Finally finished
Assassin's Creed 4 up 100% sync and did all the real world stuff, really liked it. The story telling is not that great because of the jumping around and hiding stuff in the database entries, but overall it's an enjoyable story with good characters; it's the first game in the series since AC2 that I felt had any real emotion to it.
I'm actually pretty impressed that the story of the age of pirates turned out so well considering that these games have 600 person+ teams and are rushed rushed rushed made by committee. I expect something more robotic out of that (like with the gameplay, which is pretty robotic and check off the boxes) but the story felt pretty personal and felt like the people making the story actually cared about what they were making. It does a great job weaving in and out of real world history with the fictional characters of this story.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
It's pretty depressing when you realize that the golden age of pirates really only lasted 6 years or so and almost everyone who started the pirate republic with hopes and dreams of doing something with Nassau...ending up doing nothing there and almost everyone ended up murdered or hung or dead by some other method.
All these books and movies have romanticized Pirates and the age of Piracy, yet most never touch on the darker side of how it all lasted so shortly and came to an end in an awful fashion. Most of these guys didn't live past 30-40. Not that they were innocent great guys, as when they attacked ships even if they spared the crew, I'm sure people were getting killed during ship battles regularly because of them. But for pirates, this was a group that was trying to accomplish something and totally failed and people like Thatch ended up getting betrayed and butchered.
Anyhow, yeah, they did a good job portraying the golden age of pirates from start to finish in a single game story while weaving in Edward's fictional tale about the Assassin's/Templars and Observatory. I liked it a good deal.
The gameplay was alright, the assassin stuff is still fun even after all these games, especially when you have free reign to stealth around and the sailing is really immersive and well done. There's a great sense of exploration early on that's been missing in the series for a while and I'd like to see them expand on it even if they drop the pirate theme. However the collectibles are dumb and need to go. Especially all the "uncharted" ones.
The real world stuff was ok, kind of neat though one or two of the hacking parts were annoying.
The optional objectives in the story missions are an improvement over three, but there's still a handful that are super frustrating and most are totally pointless and just detract from the main mission. Tailing missions are getting old, Eavesdrop missions are awful. The combat is still boring though pistols did make it a bit more fun since you don't have to just sit and counter as much and can be more offensive with pistol combos.
Great game, second best in the series for sure imo behind AC2. But after 50 hours and 6 mainline games in 7 years I'm pretty sick of this tbh. I think from this point on I'm changing how I play these games. Gonna wait a few months and then when I do play Freedom's Cry and maybe the AC3 Expansion I never played + Liberations HD, I'm doing two things differently (also for AC5+ because I'll still keep playing them since I like this series):
Basically I think to get maximum enjoyment out of this series I'm going to play them while 1) ignoring all optional objectives in main missions and 2) not going out of my way to collect glowing things/collectible icons spread all across the map. I feel like if you cut those out in AC4 you'd go from a 50 hour game to 30 hour game that's the same experience but with much better pacing and way less frustration. So yeah, done with my OCD in AC games after this game, will enjoy further AC OCD-free and see if I like it more.
Now I just gotta finish up the rest of these Pinball Arcade Season 1 tables and I can finally get to Resogun and some of the other PS4 launch titles! Between ACIV, Pinball Arcade S1, Don't Starve and Killzone/Knack, probably put like 100-150 hours into my PS4 already. Still have NFS Rivals & Lego Marvel to last another month until the Yakuza Isshin/Infamous SS/MGSV GZ trio arrives.
