Le Saboteur
Active member
Finn said:...it would hardly be Max Payne.
I did happen to see one Favela Max walking around the floors of Comic Con. Surprising, yes, but not nearly as surprising as the five or six Ezio Auditore di Firenze's stalking the floor. I didn't realize it was that popular.
Well, one of them might have been an Altair. I didn't look for the subtle differences in costuming. I'm sure one of the many articles on SDCC's cosplay will point them out for me.
Ubisoft's presence on the exhibit floor amounted to a large black theatre adorned with the Assassin's Creed emblem. Fronting the theatre were a couple of laptops where you could pre-order the game through Best Buy, and a Frag Doll Cadette doing her best sideshow barker impression.
You did get this rather awesome t-shirt for pre-ordering.
Inside the theatre another Cadette(?) emceed a fifteen minute video featuring the Battle of Bunker Hill and Colonel William Prescott's famous "do not shoot before you see the white's of their eyes" speech. The demo culminated with Connor preparing to go all Last of the Mohicans on Major Pitcairn.
Alex Hutchinson, the game's director, narrated the video explaining the difficulty they had in a.) designing natural looking trees that could be traversed and b.) implementing an open-world where Connor could go where he pleased.
Weapons offer more realistic damage this time around as evidenced by Connor cleaving a Redcoat's head in twain with his tomahawk. There's also a stronger emphasis on contextual animation; i.e. enemies will jump away when cannonballs land near them, Connor will visibly seek out hand and foot holes while scaling vertical cliffs, and troops on both sides will act out their death throes.
The engine now handles some twenty-five hundred people on screen at once, and this allows the team to implement period accurate military tactics. Though, I would have liked to seen if the battle would continue to play out if Connor did nothing.
The last thing I specifically remember from the Bunker Hill sequence: the free-running has been adjusted to include over-under options. Where Ezio, Altair, & Desmond could only vault over objects, Connor can now slide under them. It remains to be seen if this actually affects gameplay, but it is a nifty piece of flair.
The video closed out with a new look at the addition of naval warfare. Most of the footage was recycled from the E3 demo, but they took pains to point out that Connor wasn't limited to the quarterdeck. You were free to explore the entire ship; if you abandoned the helm, your helmsman would take over; and you could take direct command over your cannon.
Though, I wish they would be clear about the fact that the Continental Navy was beyond hopeless. Aside from a successful campaign at Nassau and John Paul Jones, it wasn't a factor.
I'm looking forward to more. Which is surprising considering how nonplussed by the earlier outings I was.