GhostofAnakin

I'm guilty of doing this on websites I make a lot of orders from, but never check the box when it's a site I rarely buy items from.

Finished all the naval and assassin side missions in Black Flag. I'm almost done upgrading the Jackdaw completely. I should probably get back to main mission soon. I've got either 5 or 6 main mission sequences to go.

Black Flag is my favorite Assassin's Creed game by far. Maybe it's just the pirate setting that I enjoy so much, but I'm, having more fun exploring the world in this game than any of the previous games. I've finally upgraded my ship enough that I can take on Man O Wars and not get pimped slapped. So cruising around as a terror of the seas is now really fun.

Did Of Orcs and Men ever get released for the consoles? I remember having my eye on it, but the release date just kept being listed at December 2014.

It is, and it's much better for it, in my opinion. In fact, I wish they had just gutted all the Assassin vs Templar nonsense and made it a straight up pirate game. Yeah, the pirate theme is quite interesting. It's one of the reasons I liked the recent Risen games.

AC: Black Flag seems a lot less focused than past titles. It's always been an open world type style, but so far the main quest seems to be based on nothing more than the main character's desire to make a lot of money. The Templar/Assassin theme seems very, very in the background compared to most games by this point (I'm somewhere in Act 4).

I found the Splinter Cell games more fluid when it came to sneaking up on people and slowly to a crawl after sprinting. That's one of my beefs with the AC games. It wants to be a stealthy type game (sneaking up, assassinations, etc.) but the character movement often makes it difficult.

No matter how advanced these games become, the Assassin's Creed series has never managed to make movement more fluid, especially when it comes to running and scaling. My character has this annoying tendency to jump when I went him to hide behind something. It's hurky and jerky, too, when you're moving forward at a run. The character does this drunken couple of steps before actually stopping.

Bracing doesn't make the ship take less damage, it makes you lose less crew. So essentially it is useless. I can always get more crew when I get back to shore, but seeing my ship's "health meter" go down each time they shoot at me, with no way to fix it without destroying and bordering a ship (which is part of the issue, being able to whittle the other ship down before mine gets whittled down) is frustrating.

The naval missions in AC: Black Flag are just as annoying as I found them in AC III. Worse even, because when the enemy shoots its cannons at me, there's nothing I can do to avoid taking damage. The "brace" button doesn't seem to do a thing. I like the concept, but the execution is lacking, IMO.

Agreed. Maybe I'm just easy to please, but I wouldn't care if BioWare stuck to that formula all the time (which they usually do), so long as their execution works.

Finished Far Cry 4's main story. The campaign seemed kind of disjointed, with not much build up to a lot of the things that happened. The final "fight" was also quite anticlimactic. There are multiple endings, but no way to save multiple save files so I can just see the other endings by loading a late game save. Unless I'm missing something, I have to basically play the entire game again from beginning to end. Solid game, though. I preferred Far Cry 3's main story though. Made more sense, so to speak (even if it went off the rails during the last little bit).

They needed to add more commentary during the radio broadcasts in Far Cry 4. The guy repeats the same dialogue endlessly until you finish another part of the story.

Holy Smoke, that would have completely frustrated me. How many hours did you spend playing the game to the point of the crash? I don't know how many hours. But I do know that I decided to see if I could salvage something by playing around with it. I loaded up the save, told it to restart the level, hoping I could at least salvage the weapon upgrades. Instead I lost the save file too when it crashed again at the same point. Good news is that the game is designed for at least two playthroughs. So I'm doing Wyatt timeline and seeing what's different. Since the crash was reproducible, I've reinstalled it and the update. I can't recall there being any difference between the two timelines, other than the "special" skill each teaches you. Story-wise, I can't remember anything noticeable other than whatever cutscenes you have with that specific character.

Some of the main quests in Far Cry 4 are just dumb. For starters, the wingsuit is clunky and hard to control. So having an entire "escape" level of navigating it through rocks where you die instantly if you collide with them isn't fun. The side quest stuff is just so much better than the stuff you have to do in the main quests. It's like the side quests let you do all the cool stuff, while the main quests are full of the silly little features they added to the game but actually suck.

The main quest pacing in Far Cry 4 seems off to me. I don't know what it is exactly, but it seems that major events happen in each mission with no build up toward it from the previous mission. Also weird is I still can't access the North part of the island even though I've already completed 20 of the 32 main quest missions. It's still an addictive game though. I think I preferred the story from Far Cry 3 though.

What is it about Islam that seems to lend itself more easily toward these extremists? Is it more easily wrongly interpreted (ie. more vague language in the Koran than the Bible or something)? Are the teachings in the Koran more easily twisted to mean something that wasn't intended? I'm genuinely curious why more often than not, these extremists/terrorists seem to be Muslim, as compared to the other religions out there.

Clearly Kim Jun Un is targeting you personally with his current attack.

Far Cry 4 is giving me issue after issue. Now my issue is I can't seem to call hired guns to help me. I can access the option wheel by pressing down on the D-pad, I can highlight the call guns for hire option in the menu, but there is no indication about what to do then. I've pressed every single button and none actually call the guns for hire. And yes, I have tokens. I'm maxed out at 6 tokens (and I've got all 6).

Far Cry 4's main story quests are kind of annoyingly designed. It's basically a free for all where you have to singlehandedly take on wave after wave of enemies. It's why I prefer the side quest missions. You can approach a lot of them different ways.

For me, part of it was there was more consequences for your decisions. Or at least, more *perceived* consequences (as we saw in ME3, those consequences didn't pan out). I also thought the main quest was paced better. DAI's main quest seems to go on its end-run right after the Adamant Fortress/Orlais ball quests, despite the fact we'd only just been introduced to the main villain not long ago (main quest-wise). And, for me, I was more interested in the party members in ME1 than DAI. I wasn't fond of most of the party members, or their backstories.

Uh, yes? I prefer games that I can go back to numerous times, over a game I play for a couple of weeks and then never touch again. Different game, but I played Mass Effect 1 at least a half dozen times (fully), as well as a couple more partial play throughs. So while individually it's a shorter game than Inquisition, I spent more overall time on it because it drew me back in even after I'd completed it. Also, the "twice as long" thing is a bit misleading. The reason for Inquisition's length is because of all the wandering around doing fetch quests you can do. Its main quest was actually shorter than the other two, and the main quest is the one that I tend to judge the game on its replayability for. Did you actually complete all of ME1's sidestuff half a dozen times? Everything but the mineral collection, yes.

Uh, yes? I prefer games that I can go back to numerous times, over a game I play for a couple of weeks and then never touch again. Different game, but I played Mass Effect 1 at least a half dozen times (fully), as well as a couple more partial play throughs. So while individually it's a shorter game than Inquisition, I spent more overall time on it because it drew me back in even after I'd completed it. Also, the "twice as long" thing is a bit misleading. The reason for Inquisition's length is because of all the wandering around doing fetch quests you can do. Its main quest was actually shorter than the other two, and the main quest is the one that I tend to judge the game on its replayability for.

After having digested my play throughs and put the game away for a bit to play something else, I'm coming to the realization that of the three Dragon Age games, this one is the one I have the least interest in playing through again. IMO, it had the weakest main quest story (not that the other two were *great*, but this one seemed so underdeveloped) and I didn't care all that much for the bulk of my companions. The only edge it has over the other two games is the "open world", but even then it's limited because the majority of quests associated with the open world are only solvable one way and once you finish them they're not interesting enough to do again. It's almost like their original plan was to make it strictly a MMO, decided halfway through to change it to SP, but stuck with most of the features already implemented for the MMO. Having said all that, it's not that I disliked[/ it. I did play through twice, after all. It's just in comparison to previous DAs, or even Bio games, it's one of the games I least have interest in playing through multiple times. The only exception may be if Bio comes out with a kick ass DLC/expansion that fleshes out or expands upon the main story.

Doesn't the game have auto-drive? I thought I remember a certain Cynical Brit alluding to as much. It does. But you have to set your destination for it to follow, and it takes straight lines everywhere (even if there's things in the way).