Blog Archives
Cohesive Game Experience, Part II
In this three-part video series, we’re continuing to talk about cohesive game experience: what is it, why is it important, and how to achieve it.
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Why Dark Souls Should Have an Easy Mode
We’re going to talk about the nature of difficulty levels and difficulty scaling, and how that should apply to hardcore games like Dark Souls.
Thanks for watching! Feel free to leave any comments below! 🙂
And if you’d like, consider supporting my work on Patreon! Thank you very much!
Characterization Through Mechanics
In this video, we’ll talk about the importance of mechanics in adding depth and personality to characters in games on example of Thomas Was Alone and few other games, and what things we need to take into account when adding or reusing mechanics in the games we make.
Thanks for watching! Feel free to leave any comments below! 🙂
And if you’d like, consider supporting my work on Patreon! Thank you very much!
The Hero’s Journey of Brothers
Welcome back to this 2-part post series about the Hero’s Journey. In this post, I’m going to talk about the game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and how Vogler’s rework of Campbell’s structure is applied to it. Please note that I’ll reference the previous post about Journey a lot, so please read it beforehand 🙂 That said, let’s continue.
Why Assassin’s Creed series isn’t social stealth, and what to do about that?
So this is going to be my last Assassin’s Creed blog-post for a considerable while. I think I will write about the movie when it comes out, but don’t expect to see any Assassin’s Creed content until the release of the next big console title. That said, there will be articles about other games (so keep checking my site if you’re interested in it!), and this post is going to be a big one. I am very fond of the Assassin’s Creed series, as you probably have guessed. I’ve been interested in it ever since I saw its reveal in 2006. So what I’m going to say might raise eyebrows, WTFs, and other confusion among the fan community, but I think it’s a topic that should be discussed. Assassin’s Creed is not, and has never been, a social stealth game or series.
Assassin’s Creed: Rogue and Good Open-World Collectibles
Assassin’s Creed: Rogue is a curious beast. I don’t think it offers a well-put narrative, main campaign, or a cohesive overall experience. And the implementation of Assassin turned Templar concept is underwhelming at best. It does, however, offer some amazing side-content. It’s an Assassin’s Creed game where you just enjoy travelling around the world, exploring, and completing very well-designed side missions and activities. Including getting quite a lot of collectibles, which is the main topic of my today’s post.
The Disunity of Assassin’s Creed: Unity
I talked quite a bit on the topic of cohesive wholesome open-world experiences on examples of Assassin’s Creed, from the positive examples of Brotherhood and Black Flag, to a somewhat more incoherent example of Revelations. But today I want to talk about an example of cohesiveness lacking at all, which can’t be fixed by removing some elements or features or polishing it up.
There’s some Assassin’s Creed games that I could use as examples. There’s Rogue that’s indecisive about what it wants to be as it mixes the Assassin and Templar experiences in various degrees of success. There’s Assassin’s Creed III which was so ambitious that in the end quite a lot of different parts of the game ended up somewhat lacking. But the game that I want to focus on for this topic is Assassin’s Creed: Unity.
Black Flag’s narrative theming in gameplay
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag at the moment of writing this post is my most favourite game of the franchise. It’s just so well-crafted, from mission design to narrative, world, how it all connects together. And maybe it doesn’t fix all the flaws inherited from other games (like the still very easy combat system), but as I’ve mentioned a couple times before, it’s not a barrier for some amazing experience and in my opinion Black Flag delivers it. The game is really a ’Best of Assassin’s Creed’ collection, combining all the strengths of previous titles in one cohesive package. But today I want to talk about the narrative themes of the game, as well as how they connect to gameplay.
Game Opinion – Assassin’s Creed: Liberation
I don’t really have anything in-depth to say about Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, but since in my current blog post series I write something based on every Assassin’s Creed console title to date, might as well write an opinion piece for this game. In short, I don’t like it, and it’s probably the only Assassin’s Creed game to which I react mostly negatively.
Stanislav Costiuc 