Assassin's Creed Unity has so Many Problems that Assassin's Creed Origins Fixed

The difference 3 years of development can make.

In anticipation of AC shadows, I've been replaying some of the AC games. I started with Unity. Or at least I tried too. Unity sets the stage for a fantastic assassins creed game. It has plenty of historical figures that died, plenty of space for cinematic moments, plenty of bloody conflict, a huge city with plenty of twists and turns, and a turning point in European and World history. I remember playing it back when it came out in 2014. I enjoyed it back then but it wasn't my favorite game of the year nor the series. I was let down by the story where i didn't feel much connection with the characters, particularly Arno, and i remember rather disliking the combat. I was one of the people that really liked the old Assassins creed combat. I liked feeling like a powerful assassin. In Unity i remember getting frustrated by the combat and the core design of running around the city. But now, a decade later, I decided to go back and try it out. To see if I'd like it more after so much time has passed. And how'd it turn out? Did I like it more now? Did I think it aged well? Could I have gotten better at video games now that I'm 30 instead of 20?

Well. In one word. Nope. I would say I actually grew to hate Unity the more I played it. The thing that stuck out to me the most was the terrible free running. This was before Origins where Ubi made some massive strides in their engine to make running around more fun, realistic, and generally less frustrating. For instance, early on in the game you have to infiltrate Notre Dame. There's a service actively happening and you have to kill one of the people attending. There are several ways to get inside but I always went with the giant hole at the back of the church. Now, I did what I usually do in AC games, and what I think most do, I went silent until I couldn't. I got several of the guards and then I had to get down a bit to be above of the target. Well, when I tried to freerun down, instead of doing dropping down a bit to some poles, I jumped all the way down to the target. On this jump I went right by multiple things that my character should have grabbed but no, Arno did no such thing.

Now in most AC games I would have been frustrated but feasibly capable of recovering. But here in Unity, I could not handle it. There was a delay between me pressing a button and the attack happening. The excuse in the game is that the character is doing the movement. So it takes time after the button press. But it was incredibly frustrating. I changed batteries in my controller, changed controllers, used my mouse and keyboard. Nothing seemed to help. So I ended up dying and reloading. I had to go all the way back to where I was and try to go down to the level I needed to again. It took me two more times to figure it out. I had to go down below the pole then go back up. So I had to go past where I wanted to go in order to go where I wanted to go. And this was early in the game. This basically summed up Unity for me in the 10 hrs I played.

Another moment that really bothered me, and this is largely a fault of how Ubi develops their games simultaneously, AC rogue had a great feature where when someone is about to fire a gun at me, I can press A and use a close enemy as a meat shield to block the shot. In Unity, that doesn't exist. Or at least if it did, I couldn't figure out a way to trigger it. This was an innate thing too. It was a great way of combating the fact that your enemies now have guns. But again, this is what happens when you develop sequels and follow up games simultaneously, they don't usually have enough time to build off of the other.

Games are supposed to be like building a house. You build the first house, you see how to do stuff, you do weird shit to finagle stuff into working, and then you continue to build it. And then you complete it and look back at a job done. You have people give feedback on the finished product and then you get a new plot of land for your next house. There you are able to take the lessons from your first house to build the new one. You are able to say "I did this in the first house and it didn't go well so i won't do it again" or "people liked this in the first house so I should try to develop this into something better." But when you build two houses at the same time with two different complete dates, you can't really learn anything from the first house that you complete. Or at least not much. It's like that Mr. Bean meme where he's cheating off of the person sitting next to him. Except here, it's the AC Unity Team cheating off of the AC Black Flag Team or AC Rogue Team. And so on back. It just ends with the newest AC game missing awesome features from the prior years game. Thankfully, Ubisoft realized this post AC Syndicate.

And that's what brings me to what I eventually did with Unity. I stopped playing it. I know it feels cheap to say I'm replaying a game but then not finish it. Personally I feel like it's a cop out, but playing Unity was brutal. Sure, the world was amazing, there were some amazing animations and historical moments in the game, but that's not what a game is. A game is about playing. And if you're not having fun playing a game, not having fun at all, you shouldn't keep playing it.

So then I hopped over Syndicate, a game I actually really enjoyed and will probably go back to in another post, and started playing Origins. I played Origins years after it came out initially and it was...fine. I liked it okay. It had better gameplay and some interesting world and story, but nothing jumped out at me. I hadn't played an AC game in a bit when I played it back then so it wasn't as obvious a difference.

Now, let me tell ya, going from playing Unity to Origins is fucking astounding how much better Origins is. The gameplay was so much better, it was responsive, it had complexity, and it still made me feel like a strong ass assassin/medjay. The climbing was so much better, I could climb up cliffs! I could tell Bayek to go a direction and climb up or go down and he would! I know, what a novel concept, a character that actually does what you tell them to do. But since I was coming from Unity, this difference was incredibly stark. I actually felt like I was in a game where the gameplay had the same care put into it that the world did.

Now, there are some other differences between the games, primarily that one is more RPG and Looter than the other, but I don't think that's as important as the core gameplay of an AC game. At the end of the day, all AC games come down to fancy running, climbing, and slashing at people with your weapons. If those three things aren't good, it doesn't matter what else is in the game, it won't feel satisfying to play. Developers spend years on just perfecting their core gameplay loop, it's incredibly important to a successful game.

Origins gets that gameplay loop dead on. The biggest problem I have with it is that not everything needs to have a looter aspect. I get the point, to feel like your leveling up and becoming stronger and getting more powerful and cooler weapons as you level up. I've played 2000 hours of Destiny 2, I know the attraction to that loop. Origins handles it...okay. The core loop is great, and while I wish the weapons were more interesting, I don't think it's as important as having that core loop be good. This is the loop that Ubi would build on with Odyssey a year later and then Valhalla 2 years after that.

Replaying Unity has only made me be more hesitant to replay the older AC games. I adored the Ezio Trilogy and have been wanting to replay them but with my experience with Unity I am apprehensive. I'll probably bite the bullet eventually but I don't know when.

While replaying Origins has just made me more excited for Shadows. If the team is able to have a core loop that is as good as Origins and as Odyssey built on and as Valhalla sorta built on, then the gameplay is gonna be kickass. And it's been 4 years since a mainline AC game, so it'll be interesting to see what new evolutions the team has brought. No matter what though, what I can say is that if you're wanting to replay some Assassin's Creed games, you're gonna get super frustrated with Unity, so maybe just play a couple hours and if it frustrates you as much it did me, just skip it. It's okay. I won't tell.

Meow,

Cat