What I would change in Assassin's Creed Origins

[PZ]

First, allow missions to be replayed like in some of the prior games. However, I realize UBI*bleep* does not want the ability to replay games because that would mean that you would not quickly purchase another. I would love to replay some of the difficult huge fort areas with literally a couple dozen or more guards.

There are a few boat missions like in Black Flag. I think these should be optional missions rather than part of the main quest line. The main reason I did not finish Black Flag is the boat fighting, which I found to be nothing more than run and gun and try to keep from being sunk. The only races in the game are the chariot races, which are completely optional. I have not done a single one of those, and that has prevented me from becoming annoyed with the game.

I do not like at all the game forcing you to play as Bayek's wife in part of the main quest line, who has developed none of the skills you have accumulated along the way, and only carries a basic sword and bow. The game forces you into some difficult battles with nothing but a level 30-ish character with no real weapons of significance.  However, at least they are normal missions rather than those nasty boss events. A better way would be to halt the game at a crucial point and give the gamer the option of continuing as Bayek, or playing a harder game as his wife.

[Art Blade]

there are more games that force you to play as a different and at the time weaker, not customisable character. The Witcher 3 immediately springs to mind. I don't like that much, either. However, it made sense as in that case, they allowed the player to be an active part in what happened to that particular female character rather than resorting to long narrative cutscenes. And it was actually a part of a story rather than just showing off sea warfare and battle mechanics borrowed from a previous iteration. To me, in AC:O it didn't seem to be necessary or really helping the story, it was too short an interlude and you barely had time to learn the mechanics properly to be able to have actually fun playing it.

And I don't like a game design that forces you to go forward all the time so replaying it would be only repetitive and not offer any new perspectives or different approaches.

Boss fights (particularly against fantasy monsters) are so retro that I don't get why they keep doing stupid stuff like that in an environment that otherwise is so believable. AC:O would have been great already, without that nonsense. But no, they had to ruin the whole idea of ancient Egypt.

[PZ]

You're correct - playing as Bayek's wife was more of a flippant decision in the cut scenes. Words to the effect: "I'll go do it" to which was replied "No, I can go this time". Utter nonsense. The only advantage is that the story does make you wonder what his wife is like.  A better way would to be to have given her even more level experience (or at least the same level) so that it leaves the gamer wanting even more rather than feeling relieved that being demoted 10 levels is finally over.

I still find the free roam and side missions the best in any game I have played, and thankfully they comprise most of the game.  I've played through twice now, and the experience I gained in prior game play has shaped how I now go through the world.

[fragger]

I don't know why so many games insist on having boss fights. I guess it's a relatively cheap and nasty way of making a game more "challenging". But geez, they've been doing that sort of thing for about a quarter of a century. Boss fights suck. Enough already

[Art Blade]

Boss fights were essentially the only way of making a game harder to play, back in the days of the Commodore C64 when memory and (floppy) disk space was extremely limited. They didn't have the space to tell large stories or to make the game difficult by other means. All they could do was to inflate a sprite (yeah, yeah.. sprites were animated characters and items) and give it more health points and more damage and more speed so the player had to fight hard to get to the end. Now? There is no bloody reason nor any excuse for that retro *bleep* in modern games.

[fragger]

True, mate Heh, the venerable Commodore 64. That was my first computer, and was the inspiration for me to learn programming as it had the BASIC language built into it. BASIC is still a cool programming language even in this day and age of advanced object-oriented programming languages. There was a form of BASIC for the Commodore Amiga (which I later had one of) called AMOS Basic. It was a fully-developed BASIC, but had several hundred additional commands which were specifically created to take advantage of the Amiga's unique sound and graphical capabilities (which were actually way ahead of anything available for PCs at the time, utilizing parallel processing in a foreshadowing of future PC GPU technology. The visual effects of the TV series Babylon 5 were all generated on an Amiga-based system). It was just terrific, was a breeze to use, and had an excellent editor. I even wrote a couple of games in that language back in the day, including my own computer version of Monopoly (for up to 4 players) that dumped on anything available for PCs at the time, even if I do say so myself. It was so easy to incorporate your own graphics into it. I've never found anything remotely like it for PCs.

I digress. There are games around today that prove that boss fights are totally unnecessary. In the FPS category, I think a breakout example was Half-Life 2 (not HL1, which did have a boss fight at the end, and I hated it). Valve raised the FPS bar with the original Half-Life, then took it up a few more notches with HL2. The climax of HL2 didn't involve a giant, levitating, baby-like alien being but instead required you to bring down a human opponent by taking out the technological doo-dads that supported his bid for escape after you'd taken out his defensive infrastructure.

Wonderful game that, despite it's age and linearity. You know, I still have that on Steam. Maybe after my current jaunt through FO4 I might even DL it again for old times' sake Last time I DL'ed it I had a crappy net connection and it took frigging ages to come down. Should only take an hour or two to DL it now.

[Art Blade]

 

I started with a Sinclair ZX81 and went on with the C64. I remember having to wait until I had enough money to buy the floppy disk drive which back then costed (using today's currency) around US$ 800. For a floppy disk drive!

I skipped the Amiga and the X286 and continued with my first PC, an X386. When I went to the only computer store that actually had PCs and spare parts (the other few stores were for enterprises and small businesses and the guys in the business stores put on a face as if I was asking complete rubbish when I told them I needed a PC for gaming.) I remember I bought a graphics card Tseng Labs ET3000 and a Soundblaster card so I could play games. PC game shops were regarded almost as if they were some adult sex shops and people would shake their heads if you told them that you used your PC for gaming. It was better to keep your mouth shut around anyone who wasn't a gamer themselves. Well, ever since, I have gone through mostly every step in the history of PC hardware until today.

[PZ]

We certainly have come a long way in the PC world. My first was the original IBM PC which I purchased with 2 5.25" floppy drives and 256K of memory which I upgraded to 640K. Hard drives were not available at the time.

There was a kind of office suite containing PFS Write, PFS Plan (spreadsheet), and PFS File (database). To get them to run, I'd created a batch file to create a ramdisk, upload all the program into that ramdisk, and then put in a separate floppy for the data. All of this happened within the 640K memory limit. Man, those were primitive days. Assembly language was my first introduction into programming, then Basic, and finally visual Pascal (Borland's Delphi).

My first video game that I actually liked was the old original Wolfenstein (DOS) in which I was able to create level maps as my first gaming mod. However, even in that game there was a ridiculous boss at the end of the game. 

If I want something challenging, I'll go outside and build a deck - the last thing I want in what should be entertainment is something that boils my blood.

[Art Blade]