Looking Back at Assassin's Creed III
Well, hello there! Today I want to take a step back and look at a game I have not really liked back when it launched. As you have seen in the title, it is Assassin's Creed III. Yes, the first of the Colonial saga.
Back in 2012, the hype for this game was immense. Just imagine, all the games took place in 2012, and this was supposed to be about stopping the end of the world from happening. This was supposed to be the end of the series...yep...the last one...no more games after... Anyway, I loved and still love what is dubbed today The Ezio Trilogy, and the epilogue of this little saga, called Assassin's Creed Embers really broke me at the time, so I was really curious what they could do now that we get a completely new setting with completely new characters. Problem is, by comparison, the American Revolution, although an important moment in history, was an infinitely more boring period than the Italian Renaissance and the embers of the Byzantine Empire around the area of Constantinople.
The game comes out, I convince my father to buy me Assassin's Creed Anthology, a pretty cool box set of the whole series up to that point (at last, I owned Brotherhood legitimately) with all they're respective DLC, except the Battle of Forli and Bonfire of Vanities expansions for Assassin's Creed II...for some reason, but it was alright, I already played the hell out of Assassin's Creed II on PC, expansions included. I boot up Assassin's Creed 3 on my trusty PS3 and I genuinely like the Haytham segment of the game, as it was pretty much classic Assassin's Creed stuff, and then the game drops a bombshell unto me: Haytham is a Templar. I was shaken in disbelief at this amazing plot twist. The game fast forwards a few years and we play as Connor (I can not write his Native name, no we will stick with his given name). The game is tutorialising me! The first too many missions playing as Connor are tutorials, which make them really out of place as we already had about two to three hours as Haytham, which means, the middle portion of the game is an overlong tutorial.
After the tutorial stuff, I started to notice how broken the game was. I managed to fall through a rock at some point, into the void under the map, which, fyi, is, like in most games, an ocean. I had to restart my game, then back to business as usual. The game was kind of a chore to play in its state, as the framerate was pretty low (yeah, I know, complaining about framerate on an old console), looked really blurry and lifeless (it really did have a blue filter over it, which did not help the matters) and I just didn't like Connor as a character. Now, I'll bring out my secret weapon: when I bought Assassin's Creed Odyssey, I got the season pass too, as the whole package was on sale for 40 Euros. The season pass got me access to Assassin's Creed III Remastered, an on the whole better version of the game. As soon as I started playing, the game hit me with it's looks and smoothness. The main attraction is the new lighting engine, which gives the game a much warmer look, and I can only gush about the orange sunrises and sunsets in the game.
This remaster not only fixed the looks (and framerate, but it is on PC, so I expect good framerates from 8 year old games), but also the animation bugs and redesigned the map to make it easier to read! It is not sunshine and rainbows though, as there are a few trade offs. First one is the most obvious: they removed the multiplayer, which is a bummer, as it was the best game of hide and seek you could ever play, besides The Ship. The second trade off is the fact that, for some reason, the character models look worse with the new lighting engine, there are no small subtle shadows on them now, which kinda ruins the cutscenes sometimes. In gameplay, this problem isn't noticeable, so at least there's that.
On the whole, these days, I am wandering through this game's Frontier area, an almost untamed part of the map, where small human outposts pepper the forest and mountains, the rest being beautiful nature without a care in the world. It is pretty funny how this pretty big area has more detail put into it and more heart than the empty plains of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I know the developers really did not want that game to be a mainline title in the series, as it was pitched as Odyssey: An Assassin's Creed Story, so being harsh on it for the unfortunate title is not really warranted, but damn, I just want to explore one of those minutiously crafted worlds like in the games up to even Syndicate, without wide open areas, presenting me with tall buildings which, by themselves, present me with climbing puzzles to reach the top of them, with crowds of people on the streets minding their business.
All in all, this game is a pretty nice hiking simulator and still presents some of the soul the franchise has slowly lost over the years, so if you find it for cheap, give it a try, I guess.
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