When we last left off, the game rudely interrupted me by crashing just before we escaped from our first successful assassination. So before we can proceed, we’ll need to perform the hit just one more time.
During the last recording, we experienced an issue where whenever we performed a Leap of Faith at a Viewpoint in the Kingdom, we would die 100% of the time instead of safely landing in a bail of hay. As it turned out, stream chat was correct and it is a frame rate issue. Turning on VSync fixed it, as you saw in the episode above.
Having said that, there’s a delightful irony in retrospect. This open world Kingdom region is easily the weakest area of the game, and yet it will became one of the most defining aspects of the franchise going forward, since Ubisoft doubled down on it. If anything, Assassin’s Creed would grow to become the blueprint for the “standard Ubisoft open world” that repeated itself across multiple franchises, including both Far Cry and Watch_Dogs among others.
Admittedly, other factors were at play. Not only was the formula new, but there was a desire to make use of all the processing power that was afforded to development teams thanks to the new consoles, the PS3 and the 360. Making “bigger” playable zones was one such way of doing that, so many games at the time became open world.
It’s hard to call that a “mistake” given how wildly successful Assassin’s Creed was and still is, but I can’t help but wonder what that alternate reality would have looked like where they cut the open world and created a more focused play space.
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