarre 'server bridge portal' section. I’m not sure exactly why I’m being thrown a century into the future to climb up the Statue of Liberty, but I’ll accept it. (Why were there all those wooden boxes and planks blocking the way on the Metro tracks? That doesn't seem safe.)
There's an interesting new approach to language in this game. In previous Assassin's Creed games set in non-English-speaking locations, the speech would all be in English, but the accents would help to give a sort of linguistic sense of place. In Unity, where the major characters seem to speak mainly with British accents, the linguistic sense of 'this is France' comes from the fact that all the people you pass on the street are speaking French. I'm a bit sad about this, because I can't understand what they're saying, and I loved some of the passer-by quotes in previous games. I fondly remember the time I (as Ezio) knocked a box out of a guy's hands and he said, 'This is the third delivery I've lost this week. You're ruining my business. Please go away.'
Finally, a couple of interesting historical titbits from the in-game database:
- During the French Revolution, the statues of the biblical kings of Judah on Notre-Dame Cathedral were beheaded; the revolutionaries had mistaken them for kings of France.
- The game says that 'By 1789, the Bastille was deemed useless, and was costly to maintain, with 250 soldiers for a mere nine prisoners.' How did all the guards occupy themselves? Why not have fewer guards? Were there actually cells, or were the prisoners kept in by a solid wall of men? I'm having trouble finding another source to confirm this, though; it's definitely true that the number of prisoners was in single figures at points in the 1780s, but I can't find anything solid on the number of guards.
(I might post more Occasionally Unverifiable Eighteenth-Century France Facts in the future, if people are interested.)
And I've barely progressed the story at all. I'm spending so much time just arsing around in the streets of Paris, climbing up buildings, trying to solve murders, gazing in awe over the city. It's a ridiculously beautiful game.
I've been making disjointed notes as I go along, and I'm going to dump them here:
THAT SCENE BETWEEN TINY ARNO AND HIS FATHER AT THE BEGINNING WAS REALLY CUTE. I'M SO UPSET. I'm sorry I killed your dad when I was being Shay, Arno!
Everything is so beautiful! Except, for some reason, Arno's hair, which looks like it's stumbled in from a previous console generation and doesn't know what it's doing on this guy's head.
Arno loses two fathers within the first two hours of gameplay. That's the most Assassin's Creed thing I've ever seen. (He's also the second protagonist in the series to lose a father figure specifically because he does the wrong thing with an important document.)
This is a ridiculously overblown initiation ceremony. But Arno's drugged-up rebirth sequence was really cool.
...aaaaand first crash of the game! (I'd just spent ages buying equipment, too.)
Oh, it turns out that it's because I hadn't signed into my PSN account, and so the PS4 hadn't downloaded the patch to make Unity not completely broken. The... six-gigabyte patch. Wow. I knew Unity was famously bug-ridden when it was first released, but I hadn't realised it would need quite that much patching up.
Come to think of it, that does explain why Arno kept refusing to draw his sword while I desperately hammered the Square button. ARNO.
(The drugged-up initiation ceremony was still great, though. Very Kingdom Hearts during the de la Serre sequence, with all the wobbly floating buildings and moving platforms.)
The city feels far more alive than any of the locations in previous games. There are so many people on the streets; there’s so much going on. I’m really impressed by the PS4’s sheer capacity for getting things on the screen.
Right now I’m running around in Edward Kenway’s outfit, because Arno’s mismatched collection of clothes looks ridiculous. I just want to be able to buy things for the stat boosts without having to worry about whether leather goes with linen.
I find Creed Points hilarious and I don’t know why. YEAH, WELL DONE FOR HIDING IN A HAYSTACK, YOU EARN FIFTY CREED POINTS.
Who could the murderer be? Is it the woman at the end of a trail of blood leading from the crime scene, who's claiming that the victims got what they deserved? Or is it the victim's distraught wife? This detective business is tricky.
And then I hit the bizarre 'server bridge portal' section. I’m not sure exactly why I’m being thrown a century into the future to climb up the Statue of Liberty, but I’ll accept it. (Why were there all those wooden boxes and planks blocking the way on the Metro tracks? That doesn't seem safe.)
There's an interesting new approach to language in this game. In previous Assassin's Creed games set in non-English-speaking locations, the speech would all be in English, but the accents would help to give a sort of linguistic sense of place. In Unity, where the major characters seem to speak mainly with British accents, the linguistic sense of 'this is France' comes from the fact that all the people you pass on the street are speaking French. I'm a bit sad about this, because I can't understand what they're saying, and I loved some of the passer-by quotes in previous games. I fondly remember the time I (as Ezio) knocked a box out of a guy's hands and he said, 'This is the third delivery I've lost this week. You're ruining my business. Please go away.'
Finally, a couple of interesting historical titbits from the in-game database:
- During the French Revolution, the statues of the biblical kings of Judah on Notre-Dame Cathedral were beheaded; the revolutionaries had mistaken them for kings of France.
- The game says that 'By 1789, the Bastille was deemed useless, and was costly to maintain, with 250 soldiers for a mere nine prisoners.' How did all the guards occupy themselves? Why not have fewer guards? Were there actually cells, or were the prisoners kept in by a solid wall of men? I'm having trouble finding another source to confirm this, though; it's definitely true that the number of prisoners was in single figures at points in the 1780s, but I can't find anything solid on the number of guards.
(I might post more Occasionally Unverifiable Eighteenth-Century France Facts in the future, if people are interested.)