Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

I have played each of the Assassin's Creed games more or less as they have come out. It was actually my wife who bought the first game, but she didn't care for it so I played it on her Steam account. I've bought each of the Assassin's Creed II games on Steam myself, from the original through Brotherhood to Revelations, and then I ended up with Assassin's Creed III on Xbox 360 because my wife found a great deal online. I'm back to my PC for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, however, and so what I have to say about the game ought to be taken with the understanding that I've played it with mouse and keyboard exclusively.

The Good

The "Golden Age of Piracy" Caribbean setting is really a lot of fun. The Assassin's Creed games have always had a good time playing with real history versus the added secret history of the Assassin vs. Templar conflict, and this is no exception.

The mechanics of the game are still very good, though there are still some instances where I think I'm having Edward Kenway leap in one (safe) direction and end up commanding him to fall to his (unsafe) death.

Sidebar: It's funny how sensitive I am to the cues the game is giving me - I flinch whenever I send Edward sailing into the air and realise he's not stretching out into his leap-of-faith pose, knowing that he's going to have a hard landing. I tend to get a tiny touch of vertigo whenever a character I'm playing falls from a great height, unless it's in a situation or a game where I know it's safe. An Assassin's Creed protagonist dropping into a haystack or the water doesn't make my stomach lurch; likewise I know for a fact that even if I let Batman in any Arkham game fall from the highest point possible, he'll slow his fall in the last few metres to land safely.

I have seen several comments, from both fellow players and reviewers, that they were annoyed by how much the game really was an entry in the Assassin's Creed series as opposed to more of a standalone pirate game just called Black Flag. I'm absolutely in the tank for the Assassins vs. Templars conflict, though, so while I appreciate the distinction of having a protagonist who's not actually aligned with either side but just interested in becoming a successful and wealthy pirate, I'm really satisfied with the extent to which the whole conflict and the Precursor civilisation still matters to this game.

On that note, I'm also probably one of the few people who was interested in completing the modern-day portions of the game, where you play an employee of Abstergo Entertainment who is responsible for getting the "footage" from Edward's life that they're planning to turn into an immersive virtual experience called Devils of the Caribbean. To be clear: I was irritated by the Frogger-style hacking puzzle, but I actually found all of the artifacts from the early days of successful Animus technology really interesting. Plus, ironically, Desmond and crew are probably more interesting in the information and voice journal entries recovered by Abstergo than they ever were in the previous games.

The Indifferent

The hunting and trading subsystems are simpler and thus better than in Assassin's Creed III, where they were first introduced. It's actually really cool to be able to choose to capture a defeated ship and send it off to your personal fleet. The downside is that the economics of your fleet have nothing to do with your actions in the game, really; it's a relief to not have to flick through submenu after submenu to make medicines and cabinets in order to send them off in trading caravans as I did in Assassin's Creed III, but all of the goods you trade in Kenway's fleet are specific to the fleet minigame. I'm not looting tobacco or tea on the high seas as Kenway and then selling it on, I'm just acquiring it from winning fleet battles as far as I can tell.

The tombs from previous games, which I always enjoyed whether they were exploration/parkour challenges or enemy bases you needed to fight through, have been largely replaced by the diving bell sequences. I actually don't mind the mechanics of the wreck-diving areas - mastering three-dimensional swimming while avoiding poisonous sea urchins and making sure you don't run out of air is fun. What's not fun are the fucking sharks. So far there's only one wreck I have managed to fully explore without getting chomped to death, and that was not a fun experience at all. The sharks add unnecessary danger and too many areas are impossible for me to navigate while hiding from them.

The actual gameplay of the modern-era sequences kinda sucks. The engine makes walking around in first-person view awkward, and the characters are clearly not as well-designed as the pirate-era's. Plus, as mentioned before, Frogger. The other two hacking puzzles aren't that bad, but fuck Frogger.

The Disappointing

The sailing portion of the game is a huge part of what you're doing, so it's unfortunate that I don't really find it all that much fun. Combat is fun enough moment-to-moment, but the difficulty is completely screwed up. At the point where I finished the storyline, I had upgraded Edward's ship with just about everything I could afford, but I still find myself facing multiple ships at a time that show as too tough for me to handle individually, much less in pairs or with smaller buddies along for the ride. Meanwhile anything less than a man-o-war I can take down in under a minute. In fact, my cannons are so powerful that I have to deliberately aim too high to deal full damage if I wanted to capture one of the smaller ships, or else I sink them in one volley.

I don't find it enjoyable to have to stop playing through the main storyline in order to screw around attacking ship after ship in order to buff up my own. At one point, faced with two man-o-wars guarding a bay I needed to enter, I parked my own ship off the coast and took Edward for a two-kilometre swim past them just to get to the mission start point I was heading for. Not, I think, working as intended!

So far the only way I have managed to survive is by taking advantage of the weird-as-hell design decision that you can board an enemy ship you have disabled even in the middle of combat with other still-mobile ships, defeat the crew and capture it, and then use its resources to repair your ship, all in a frozen instant of time after which the regular fight will resume!

Conclusion

I recommend that people play this game if they're interested in being a cool pirate and if they don't mind a bit of a resource grind. At this stage, I can't say whether or not I'll bother to try to take control of every zone on the sea and craft all the gear I can and defeat the "legendary ships" in the corners of the map . . . it really depends on how motivated I am. I'm already shortening my time spent on the sea by making frequent use of the fast-travel system, which feels a bit weird when I could be hunting for jerks.

Sidebar: Fuck Assassin's Creed multiplayer. I haven't enjoyed it since they introduced it, and while I intend to give it a shot again eventually even the tutorial reminded me how annoying and awkward it feels.

Six short responses to Black Mirror

Black Mirror is a British television series, created by Charlie Brooker, which has to date aired six episodes in two series of three episodes each. The titular "black mirror" represents the screens of our technology - televisions, computer monitors, smartphones - and the series consists of standalone episodes in the manner of The Twilight Zone, each considering a different aspect of how modern technology affects us now through a look at how it may effect us in the speculative future.

I recently watched both series and I just want to give you a single paragraph on each episode, more as a reaction than a review.

S01 E01 The National Anthem

Rory Kinnear, who I most recently saw playing Bolingbroke in the first episode of The Hollow Crown, "Richard II", plays the British Prime Minister faced with a seemingly absurd demand in exchange for the life of a popular princess. What first seems humourous descends into unease and then disgust; yet the story sympathises with the motive of its villain, both only revealed in hindsight, and it seems impossible to disagree.

S01 E02 Fifteen Million Merits

Perhaps the most overtly science-fictional story of the lot, and one which apparently has some personal resonance with the careers of Charlie Brooker and his wife Kanak "Konnie" Huq of which I am unaware, not being British. Daniel Kaluuya and Jessica Brown Findlay are very effective in appropriately emotionally-restricted roles; a story of constant media saturation as popular pacification which perverts or subverts anything genuine is perhaps a little obvious, but well-made.

S01 E03 The Entire History of You

This was probably the most effective episode but, due to its subject matter and the excellent performances of Toby Kebbell and Jodie Whittaker, absolutely the hardest for me to watch. It's effectively the story of how a given technology - the ability to record and replay everything you experience - magnifies one man's insecurities and faults, giving him the ability to pursue a suspicion he'd have been better off leaving alone.

S02 E01 Be Right Back

Although "The Entire History of You" affected me more because it was so raw, "Be Right Back" (starring Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson) is definitely the best episode of the six as far as I'm concerned. It's a very small and intimate meditation on grief and coping, and how the real person is always more - for better and for worse - than your memories of them after they're gone.

S02 E02 White Bear

This is the episode that gets all the plaudits, and it is very good although it relies on a conceit which I began to expect about halfway through the episode. Lenora Crichlow is the lead in a role which really asks very little of her, but she's so expressive within those confines that it doesn't end up mattering much. I'm less affected by the driving tension of this episode than others were, but it's very well done.

S02 E03 The Waldo Moment

The most straightforward satire of all six episodes, and the least speculative of them all. Daniel Rigby plays a comedian stuck playing a cartoon bear who gets involved in a by-election for the House of Commons; his performance is fine but I was more interested in Chloe Pirrie as the newbie Labour candidate and especially Tobias Menzies (Brutus! Edmure Tully!) as the safe-seat Tory candidate. This episode repeats the "dissent will always be co-opted" theme from "Fifteen Million Merits"; while it's not bad television by any means, it's a hard task to make something good out of a story of so many people who basically don't want to be there at all.

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

This expansion has given me simultaneously more to do with my army of characters and less reason to do any of it - but the latter isn't Blizzard's fault. It doesn't even really have anything to do with the expansion itself; it has more to do with Cataclysm, the previous expansion, but even that isn't the whole story.

I really enjoy the story of Mists. Maybe it helps that I've never seen Kung Fu Panda? There was a lot of stupid bitching about the idea of an expansion featuring the pandaren race and adding the monk class, at least, and maybe my wise decision to not see terrible animated comedy movies helped ensure that I wasn't offended by the very notion of these ideas, let alone the two of them combined.

As I said, I liked the story. The Horde and Alliance clash in a sea battle that leaves both fleets wrecked on the shores of Pandaria, no longer hidden by supernatural mists that kept it isolated for thousands of years. Over the course of subsequent major patches, the Alliance has banded together and, from my point of view, learned the right lessons from the unique mystical features of Pandaria, while the Horde has fractured at the driving point of Warchief Garrosh Hellscream's lust for power. Now he's the Big Bad both factions have besieged the capital city of the Horde to depose, because the second truth of WoW (after "Blizzard will always try to push Alliance vs. Horde") is "everyone has to be able to raid the same guys so we might as well have the factions more or less team up to do it".

(Sure, we'll have rival groups trying to outdo the other and even gunship fights to see who gets first crack at the loot piñata (oh, wait, the Gunship fight in Icecrown Citadel was the loot piñata), but ultimately no-one wants the Big Bad to win so there will always be room for a begrudging partnership of convenience.)

Enough of the general, now for the specific. I have played a human fire mage as my main character since my very first day in the game, when I was operating on D&D logic and assumed that, if I let a wolf bite me, my wizard would die immediately. He became an engineer during The Burning Crusade when Blizzard let engineers build helicopters, and that's remained immutable ever since as well.

The thing is, I'm definitely an altoholic. This is my character list on my main server right now:

(The only reason why Shihou isn't already 90 is because I'm playing him with my wife's mage, and she's fixated on Final Fantasy XIV right now.)

Despite everything I've achieved in the game so far, there's still a fair bit to do. Sure, Ascanius is already exalted with every faction of Pandaria that offers daily quests, a master of all the different ways of cooking introduced in this expansion, possessed of all the new Engineering recipes, proud restorer of every new Pandarian archeological artifact, et cetera et cetera. But look at all those alts! Okay, there's no way I'm going to repeat the feats of my main character with each of them, but most of them have some cool stuff I can do. Catilina is a blacksmith slowly putting together the materials to make some cool-looking weapons for everyone. Fulvia is a tailor and enchanter slowly acquiring the reputation necessary to learn really useful patterns and the cloth needed for them. Mithridates is a scribe slowly collecting the new Darkmoon Faire card sets, which will eventually result in trinkets, I think?

But the key word there is slowly. Part of the problem is that the most worthwhile things to do with your profession are always balanced by the time and effort needed to acquire them, with the assumption seemingly being that people will only bother with this for their main characters. I don't disagree - I don't need to put together epic sets of gear for my alts, because I rarely even run scenarios or dungeons with them, let alone raid.

And yet . . .

I acknowledge that I'm an unusual player. Back in Wrath of the Lich King I knew that some of my friends talked their housemates or partners into levelling their characters for them, because they just couldn't stand questing. But I love it. I won't go through every zone on my alts as completely as I do on Ascanius, but every single one of those level 90s you see (and the monk) was levelled through questing, not through grinding out experience in PvP (which I don't do) or dungeons (which I rarely bother with while levelling). I enjoy the experience of playing each character, doing the same zones and the same quests in those zones but seeing how the gameplay changes when I'm on my shadow priest as opposed to my enhancement shaman, or even playing my protection paladin as compared to my blood death knight (both protection and blood being tank specialisations).

That experience is part of it . . . but another part of it is feeling like I'm accomplishing something, even if the goal is modest. I won't usually bother to run a dungeon on any of my alts, because I've done that dungeon on my main character and the only reason to go back is to earn gear; if I'm going to try to earn gear, why not put that time into my main character? However, in addition to the different experience of playing a different class (and sometimes race makes a difference; every Alliance race is represented in that list of my characters, even night elves), what they also have that distinguishes them from Ascanius is their professions. He can't be a tailor and an engineer and a blacksmith and an alchemist, not all at once; his being exalted with the August Celestials doesn't help Fulvia get the pattern for the Royal Satchel. He can't buy Catilina the blacksmithing patterns from the Klaxxi, and he certainly can't make the armour and weapons from them.
So I play my alts once they hit maximum level so that I can achieve things through their professions, which brings me back to not only the problem of everything taking forever (it takes 12 days to make the special cloth used to make that Royal Satchel) but also the disappointment that I'm only able to help myself (and occasionally my wife).

Back in Wrath of the Lich King, our guild was able to field a full 10-player raid and take down the Big Bad Lich King all by ourselves. In Cataclysm, there was an epidemic of burnout; some of my friends raced to the new level cap and then got bored waiting for the rest of us to catch up, while players like me took our time to level and enjoy the storylines and zones. I didn't even think about hopping into dungeons until I'd already fully quested through all five of the new zones of the expansion, and by the time I was halfway through running the dungeons enough to gear up for heroic dungeons too many key players had simply quit the game.

This kind of burnout is natural, doubly so because of the specific conditions - Wrath's final raid content patch was released more than a year before the next expansion debuted, and while we needed a lot of that time to get to the point where we could kill the Big Bad, there were months and months after that where we, as a guild, had almost nothing to do (excepting a brief period when we set about killing a very stupid dragon with the exact same name as our guild leader). No surprise that some of us were raring to get back into raiding as soon as possible, while others were just happy to have new zones to explore and new things to do, full stop.

I just know that if I felt like it was going to help me do more than just equip my alts with cooler-looking gear, or give myself a little more bag space on my main character, I could easily be motivated to play those alts in a more serious way. Now of course it's no surprise that I could get more out of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game if I had more people to play with, but at the same time it's not really my choice. I can't find new people to play with and leave behind the guild . . . I'm so close to being able to steal guild leadership, if my wife stays unsubscribed for long enough!

So in the end I will continue plodding away at the little things each character can do, and cross my fingers that my friends get excited by the next expansion for the game and come back some time in 2014. At least I have the Raid Finder experience; it may feel like a big, uncoordinated dungeon, but at least I might get a chance to burn the shit out of Garrosh Hellscream, that fucker.