I think people will believe whatever the gaming press tells them, they try to act like free thinkers but they're fucking automatons, last year it was Ubisoft was broken, this year it's they're trying to improve. Anybody who has been playing each iteration of the Assassin's Creed games and should see that Syndicate shares a lot of the problems Unity had. That in itself is a challenging thing because most people talked shit about Unity without a clue what was wrong with it, probably the most brought up thing was releasing a buggy game (due to another case of Nvidia GameWorks PC port sabotage backfiring... consoles ran fine), the other backlash came from the "microtransactions", which if anybody knew how they worked wouldn't be too upset since one has to play the game just to unlock the ability to use hack points (currency bought with real money) to acquire to weapons, defeating the utility of using hack points to begin with... anyhow...
Just like Unity, Syndicate is very disengaged from the idea of a modern Templars (Abstergo) fight with modern Assassins. Syndicate, just like Unity, also suffers from lack of fluidity with traversing the landscape, unresponsive controls, a shit combat system that has truly become a button spammer (previous entries encouraged rhythmic attacking versus sloppy attacking, character leveling system is very similar to Unity's in that it feels like competitive MP character leveling up in an SP game instead of like in previous games making the mechanics available early and making leveling up just an issue of getting better gear, usually just requiring players to get more money to buy it all instead of completing very specific circumstances. They scaled back Unity's crowds which baffles me as it hasn't seemed to improve load times. Load times weren't even an issue for me, it was the reasons I had to sit through them, dying because they gimped the main player to promote the stupid leveling system. If they had kept the solid combat they could have had the huge crowds and long load times and I'd of not worried as I wouldn't be dying constantly. The joy of the combat isn't surviving, it's doing it and trying to look like an utter badass, and the sheer spectacle of the game. So, make people want to do that, set up 100% synchronization with thoughtful and challenging and enjoyable objectives, not painstakingly frustrating in a shallow attempt to add challenge to it.
The only things Syndicate seemed to address are really basic. They brought back corner whistling, something they took out of Unity probably to create more challenge. They took out stupid companion app for special chests. They added a female protagonist because of lack of female MP characters creating negative reaction. They got rid of MP overall to focus on the SP (yeah right). They cut down on crowds to maybe ever-so-slightly improve on load times. They released it in a less glitchy state (probably real reason why they ditched MP). On the surface; that's it. That's just some of what was wrong with Unity but there's way more than that, like the stuff mentioned in the above paragraph.
No, Syndicate is every bit as bad as Unity was, it's just popular to say otherwise, and people are quite willing to conform with the opinions of others when they're not in a position to add anything relevant to the discussion.
That all being said, I rather like the game when I don't feel in a rush to completing various tasks like a checklist, and just sit back and soak in the scenery. For that, they still do that exceptionally well, but that's about it. Would have looked cooler with bigger crowds though.
Log in to comment