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Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag – Part 4-4

I’ve maintained that the tailing missions are some of the best parts of Assassin’s Creed. Surely Black Flag won’t try to prove me wrong, right?

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There’s something about the way the terrain and the guard placement for these missions come together in both this and the previous tailing mission that detracts from the overall experience. There are simply too many ways for the guards to spot us and not enough hiding spots to keep out of sight as we move toward our objectives.

Because previous games took place in large cities like Venice, with large buildings, it was much harder for guards on rooftops to spot us on ground level. Generally, they existed as obstacles to keep players off the rooftops and weren’t very applicable to the ground game. But here, they’re low enough to the ground that they can spot us from their vantage point, making them far more irritating to deal with.

I have a dreadful suspicion that a large reason why tailing missions became so maligned was that they began to get worse around this time, because I do not recall having anywhere near this many issues with them when I replayed the Ezio games.