I’m about 2 hours in and really like the game. The prologue’s snowy environment is beautiful, with nice mountain vistas and breathtaking night skies once the aurora lights it up. I’m playing on medium difficulty and it does feel a bit easy though… But so far I’m liking the direction they took and it will dethrone Origins as my favourite AC game to date.
Oh, and the game is truly stunning on ultra. It runs well enough with all settings maxed out on a GTX1080 and Ryzen 7 3700x, averaging 58fps. If I tweak some non-essential settings I’m sure I can break the 60fps mark comfortably.
I’m also impressed by how well the game is optimised. Using the game’s benchmark tool I get an average of 50FPS with most things on high, but I dropped volumetric clouds and shadows to medium and turned off motion blur.
One thing I think Ubisoft must be commended on is the amount of options this game offers. Everything from the graphic settings, accessibility options and even allowing you to customise different parts of the difficulty individually. You can put the combat on a higher difficulty but put stealth on easy or whatever you fancy. All games should have extensive options like this.
Part of me is morbidly curious to find out what the text will be changed to.
Another part of me is petrified because I’m no longer sure I understand the world I inhabit. Perhaps the world has passed me by? Is this opinion so undisputed that it’s obvious to everyone but me (including Ubisoft) that indeed a great, “unacceptable” offense has been perpetrated?
For what it’s worth, there are also respectful dissenting opinions on Twitter. It was encouraging to see.
I also don’t enjoy watching SkillUp, but I love me a dissenting opinion.
For the longest time it felt like true diversity of opinion in the major games media was extremely lacking.
In other media, like movies for example, there was a far broader range of opinions. I’d often see the likes of Roger Egbert and Barry Ronge give reviews that conflicted with those of their contemporaries.
Sometimes I’d see more “controversial” opinions on certain games at Quarter to Three, but dissenting opinions on games seemed to be much harder to come by than for movies.
Part of the problem, of course, is that games journalists could easily get blacklisted for giving a game a negative review.
Movies don’t have this problem because you don’t really need early access to movies to be able to publish a review on launch day. Movie studios also don’t base people’s remuneration / bonuses on how well a movie gets reviewed, as far as I know.
The wave of “new new media” on YouTube and Twitch really seems to have done wonders for diversity of opinion in games media.
Of course, not every opinion is worth listening to (everyone has one, as Dirty Harry says). There’s a lot of noise out there and the responsibility to filter out the signal has now shifted onto each individual (with mixed results), but it’s great to have some diversity of signal to filter through! (If you’ll pardon my mixed metaphors.)
I’m more inclined to try out a game that divides critics / journalist than I am one that gets universal praise.
One of my favourite games from the PS3 generation was Dead to Rights Retribution and its scores range from 80 all the way down to 30 and it ended up with a Metacritic score of 60.
Incidentally the 80 score came from Game Informer, who I usually agree with.
There should be more reason. It’s closer in feel to Origins currently than it is to Odyssey. At least the first 3 hours I’v played so far. Origins was great, while Odyssey felt like boring legwork.
I quite enjoyed Syndicate though… Much more so than Odyssey. I didn’t play either all that much though - probably only around 10-15 hours each. Origins was the first AC I ever completed and Valhalla seems like it would be the second.
