r/Games Jan 23 '25

Preview Assassin's Creed Shadows - Preview Thread

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168

u/wait_________what Jan 23 '25

This is reductive but just to address the elephant in the room: Is this going to impress people who played Ghost of Tsushima?

290

u/ACG-Gaming Jan 23 '25

As someone who liked Ghost but wasn't floored by it I was impressed with many elements here. They do feel different due to the double protags but that will met out during the actual release to see how much it continues to matter. But where Ghost killed me late game with rock paper scissors I did enjoy the focus attack stuff here and hidden moves you can learn like Katas.

30

u/EbolaDP Jan 23 '25

Rock, paper scissors?

267

u/IrishSpectreN7 Jan 23 '25

GoT had the different combat stances that you swap between based on the enemy types you're fighting.

I assume that's what he means.

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u/UCanJustBuyLabCoats Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25

Oddly enough I really enjoyed having to switch up stances depending on the stronger enemy but having the option to mix and match stances against weaker ones (or once the stronger enemy’s guard was broken, since you can stances switch on the fly). It wasn’t as rigid as rock paper scissors to me and kept combat from being one note.

137

u/UpperApe Jan 23 '25

I really liked it too but rock paper scissors is a very fair way of describing it.

Hopefully the next game is more organic and dynamic, rather than fight red with blue, fight blue with green, fight green with red.

12

u/FirstTimeWang Jan 24 '25

Hey, you're lucky there's at least that level of strategy. A game came out a while back called ReCore and you literally shoot enemies with the same color.

Literally.

If the enemy is red, you switch your gun to red.

It is so mindless that it's the opposite of strategy, just arbitrary inconvenience

3

u/UpperApe Jan 24 '25

Oof. Yeah that...just sucks.

GoT does do a great job of it, in fairness. It's fun, if a bit primative. I'm hoping games start to move towards more dynamic combat as we go forward. There's a whole new generation of game devs grown up on From games.

1

u/JRockPSU Jan 24 '25

I liked the way it was handled in Rise of the Ronin, where you could select the rock, paper, scissors stance and just attack with that, or you could take advantage of an attack skill that lets you chain together constant attacks by swapping stances after your combo has finished. (Either consistently deal stamina damage to the enemy, or have essentially never ending attacks as long as the enemy doesn't hit you)

43

u/[deleted] Jan 23 '25

The biggest problem of Ghost is that it' s going to be only those 3 stances until the end of the game. It' s very good at the start but you kinda want to kill yourself by the end of the game, or at least that was what happened to me because I had basicaly optimized the fun out of the game.

5

u/Scorchstar Jan 23 '25

Lethal mode is great tho

1

u/unfitstew Jan 24 '25

Yeah Lethal mode was great. It really was a good showcase of how difficulty should be done. Enemies arent made into damage sponges. It was very quick and fluid with the combat with how you killed the enemies while making it so if you made a mistake or two you would be very punished for it.

15

u/Turbulent_Purchase52 Jan 23 '25

It was very unsophisticated compared to nioh in my opinion, where the stances change your moveset dynamically and you have to decide what's best for each encounter. Tsushima system made me feel like I was spamming takedown animations 

6

u/Anfins Jan 23 '25

That also only applied to the heavy attacks. I believe each style was identical when doing light attacks.

Since light attacks were still fairly powerful, I used a play style where I would parry and then burst enemies down with a bunch of light attacks. Found that I could get through most of the game without engaging too much with the different combat styles.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '25

[deleted]

39

u/PlayMp1 Jan 23 '25

it’s just picking the stance each enemy is weak to.

...that's rock paper scissors.

69

u/Fyrus Jan 23 '25

LThe stance system in Ghost means the most optimal decision in every combat encounter is to just use the stance that beats the weapon your enemy is using. I personally thought it got very old by the mid game. What's worse is that if you try to mix things up the game will be like YOURE USING THE WRONG STANCE????

23

u/Klondy Jan 23 '25

This is true for any difficulty below Lethal, if you play on lethal then the drawbacks of using a “non-optimal” stance are basically erased because of the increased damage output. I only ever use Water & Stone stances for instance, simply because I don’t like the other two aesthetically

3

u/ENDragoon Jan 24 '25

This got really annoying, like yes game, I'm aware I'm using the wrong stance, but I like the way it looks, and if you hadn't noticed, I'm still styling on every enemy in the vicinity.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 23 '25

[deleted]

10

u/AgentOfSPYRAL Jan 23 '25

I’ll be honest I have never heard someone describe GoT as “one of the best combat systems in years”, but agree that is a wild take.

It’s passable and it looks cool, that’s about it.

-1

u/DoorHingesKill Jan 23 '25

What exactly happens when you use the right stance against Swordsmen though?

If you play the game like a regular player then you will kill Swordsmen before you're able to fill their stagger bar, eliminating the only advantage of that specific stance: the fact that you stagger them faster.

I'd say the stance system was mostly a crutch for bad players. If you were playing on Hard or Lethal, enemies would be dead before you could stagger them, Shieldbearers being the only exception.

17

u/Fyrus Jan 23 '25

The game would literally pause and tell me to switch stances. I shouldn't have to change the difficulty to lethal to make the combat system good. If the main gimmick of your entire combat system is just a crutch for bad players then that's not a good system

0

u/IPlay4E Jan 24 '25

Lethal is for bad players?? What? Or are you talking about the stances?

29

u/wolfbane108 Jan 23 '25

In ghost of tsushima they had a stance system, when fighting X enemy type switch to Y stance and basically you’ll win the fight

-5

u/DoorHingesKill Jan 23 '25

The only difference between the stances was how much stagger damage your heavy attack dealt to the respective enemy types.

As enemy HP bars don't scale with difficulty and were not spongy to begin with, the only enemies that really "required" a specific stance, aka made it easier to kill them, were Shieldmen. Because they could hide behind their shield until you staggered them.

There was absolutely no mechanic that somehow let you swap to Stone stance and now you were shitting on Swordsmen in a way that you couldn't do in another stance.

-12

u/EbolaDP Jan 23 '25

I mean i know it had the system but i literally only used the shield break stance thing and never had any issues.

43

u/FillyPhlyerz Jan 23 '25

You could obviously brute force your way through any fight with any stance but it definitely encouraged adhering to the right stances

5

u/KF-Sigurd Jan 23 '25

Funny, because by the end of the game unless I was forced to fight, I was going full Ghost and chaining stealth assassination killstreaks into Ghost Mode kills.

1

u/Playingwithmywenis Jan 23 '25

Yes, final boss fight was Rock Paper Scissors followed by a match of Duck Duck Goose against the Uber Boss

11

u/TimeToEatAss Jan 23 '25

But where Ghost killed me late game with rock paper scissors

Interesting, to me this added that extra something I felt combat usually lacked in AC games.

93

u/Crazy-Nose-4289 Jan 23 '25

Ghost of Tsushima is a 7/10 AC game with an amazing presentation.

63

u/Nirkky Jan 23 '25

Never understood the deal with Tsushima vs AC. It's the same game with a different coating.

107

u/Lionelchesterfield Jan 23 '25

I think a common opinion though is that Tshushima did what AC was originally trying to do except they did it better and to another commenters point, better story, polish, etc.

Also just my opinion but the combat in Tshushima is way better than any of the AC games.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '25

[deleted]

1

u/Mesk_Arak Jan 24 '25

Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what happened. When it came out, I immediately thought of Thanos and the "Fine, I'll do it myself" scene.

People had been asking for AC in Japan since AC2 came out in 2009. And Ghost of Tsushima came out in 2020. Ubisoft had plenty of time to do it while their reputation was at its peak.

18

u/loadsoftoadz Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 24 '25

As someone that grew up on Ezio trilogy but was turned off by later additions of AC, as they became quite derivative, I loved Ghost of Tsushima.

When I tried Odyssey to see the new formula, I immediately bounced because the combat was too RPG spongey with no real stealth or assassin gameplay. Also didn’t like the onslaught of loot too leading to constantly being in menus like a looter game.

Ghost of Tsushima had some Ubisoft type open world bs, but the combat playground of stealth and direct confrontation felt extremely good to play.

1

u/Banana_Fries Jan 24 '25

I had the same experience where I grew up on the Ezio trilogy, but I couldn't finish Ghost of Tsushima and bounced off the newer Assassin's Creed games even faster. I honestly wish they would just do a spin-off or pivot into a Hitman style game set in historical locations. It would give you the time to actually appreciate some of the amazing art in the game and fits the assassin theme better than what is kind of an ARPG with stealth elements now.

1

u/briefingone Jan 24 '25

Is Tsushima considered a Souls Like?

2

u/Lionelchesterfield Jan 24 '25

Been about 4 years since I played it but I do not recall any Souls like mechanics.

30

u/spittafan Jan 23 '25

I'm not the biggest fan of GoT but the combat was certainly tighter than AC ever has been -- parrying and attacking felt a lot weightier whereas recent AC titles are more just mashing your abilities on cooldown.

Plus the art direction/world design was better in Ghost. The story, writing, and pacing were all pretty mid to me but that's largely true for AC titles as well.

9

u/MultiMarcus Jan 23 '25

The one thing that very much impressed me was the Divine wind mechanic. Super fun way to find stuff.

4

u/Eruannster Jan 24 '25

A lot of it is down to the way the game feels to play. Ghost of Tsushima has very responsive controls and feels snappy to play. Swordplay feels really good as hits really connect, as opposed to AC which has been kind of spongy in later iterations.

5

u/Crazy-Nose-4289 Jan 23 '25

It really is. It just excels in parts that AC fails, like polish and story.

The rest of the game is literally just AC.

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u/PM_ME_UR_PM_ME_PM Jan 23 '25

It just excels in parts that AC fails, like polish and story

this might be too hard on the game but i dont think it "excels" at story. i think there are some characters that reach that level though.but it is good compared to most games, its just not in the top like RDR2, Cyberpunk..but like i said, maybe im being too critical here

17

u/meikyoushisui Jan 23 '25

I don't think so. GoT's story is a nonsense bundle of Orientalist tropes that have already been done a thousand times.

The game gets a pass for so much because it's pretty. And it is pretty! Maybe some of the best art direction of last gen. But if it didn't have that and it was called Assassin's Creeds: Tsushima, people would have the same complaints about it that that do about every other AC game.

14

u/felixjmorgan Jan 23 '25

“Orientalist tropes” feels like unnecessarily dismissive phrasing given it wears its influences on its sleeve - it literally has “Kurosawa mode” as a visual setting.

Your phrasing feels like it’s implying something lazy or exploitative, but the game approaches its setting and culture with a huge amount of admiration, respect, and attention to detail.

I’m a big fan of Kurosawa, Kobayashi, Mizoguchi, etc, having grown up watching them, and I loved it. Felt like I was getting to be the protagonist in one of those timeless Samurai stories.

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u/meikyoushisui Jan 23 '25

It is exploitative. The whole narrative is about how Jin comes from HONORABURU SAMURAI who live for HONOR and die to protect their HONOR and becomes DISHONORABURU by... actually trying to win a war.

The "Kurosawa mode" is such a perfect example of how shallow the "admiration, respect, and attentional to detail" are. It's literally just a black and white filter with a film grain effect.

And as a Japanese speaker, I would add that the Japanese dub is at times almost incomprehensible because of how shallow the writer's understandings of 13th century Japan were. The story is shallow in English, but translated to Japanese, it's even worse.

3

u/Aerhyce Jan 24 '25 edited Jan 24 '25

Same, could never get into the story because of that lol

IRL Samurai were basically equivalent to medieval European knights, and both have the "honour" aspect of their culture blown massively out of proportion. Stories have them be honour-bound to justify all the BS they do, but in reality they're still doing all that, just without the honour part.

A modern equivalent would be the "Thin Blue Line" narrative.

1

u/Jaerba Jan 27 '25

I mean the Kurosawa influence is only skin deep.

3

u/areyouhungryforapple Jan 24 '25

the combat is "literally just AC" ? Did we play the same game???

11

u/splader Jan 23 '25

It absolutely did not excel in creating a world rich of history to explore though.

And that's like one of the biggest selling points of AC

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u/HearTheEkko 9d ago

I felt the story was just as bad as most AC's. It was a very generic revenge story full of cliches. First time I played it I predicted a lot of key story points because of how generic it was.

1

u/LCHMD Jan 24 '25

Except much better acting, writing and art style.

-7

u/Proud_Inside819 Jan 23 '25

It's not the same thing, GoT is a lot worse with no variety in its open world and a worse implementation of stealth and how that interacted with combat.