I bought the "Director's cut edition" last year second hand from CEX and to this day it has failed to pique my interest beyond the first hour or so's gameplay and I have even forgotten what happened. I can't even tell for sure if it uses DRM (no product key but I seem to remember it directed me to Ubisoft's cruddy social network or something)

I guess I'll give it a go again at some point.

This is an old point of view that I have never really agreed with. The social stealth gameplay is there and intact in the original, it just lacks a lot of fluff around that. To me AC2 has worse gameplay because it added a ton of MMO style filler bullshit that I don't want to do.

It's all opinion, really.

I thought the scifi premise of the game was quite clever (if a bit wacky). But I found what I played of the game itself to be extremely underwhelming.

The presentation was fantastic, however.

The point of AC2 is two-fold. Desmond is both gathering information for the assassins and reliving the memories is adjusting his body to be used to the motions of combat and parkour style navigation. Leaving the animus is manual because there's not much to do outside of it between chapters, the only reason to step out is to further the real story of the game. You won't see Desmond take on environment exploration until Brotherhood however.

I have no problem argeeing that the second game is the better one, I do however much prefer the simple gameplay of the original. Its a problem I have been having with Brotherhood and Revelations is the fact there's too much to do. Buying shops, races etc it just gets so mind numbing after a couple of hours.

Yeah that's pretty much how I feel. I don't like a ton of fluff, I like straight-forward gameplay. Unless you're a total RPG I guess.

Not really, when you look at the criticism in most of these game X sucks threads, it's pretty clear that the people doing the criticism didn't actually do any thinking about it or understand why the game was developed as it was.

This thread isn't as bad as some of the others, but folks like you are still bitching about the scifi aspect without having any meaningful idea as to why they did that. And seem to be under the delusion that what happens inside of the animus is the story.

As I pointed out earlier, what happens in the animus is expository information, not the plot, the plot is what happens outside of the animus.

And quite honestly, it was a refreshing change of pace. As somebody else mentioned, it does explain the hops in time, the HUD and a lot of it rather neatly. Rather than just ignoring it like most games would.
Fluff?

You mean fluff like varied game play? The mechanics were fine, even if they did improve them later on, but the gameplay itself was lackluster because they had pretty much just one mission type throughout the game. Had they fixed that, I probably would have finished the game.

One of the reasons I dislike Assasin's Creed.

Pretty much threads filled with elitist hipsters, doesn't make it any less depressing though. I can only imagine how bad this same thread would be on Steam where you also get myriad dumb asses spouting off as well.

AC1's biggest problem in the Desmond parts of the game was that they would have worked much better as cutscenes because he moved too slowly and the interactivity was rather limited anyway.

The whole encoding ancestor memories from the junk DNA thing is also one of those "only using 10% of our brains" things that scriptwriters keep using even though the science has a long time ago proved them false assumptions.

We could assume that the artifacts can somehow enable to pass on the memories of the individuals who have been in contact with them, but as so often is, annoying plot holes are left for the audience to figure out while the Dark Knight Rises made every effort in the last minutes to hint what the final scene is going to be and they still felt that we needed to actually see it instead of going to the credits a few seconds earlier.

For me, it's not an explanation, it's just silly excuse to make bullshit story little less bullshitty.

Aliens would do just as good "explanation". Actually, it would be a good idea for an X-Files episode. But what matches the X-Files little parody theme, failes HARD in a story that tries to be serious.

I can't be serious when I hear about bs like this. But I played only the first game.

If you haven't played the other games, you're exactly the sort of person that shouldn't be commenting on the scifi angle as it's a story that presumably spans the entire series from AC to AC3, I haven't played AC:R or AC3 yet, but it does span through AC:B so, it probably goes all the way.

It's a rather clever mechanic that ties together the games I've played in a convenient way, and no, aliens wouldn't have done the same thing.

If you've just played the first game, the scifi just adds a bit of flavor and context to the animus, but if you play the whole series, there's an entire story that's told when you're outside the animus.

It's a shame that apparently people have bitched enough about that that the developers have been laying off it, because it was an interesting angle. Go into the animus, learn skills, then come out and be totally badass.

What.

One or an occult group of stranded humanoid or human-possessing aliens (à la "Hidden") are warring against other alien invaders or against an order that tries to pierce their secrets and find/use their lost artefacts to dominate the planet. But the gentle alien(s) who try to hinder them happen to have a cyclic hybernation phase (à la Blood+) forcing the player to sleep through epochs and resume the fight in different centuries (à la Vampires Redemption).

Yes, solved. Elegantly. With aliens.

Next week : robots.

I suppose, but it's still the same scifi mechanic that people didn't like. Adding aliens doesn't really change that.