Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag – Part 3-3
The Assassins clearly don’t want us, so I guess that means it’s back to a life of piracy!
Streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud
Looking back, Black Flag might have been one of the early signals of what Assassin’s Creed was to become, even more so than Assassin’s Creed 3. Although AC3’s open world was overly expansive, encompassing far greater space than earlier games and not doing much with it, the main narrative of the game was clearly the focal point. It was where the player was encouraged to put their focus.
By contrast, it feels almost as if the game would be happier if we focused more on doing side content than interacting with the central narrative. Where the side content in the Ezio games was a distraction that one could indulge in between story beats, here I feel the need to endless justify to myself and the stream audience why I’m not capturing forts or collecting Mayan seals. It feels as by ignoring those activities, I am pulling myself away from the big draw of Black Flag.
In all of the Assassin’s Creed games I’ve played for this channel, this is truly the first time I’ve felt this way. I didn’t realize it at the time, especially since I continued to love this series for several entries after this, but in retrospect this is where the franchise would begin to pivot towards the version of Assassin’s Creed that I dislike, bloated by the need to be full of filler open-world content.
And why wouldn’t it go in this direction? After all, I and most of the people I know considered one of the best games in the series. Why wouldn’t Ubisoft latch onto that?
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