Assassiiinuss

Assassin's Creed Shadows: Reflecting on the preview build In which I have Some Thoughts™ on game design and narrative

And my #AssassinsCreedShadows article is here! I thought it would be a shorter affair, but it ended up being 9.6k words 😅

#assassinscreed #writing

englishbutter.substack.com/p/assassins-...

YouTube video by Assassiiinuss AC Shadows Grappling Hook Limitation

The grappling hook is not usable while you are in combat. That's very unfortunate because using it to escape seems like a logical use case, but that's literally not possible until you are no longer in combat.

youtu.be/yOoJ-l1LCZY?...

YouTube video by Assassiiinuss AC Shadows Parkour Issues

Parkour is unfortunately as janky as Valhalla. This clip is from early on in the demo where I was trying if Naoe can climb things Yasuke can't and I genuinely found it hard to tell if it doesn't work because it's janky or if it doesn't work because it's not supposed to.

youtu.be/RjKt4O0XfNs

YouTube video by Assassiiinuss Naoe Elite Knock Out Kill

There are enemies that have too much health to be assassinated but you can still knock them out.

youtu.be/RQP9t4n55bY

YouTube video by Assassiiinuss Naoe Indoor Stealth

The special Katana assassination is pretty fun. It does not alert enemies, you can be gone by the time anyone realises what just happened.

youtu.be/5_FURBSgWm8

YouTube video by Assassiiinuss Yasuke Refuse/Comply

You can deescalate when guards get suspicious of you. This is a nice addition but it's strange that Shadows has no other social stealth mechanics that would make this feature more interesting, like notoriety or crowd blending.

youtu.be/DBMnBgVYZRo

YouTube video by Assassiiinuss Naoe Tanto Combat

Combat is really fun. It feels relatively grounded, lethal and fast. Naoe's Tanto especially was my favourite.

youtu.be/pTtAeXUD_F0

YouTube video by Assassiiinuss Naoe Horse Jump Grappling Hook

Unfortunately I'm disappointed with the grappling hook. It's very hard to predict if it'll work or not, it's basically a less reliable version of the one in AC Syndicate.

youtu.be/GXaMhLhb6-4

YouTube video by Assassiiinuss AC Shadows Yasuke and Naoe Parkour Comparison

youtu.be/G4w7D424JFk

This is a new hiding spot type. It's functionally the same as these small sheds from AC4 and I really like the animation

I'll post some #AssassinsCreedShadows clips here!

Thanks to Ubisoft I'll be able to play a preview of #AssassinsCreedShadows in a few days. Is there anything specific you want me to try? I bet most people will focus on the available quests so I'll try to test the gameplay as much as I can.

And this is only the outward facing changes, too. If they're already making external changes like this, what they did internally is already 10x worse.