![]() ![]() ![]() Underwater, anything aside from air or your objective really has to be worth that extra time, because taking too long will kill you. ![]() No matter how urgent your task is, you can almost always stop to grab that one extra collectible or head back to the town from your previous task to pick up that extra side quest. Open world games often encourage slow, methodical exploration even in the middle of missions. With that in mind, my time with ACIV’s underwater world took on a whole new sense of urgency that even the most intense combat aboveground has never quite achieved. Edward leaves his ship in a diving bell that lets him take that one last deep, long, terrifying breath before he plunges beneath the sea, and occasional wooden structures offer the tiny bits of air he so desperately needs as he traverses the ocean floor in search of treasure. Expanding the open world of Assassin’s Creed IV into the water offers plenty of hazards - the sharks, the piranhas, the stingrays, the jellyfish – but it’s still the lack of air that’s your greatest threat. Even with the knowledge that I can respawn, I hold my breath in real life and hope I haven’t crossed that point where my precious air is almost gone, when I’m so far down that unless I find a source of oxygen there’s no way I’ll make it back to the surface, when I know my character will drown before he ever has a chance to save the princess or destroy the villain or save the president or find his daughter. In games, that translates to intense anxiety whenever my character starts to get too deep. Fortunately, Black Flag’s adventures take a decidedly more interesting turn out on the open seas… - Ryan McCaffrey Campaign on the High SeasBeing underwater has always made me nervous. Various other open-world random encounters pop up every now and again – such as a fleeing courier I football tackled in order to steal his loot – but ultimately the rescuing men at sea and metal cargo scavenger hunt so that I could upgrade the hull armor of the Jackdaw felt like tedious errands that needed to be run. One carefully aimed gunshot at the rope later, he was spared and all that remained was for me to dispatch with his now-really-ticked-off captors. A potential pal was hanging for dear life at the wrong end of a noose. Meanwhile, the second was similar and equally exciting. The other, though, appreciated that he owed me his existence and agreed to join my humble crew. I whiffed on my initial attack and it cost one of the men his life. The first saw a bad guy about to execute a pair of bound, kneeling pirates. Two of the encounters were decidedly more heroic. It was the former that kept pinging on my radar (side note: how many damn fights can even pirates get into, anyway? Hockey players must’ve evolved from pirates.), as one after another I’d make a beeline for the indicated hotspot, jump into a fight, stab a few opponents, and earn another small lot of hired hands to sail with. I was told I could either hire them or win their service in exchange for helping them. Case in point: at the start of my Sequence adventure, I had to recruit a 14-man pirate crew for the Jackdaw while on an island port stop. Sure, the art direction and geography conveys a great sense of scale and location (playing on the PS4 sure didn’t hurt, either) and the open-seas stuff gets downright tense (as Goldfarb will cover below), but the actual thread that pulls you through the Sequence seemed a bit lacking in weight and intensity. I spent a couple of hours sailing, roaming island ports, and platforming, and a lot of the time it simply felt like an endless series of time-filling fetch quests. Fortunately, it’s just one small slice of the campaign and so I remain optimistic, but for me, thar be murky waters ahead, matey. And this is coming from someone who loved Assassin’s Creed II, skipped the rest of the Ezio Trilogy, and was turned off by the opening hours of AC III. We got a look at each unique facet of the game and made it home scurvy-free to report our findings.Ĭampaign on LandI played all of Sequence 03 in Black Flag and I must admit: I liked it, but I didn’t love it. Odds are, the full day we recently spent playing Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is the last crack at the pirate-y Templar adventure we’ll get before we review the final version this month. ![]()
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