We bought Assassin’s Creed last weekend, and since Miz grabbed it first, I’ve been a voyeur, anxiously awaiting my chance to play.
I wish that MMOs could look and feel like this. The environment is gorgeous, absolutely real. Your horse slides to a stop in a flurry of dust and kicked-up stones. As you walk through a marketplace, the ambient sound is perfect. People complain when you brush past them too roughly, and exclaim in amazement and shock when you do assassin-type things. “Did you see that?” “I’ve never seen anyone do that before!” When you jump into a cart piled with straw to hide from pursuers, you shed straw when you get up. It feels real.
If you could go into the shops, talk to all the NPCs, enter someone’s house and be chased out by a screeching housewife waving a frying pan, it would be the perfect immersive experience. I know that it will be a long time before we see this type of realism in an MMO…but gods would it be gorgeous.
There are things that break the suspension of disbelief, of course…funny how you can slip into a group of similarly-dressed scholars to walk past the guards, and they seem to not see the weapons bristling from every part of your body. :)
The storyline seems to have a lot of depth and is very well done. I won’t write about any possible spoiler material, in case someone hasn’t yet played the game, but that element handles death or failure of missions very well, you just go back in.
Overall, a gorgeous, gorgeous game. Miz, I’m going to have to kick you off the XBox this weekend…it’s my turn.