Assassin’s Creed Shadow Has More Disadvantages Than Advantages
After months of turmoil, Assassin’s Creed Shadow has finally met with players. Personally, this Assassin’s Creed has not only not brought many breakthroughs but also has many unreasonable aspects in the game design. Except for the first 10 hours of the game, which can bring some joy, the subsequent game experience can be called torture.
Overall, the entire structure of Assassin’s Creed Shadow is not particularly different from Assassin’s Creed Mythology Trilogy. This game also has a very large map, with more than a dozen small countries. And like Mythology Trilogy, this game also has level suppression. Before your level meets the requirements, rashly stepping into areas that are much higher than your level will make it difficult to move forward.
There is a lot of content in the game. In the first 20 hours, you may find yourself just wandering around the starting area. Shortly after the game started, the number of assassination targets of a football team was displayed. Players who have played “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” should not be unfamiliar with it. It is the way to assassinate members of Cult of Kosmos. This assassination targets support the main process of the game.
The game also arranges a lot of side quests. Thanks to the successful experience of “Ghost of Tsushima” and “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey”, these side quests have also been organized into a series of exquisite quests. Compared with “Ghost of Tsushima” organizing side quests with the task entrustor as the core, Assassin’s Creed Shadow goes the other way and organizes a several series of side quests with the assassination target as the core. This is quite innovative.
However, players may also pick up some quest items by another coincidence without opening the quest chain, or accidentally kill the target that should have been killed after opening the quest chain. In this case, it will feel very inexplicable.
Because in this case, although the entire quest chain is not opened, the player has touched a certain link in the quest chain, and the game still displays the content related to this link as if nothing happened. For example, if the player accidentally assassinates a target, because the task chain is not enabled, the player and the character controlled in the game should have no knowledge of the target. However, after the assassination is successful, the protagonist controlled by the player will directly trigger the voice of the task. This makes the player enter directly in the middle, and the game has no targeted settings at all, and it just displays the content related to this task step by step. Therefore, I think their task design is problematic.
Assassin’s Creed Shadow adds a module similar to the home construction of Valhalla, and home construction requires building materials. In addition, like Mythology Trilogy, the protagonist needs to upgrade equipment or add engravings to equipment, which also requires materials. Where are the materials? The materials are in the big stronghold.
So you are back to the long life of collecting materials in Assassin’s Creed Origins or Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. But this time, Assassin’s Creed Shadow went even further. They added a restriction to the big stronghold, that is, the player character cannot directly take away the building materials in the big stronghold, but can only mark them and wait for the spies sent by the home to smuggle them. There are not many spies. Even if you raise the efficiency and number of spies to the maximum in the home, sending all the spies at once may not be able to take away all the building materials in a large base.
This is not the end. The spies cannot smuggle materials immediately, but have to wait for the season to change. It can only be completed after the season changes. The season change requires players to do two or three tasks, but it seems that it can also be accelerated manually. But in any case, this is an additional restriction.
And there are even worse designs. Many building materials on large bases are stored in the basement of the castle tower or in separate warehouses. To open these storage locations, you need to unlock them, which means you have to get the key first. And changing seasons means changing the locks. Changing the locks means you have to enter the castle tower again and get the new key before you can continue to transport building materials.
I don’t know what to say about this design. I didn’t expect that there would be a more sick design than the endless bases in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey—repeatedly clearing bases.
In addition to large bases, there is another type of task that is also stereotyped. That is collecting book pages in temples. The large strongholds mentioned above are usually castles, so there are garrisons. It is not uncommon to spend an hour assassinating a castle. The situation in temples is generally better. Some of them have hostile personnel, and some can move freely.
In general, Assassin’s Creed Shadow is still the classic Ubisoft game. It is also a canned game with an 8-point score from IGN. Although the scenery is perfect, the many flaws in the game design are hard to ignore.