But its worth looking at where people are coming from with their criticisms. It's not about hating the game because it's AssCreed or even wanting it to be just like Ghost or whatever. It's critizing the game because it's just straight up a regression in several ways from prior titles, some even from the same studio. The game shows a frankly insane lack of iteration on what worked well in prior games, instead feeling more like a structural building on of Mirage in some ways, with no attention to the fact that Mirage was a 12 hour almost-DLC, as if the only thing Ubisoft can iterate on is just whatever came out most recently with no thought to the broader context and needs of the product.
Like straight up some of my first posts in this thread were breathlessly effusive praise. Several hours and a good few targets later and I finally get what people mean when they say Ubislop.
It's probably the most junk food asscreed game Ubisoft has ever made. Just a plethora of largely thoughtless, invariant copy paste objectives on the level that hasn't been seen since the pre-RPG games but perhaps even worse. Why structure story beats around recurring characters when you can just have the player do disconnected objectives over and over again? Why ask the player to experience variety in the world when you can have them collect the same 3 pieces of paper over and over again to uncap an arbitrary progression limit? Why populate the world with interesting side stories when you can just give the player 5 more targets to kill, or a guy who wants you to kill 100 bandits? Shit's ridiculous when you look at sth like Rise of the Ronin, the first open world game from a developer, and it has more variety in its activities and characters, not to mention bespoke quest chains for basically every person you meet. Even Odyssey did this.
When Valhalla came out I played that, looked at reviews that were 8/10 and thought "surely you must be joking". Having played Shadows it makes Valhalla look like Witcher 3 or some shit.
Honestly, not counting spinoffs, I think there's an argument to be made that Shadows is amongst the worst games in the franchise in a change sense. To the table it brings a semi decent stealth experience, which you will experience in a series of never-evolving, generally samey locations. It brings combat that's still at least 5-10 years behind its contemporaries. It brings an ill-conceptualized dual protagonist system. The only thing that's really best in class is the visual and to a lesser extent auditory presentation, and even there the procedural animation systems and cutscene direction is all over the place, at points even more jarring than the prior RPG titles. In exchange it guts sidequests to perhaps an even greater degree than Valhalla, it guts any kind of forward momentum in its story structure you could find in Origins, it even guts a lot of the nitty gritty RPG stuff from Odyssey with the gross simplication of gear, choice and builds, and even the social stealth from the earlier titles is finally gone.
This isn't even getting into how the unguided mode is garbage compared the relatively elegant eagle and devolves into running around holding the trigger and looking for white dots. Or the quest log equivalent is needlessly convoluted and requires re-engaging every step of the way. Or how you have allies that can assist you...but the character you're not playing as can't?
Heck it's almost laughable how little Ubi Quebec learned from even Syndicate. Syndicate's problem was that you were forced to play as Jacob for the bulk of missions. Shadow's problem is that you're basically never gonna want to play anything that isn't a combat-amenable mission as Yasuke because navigation as him is shit and character changing is slower than it needs to be. So instead of mandating an imbalance they basically structure the world to force it on the player. The unique obstacles that Yasuke can deal with are a hilarious token gesture towards the awareness of this inadequacy.
Bleh. Ubisoft had a chance to knock it out of the park with Japan and the result is largely wasted potential. Honeymoon phase is over, and I doubt the game is going to be remembered particularly fondly. If the game didn't look as insanely good as it did this would have landed in the low 70s.
der Anfang is immer polished as fuck
