The more time passes, the more disappointed I get in AC2 | Forums

[ze_topazio]

Like I keep telling people, REPLAY AC:2. It wasn't the 10/10 masterpiece of the franchise like people keep saying it is. I'm glad I'm not the only one here who can see it's true value and not parade it with praises for the heck of it.

AC:2 was a good game, but was it the best sequel of the Assassin's Creed franchise? Not at all. It felt more like another add-on to the milking of the Ezio Trilogy.

I did, still like it as much.

[jdowny]

Like I keep telling people, REPLAY AC:2. It wasn't the 10/10 masterpiece of the franchise like people keep saying it is. I'm glad I'm not the only one here who can see it's true value and not parade it with praises for the heck of it.

AC:2 was a good game, but was it the best sequel of the Assassin's Creed franchise? Not at all. It felt more like another add-on to the milking of the Ezio Trilogy.

Woah there - I still think it's a spectacular game. And how can it feel like an add-on to the Ezio trilogy when it was the first of three? Although I absolutely love the first game, AC II still reigns for me because it was a successful cohesion of gameplay, navigation, setting, time period, story and music. It delivered on all fronts where the original game was lacking. To me, there hasn't been another AC game that has developed so much and so successfully from a previous one.

It's hard though to judge games, or anything for that matter. Do you judge based on how it was for you at the time? Or judge how it stands up years later when it's a bit old, a bit weathered and you might be getting bored of the whole thing?

[Be1dou]

Compared with Revelations, AC3 and AC4? No.

Sure, it wasn't perfect, not by a long shot, but it was the best.

Fixed.

You can say it's enjoyable because it really was, but that doesn't change the fact that besides the modern day parts which is 5% of the game, story, gameplay, and add-ons offered nothing to the Assassin's Creed franchise. You were running around pirating more than you had with AC:IV. The stealth was mostly scripted and instead of giving players freedom, the game keeps sending Ezio either into a scripted fights, chases, or escapes with a few puzzles here in there to mask it. And the story didn't have Ezio become an Assassin until sequence 13, and unlike AC:IV, you only had 1 mission as an Assassin and they never touched on the Assassin's Creed.

[TheHumanTowel]

Like I keep telling people, REPLAY AC:2. It wasn't the 10/10 masterpiece of the franchise like people keep saying it is. I'm glad I'm not the only one here who can see it's true value and not parade it with praises for the heck of it.

AC:2 was a good game, but was it the best sequel of the Assassin's Creed franchise? Not at all. It felt more like another add-on to the milking of the Ezio Trilogy.

AC2 was the first game Ezio was in. How could it possibly feel like a milking add-on to the Ezio trilogy?

[Be1dou]

Woah there - I still think it's a spectacular game. And how can it feel like an add-on to the Ezio trilogy when it was the first of three? Although I absolutely love the first game, AC II still reigns for me because it was a successful cohesion of gameplay, navigation, setting, time period, story and music. It delivered on all fronts where the original game was lacking. To me, there hasn't been another AC game that has developed so much and so successfully from a previous one.

It's a spectacular game, no doubt, but as I've said, it didn't touch too much on anything of the series other than it's title, it's setting, and adding to it's original mechanics. For me, AC:3 had all of said appeal. And so did ACB, AC:R, AC:IV and AC:L.

It's hard though to judge games, or anything for that matter. Do you judge based on how it was for you at the time? Or judge how it stands up years later when it's a bit old, a bit weathered and you might be getting bored of the whole thing?

I'm judging it as a whole since I've had fuzzy memories of it so I had to replay the entire saga again.. People have this weird rating of what's an Assassin's Creed game and what's not since AC:IV. IMO, AC:2 is a great game, but it's nowhere close to the Assassin's Creed game people are praising it for.

Don't get me wrong, I LIKE AC:2, but I'm open to its faults. Especially when the fanbase is at the point of targeting sequels' integrity.

AC2 was the first game Ezio was in. How could it possibly feel like a milking add-on to the Ezio trilogy?

Let me reword that. -- AC:2 is part of the milking. Brotherhood and Revelations are not alone.

[Rugterwyper32]

As per usual, Farlander, I find myself agreeing with your opinion. You had previously made some good points regarding the historical part (mostly the storyline during the Venice section).
Admittedly, though, it falls short for me from the one thing that damaged the game the most for me: No replaying main missions. To date, it's the AC game I go back to the least simply because of that one fact. I have no clue what made them think that was a good decision or why they didn't patch that option in, even AC1 had a way of replaying sequences from the game, why not AC2? It's still a fantastic game, but that one decision was baffling. Oh, and making a good part of Ezio's character development into DLC. That one was bad too. Still a great game that pushed the series forward, but come on.

[TheHumanTowel]

Let me reword that. -- AC:2 is part of the milking. Brotherhood and Revelations are not alone.

That doesn't make any sense. Ubisoft didn't know how Ezio would be received before they released AC2. How could they be milking the character in the very first piece of media he was introduced in?

[LoyalACFan]

1. NOTHING happens in the modern day main Assassin vs. Templar and their satellite plotline. A whole game developed for two years, and we only have escape from Abstergo and a few dialogs with secondary characters (that for the most part have nothing to do with said plotline), plus bleeding effect getting worse (but that, alongside the 'training to become an Assassin' doesn't need anything specific for it to happen). The plotline itself does not receive ANY progression. Not only that, but at the end of the game we're suddenly introduced to the second main plotline via a plot twist. People may argue how ACB, ACR, ACIII and the parallel development have ****ed things up in modern day story department. I won't necessarily disagree. But, honestly, the 'no plotline progression but inclusion of a new plotline' AC2 to me is the cause.

I agree that AC2 was slow on the modern side, but really, so was AC1. There was a lot more modern content in it than AC2, but much of it was backstory and world-building (i.e. the emails and Lucy conversations). The only thing that really changed over the course of the story was that you found out Lucy was on your side, which they later retconned anyway. At the end, you're still an Abstergo hostage, with nothing much having progressed outside the Animus.

2. Subject 16's puzzles that connect tons of historical events and people to the Assassin vs. Templar conflict. Even back when AC2 was released I thought that maybe they went a little bit overboard with making so many things directly connected to said conflict. But, you know, it's still acceptable. But it feels like this has set up a trend where soon enough you can't find anything that doesn't have direct connection to Assassins/Templars, even the backstory of a fictional character (Edward got the farm he lived in burned due to a Templar plot, long before he went to the Caribbean and actually met Templars, seriously?!)

I'm not so sure that it set a precedent in that regard... AC3 actually capitalized on our assumptions that Templars are behind every bad thing ever in history, and let us assume (with Connor) that CHARLZLEE was behind the village burning. They botched the whole twist by having Connor stay friends with Washington, but the concept was there.

3. Ezio's story has no connection to the modern day plotline until the very last twist.

I actually preferred this. Later games have struggled to make grand connections between the ancestor and modernity, often to the point that it feels forced. ACR and AC4 especially felt like they were really trying too hard to connect the two. The Sync Nexus and the Observatory seemed really contrived to me.

Besides, they actually did specify in AC2 why they were reliving Ezio's memories; towards the end of Clay's life, he became obsessed with Italy. Sure, Lucy didn't explain it until like halfway through the game in that garage "training" scene, and even then I don't think she explained the full story about Clay being descended from Ezio. But they knew that the Assassins found something big in Renaissance Italy, and they had a guy (Desmond) who was descended from the most important Assassin of that era, so they had a golden opportunity to explore that. It made sense to me.

4. And while not AC2's fault directly, the thing with AC2's 23 years of life, the prequel movie, the following Ezio spin-offs and the final animation short have all played a role in trend and expectation that annoys me a lot lately - that being the expectation to see every main character's full life story. And you know, nowadays that's a fair expectation because there was precedent. But I really wish that there wasn't one.

Agreed, setting the precedent of viewing an ancestor's life up until their death was a bad move, but as you said, that was more ACB/ACR's fault than AC2's.

I've said it before, and I'll stand by it; if AC2 had decent combat and replayable memories, it would still be my favorite AC.

[Be1dou]

That doesn't make any sense. Ubisoft didn't know how Ezio would be received before they released AC2. How could they be milking the character in the very first piece of media he was introduced in?

They didn't just started making AC:B and AC:R after AC:2. They already had the Trilogy concept in mind during production of AC:2.

[LoyalACFan]

They didn't just started making AC:B and AC:R after AC:2. They already had the Trilogy concept in mind during production of AC:2.

No, not at all. The events of Brotherhood were meant to be a part of AC2. It wasn't until VERY late in the development cycle that they decided to branch it off into its own game. And Revelations was going to be a Nintendo DS spinoff until early 2011; there was no plan for an Ezio trilogy until that point.

I think the "trilogy" thing you might be thinking of is the fact that the whole series was supposed to be a trilogy. One Altair game, one Ezio game, one somebody-else-who-wasn't-designed-at-that-point game, and bam, end of franchise.