Assassin's Creed Message Board older than one year ago

** POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD ** IGN guides you to 100% sync in Sequence 04, Memory 02 of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, "Nothing Is True..." Trying to locate Captain Kidd, Kenway must stealthily navigate a jungle teeming with assassins. = 100% Sync Requirements = - Knock out 3 assassins. - Loot 4 treasure chests.

Historical weapons expert Mike Loades breaks down the guns, knives, daggers, and grenades, used among pirates.

Greetings, PlayStation Assassins! We’re very excited to announce that Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD will be coming to PS3 via PlayStation Store on January 14th.

When we set out to do Liberation HD, our objective was simple: improve upon what worked on the Vita and adapt the gameplay and missions to be the most fun and enjoyable they could be. As a result, each mission has been reworked in order to improve its pacing, and the challenge it poses to the player.

Liberation is set in New Orleans between 1765 and 1780, in the period between the end of the French and Indian War, up to the middle of the American Revolution. Liberation tells the story of Aveline; a female Assassin of mixed French and African heritage. Brought up in a world of privilege and contrasts, Aveline becomes a strong-willed woman and an avid opponent of slavery.

Recruited to the Assassins by an escaped slave, Aveline joins the struggle against the Templars as they try to take control of New Orleans following France’s handover of the city to Spain. Striking hard and fast, she is instrumental in the Louisiana Rebellion that forces the Spanish and Templars out of the city for nearly two years before they return in force.

In addition to the HD upgrade, we also have new missions specific to Aveline’s Personas. Aveline is the first Assassin with such clearly different character types — Assassin, Lady, and Servant. Each persona has its own advantages and disadvantages when playing missions, and each generates a different reaction from the city life around Aveline. That’s a total of 15 missions delving deeper into Aveline’s story.

Click here to see the full gallery

If you haven’t had a chance to play this chapter of Assassin’s Creed on Vita, or simply want to play Liberation on the big screen, we hope you’ll check out Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD on January 14th for $19.99.

See you on the Bayou.

Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag is gearing up for launch on PS3 and PS4. In anticipation of this momentous event, we’ve created a brand new trailer to deliver all the details you’ll need in order to stride confidently in the daunting shoes of Captain Edward Kenway. With compelling characters, an expansive world, and a near-infinite amount of pirate activities to engage in, Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag is the largest and most immersive game in the Assassin’s series.

Get to know Captain Edward Kenway and his host of fearsome pirate allies, like Charles Vane, Anne Bonny, Calico Jack, and Blackbeard. Take on pirate hunter Woodes Rogers, whose ruthlessness is surpassed only by his infamy as the bane of outlaw sailors.

Board the Jackdaw and meet Adéwalé, your talented Quartermaster. He’ll ensure the Jackdaw sails true, and will even guide you in upgrading the ship, adding additional cannons, swivel guns, fire barrels, and even the ability to rain hell from the sky with explosive mortars. Board any ship you please and press its crew into service, use it to repair the Jackdaw, or gift it to one of your crew and put them to work earning you money and goods as part of the Kenway fleet.

Explore over fifty exotic locations, from dense jungle and island plantations, to hidden cenotes and grand cities. Immerse yourself in the gameplay elements that have made Assassin’s Creed a world-class adventure series. From stealthy assassinations to all out brutal melee combat, you’ll be able to experience the Golden Age of Pirates on your terms.

And there’s even more as you drink, dive, and harpoon your way through the lush Caribbean landscape!

Armed with all of this knowledge, you’re finally ready to set sail with Captain Edward Kenway. Join us under the Black Flag of Assassin’s Creed IV.

While it's easy to get carried away and think you'll be spending your entire Assassin's Creed IV experience walking planks and punching sharks, remember: there'll be near-future shenanigans going on as well. Read more...

Pirates were a lot of things, but above all, they were ruthless opportunists on the hunt for plunder, booty, fortune… call it whatever you want – Captain Edward Kenway calls it an end to be reached, by any means necessary. With the acquisition of riches his paramount goal, Edward assembles a group of like-minded renegades to take the West Indies for all they’re worth. Watch the video below for a quick peek at how Kenway organizes a world-class pirate heist!

With the largest governments of the world all bearing down on the islands of the West Indies with a mandate to eradicate the pirate threat once and for all, Captain Kenway and his cohorts will need to band together to survive.

Of course, with that cooperation comes increased effectiveness and even greater gains… as Blackbeard, Charles Vane, Anne Bonny, and Calico Jack join forces with the goal of bleeding every scrap of gold out of these islands before the hammer finally falls.

Spoiler alert… it’s going to get grim, Assassins!

Take a look at the dastardly pirates you'll encounter in Black Flag.

We’re introducing a full crew of rowdy yet realistic buccaneers, privateers and straight-up pirates in Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag, so we figured you would benefit from a little face-time with the roughest of them. And who better to cry them out for you than Captain Edward Kenway himself, played by the talented Matt Ryan.

Widely renowned for his incredible charisma and mercurial temper, Captain Edward Kenway is joined by his Quartermaster and closest ally Adewale (played by Tristan D. Lalla. The pair will quickly find themselves thrown in with the likes of the wiley and terrifying Edward “Blackbeard” Thatch, the gentlemanly yet morally grey Benjamin Hornigold and the downright jolly Stede Bonnet.

Meanwhile, the dauntless privateer Woodes Rogers seeks to eliminate the encroaching pirate threat festering in Nassau. But first, he’ll have to contend with the wicked and merciless cut-throat Charles Vane (played by Ralph Ineson).

Now you’ll be armed with knowledge when you come upon any of these scourges of the West Indies, where a spyglass, a skilled crew and sturdy masts may be all that stand between you and date with Davey Jones’ locker!

You’ve got a successful game design career that’s wound up with millions of people all over the world playing and loving something that you made. Not to mention all the poutine that you can eat. Why would you leave that? Let two guys in lab coats who used to work at Ubisoft tell you why. Read more...

A lot of people have asked us what kinds of technical advancements can be expected from Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag on PS4, so we asked Associate Producer Sylvain Trottier to give us a couple of examples… He went a little nuts, and delivered an entire video detailing a ton of improvements.

CAUTION: Things are about to get a little techy, so put on your coder hats!

Some of the highlights include our use of real Beaufort scale waves for a realistic ocean and the new sea engine, which follows real world physics. Complex shaders work to give the ocean that translucent appearance.

Each raindrop is an individually lit object, puddles accurately mirror the world around them and volumetric fog accepts and reflects light from different sources. Dynamic Navmeshes (three dimensional objects you can run around on) ensure that you can jump from one ship to another without encountering weird collision issues, and can seamlessly interact between two ships involved in a boarding action.

We can use the power of next-gen processors to generate thousands of three dimensional plants that realistically react to the weather around them, as well as their interaction with Edward (perfect for judging his location during stealth gameplay).

Based on the few examples of the great improvements we’ve shared with you today, you can expect that we are dedicated to bringing a more immersive experience than ever to Black Flag.

Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag will be available as a launch title for PS4.

Ubisoft has announced two new Assassin's Creed games. Assassion's Creed Liberation HD, as its name suggests, is a remake of last year's PlayStation Vita game for consoles, while Assassin's Creed Pirates is a new mobile title.

The Internet let it slip early, but Ubisoft is working on a ton of games for both the near and not-so-near future. Like, more games than we knew of just before last week. And what do you know, Kirk Hamilton has seen and reported on a bunch of those for us already. You can read all about what interesting new games you can expect from Ubisoft, all right here.Read more...

Of all the things that my PC needs right now, another Assassin’s Creed game is somewhere near the bottom of the list, right near the Bing Toolbar, the Bing Desktop and Bing. I enjoyed the second game, playing it as a bonkers historical tourism simulator, but I didn’t find the time or the energy to trot through the entire thing. Even people who liked playing II three times didn’t tend to like playing III once, so I ignored that one. Black Flag did catch the outermost tendrils of my interest when a man appeared to punch a shark in one of the trailers, but there will probably be a hundred hours of not shark-punching. That’s a lot of Ass Creed and there’s more to come. Liberation, a Vita spin-off, will be coming to PC in a highly defined version.

(more…)

Alongside the playable demos at last week's Ubisoft press day stood a lone television looping a trailer for something called Assassin's Creed: Pirates. It's a new Assassin's Creed game for mobile devices, and what do you know? It features pirates.Read more...

Reader Mads, inspired by the creepy TF2 mod we posted recently, let us know about something similar he did to Assassin's Creed II.Read more...

Ever wonder what would happen if you mashed Assassin's Creed IV and Minecraft together? Good news, this version of the first Black Flag trailer by Nacker11 gives us a taste of that crossover. Seems like it would work!Read more...

"Call me Ishmael," Ishmael said, before launching a harpoon into a shark's face.Read more...

Ubisoft has revealed it does have an end in mind for the Assassin's Creed series, and it knows how it wants it to unfold.

Picture it: you’re at the 2013 edition of Nerd Prom, finally taking a break from waiting in long-ass Hall H lines and getting something to eat. Then, some dude wearing some sort of outfit from Assassin’s Creed runs up and jumps right over your burgers. It’d freak you out, right? Read more...

Here's Volante Design's latest jacket—which is a redesign of the Assassin's Creed III jacket that put them on the map. It's called The Eagle and it comes in a few different colors.Read more...

Hey, that's not what the main character of Assassin's Creed IV looks like! And yet there it is, right on Best Buy's Canadian pre-order page for the game: That sure looks like a rough photoshop job of (who else!) former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins. For the record, this is what the actual boxart looks like: Funny though it may be, this probably won't be up too long. Between this and yesterday's one-penny "sale" on Metro: Last Light, Best Buy's been on a roll lately, huh? (Via C.J. Kershner)

This snap, taken at the London Film and Comic Con last week, is just...well, it's just the best. The whole show sounds like it was the best, actually. For a convention that's not the San Diego Comic Con, that's one hell of a lineup. For further proof of how awesome Tyrion's actor Peter Dinklage is, check out the Reddit thread below for tales of Joffrey cosplayers. [Self] as Ezio, stabbing Peter Dinklage in the throat [Reddit, via Fashionably Geek]

Anthony Guebels works for Ubisoft as one of the artists responsible not necessarily for the creation of games, but for the marketing images used for games. He's worked on all kinds of projects, from Far Cry 3 through the Assassin's Creed series to Splinter Cell to the upcoming Watchdogs. You've probably seen many of the images below on posters or advertisements; if you ever wondered who does pics like those, now you know. You can see more of Anthony's work at his CGHub page. To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they’re big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), click on the “expand” button in the bottom-right corner. Fine Art is a celebration of the work of video game artists, showcasing the best of both their professional and personal portfolios. If you're in the business and have some concept, environment, promotional or character art you'd like to share, drop us a line!

Respawn's Vince Zampella has explained why the upcoming Titanfall won't have a traditional single-player campaign.

Ubisoft traditionally has first dibs on the expansive "flank" of the LA convention centre, something which continued this year with the most ridiculously over-sized Assassin's Creed poster you will ever see. The pros of such a spot? Well, as you can see, it's huge. The cons? That Battlefield 4 banner you see in the background will get around 100x the exposure over the next week. This was put together using panorama software, so half the fun is looking for glitches. Like the old dude with two heads. And the Tonka SUV. It's over 8000 pixels wide, so you'll want to click "enlarge" to get the full effect.

Enzo Volante had been designing characters and costumes since he was in the second grade, but it wasn't until he graduated college that he learned how to design patterns and make clothes. It was a necessity: he had no job and he needed something to wear. Just because it was a necessity didn't mean he was going to wear just anything, mind. "I was bored with always having to wear a T-shirt and jeans, and wanted to make something to break the norm," Volante explained to me in an interview. Being that he grew up on action games, Marvel, Capcom, DC, what 'out of the norm' meant was very specific. The characters in this media wear outstanding things, after all—stuff that most ordinary people wouldn't wear. "The first designs I did in the early spirit of [Volante Design] were sort of way out there, mostly impractical for the street, but practical to wear," Volante recalls. They were the sort of clothes that caught the eye of performers, like circus folk and firespinners. As in, the type of folk who had plenty of confidence, and wouldn't mind standing out because of what they were wearing. But Volante wasn't in it to boost the confidence of folks who already had it. He wanted to "bring out that sense of personal power in people who aren't already willing to stand up in front of hundreds of people and spin a flaming stick." Clothes would be the perfect avenue to do it: the cooler you feel about what you're wearing, the more confidence you're likely to exude. Around this time—three years ago—that Volante saw fan redesigns of superheroes everywhere. They were good, he notes, but they weren't coming from people who designed clothes. Maybe he could do better? He would go on to start his first design based on an existing franchise—Assassin's Creed. "I noticed a trend in the games: not much was changing with the modern day assassins, except for the fact that with each installment, Desmond's hoodie was slightly cooler. And I wondered, where the hell does he buy his hoodies? I set out to become the place where protagonists buy their awesome clothes."He designed an Assassin hoodie that could be considered the "next logical step" for Desmond's sweatshirt. It looked fantastic, but more importantly, this was around when Volante Design cemented one of their core tenets: fashion that would make ordinary people feel extraordinary. "The business was founded on this sort of build-your-own-hero-wardrobe idea, I offered custom everything," Volante says. Custom everything made clothes pricey. That didn't deter people from taking notice; order volume might've been low, but the interest for his sort of product was high. He was making eye-catching clothes, after all. But eventually, the business took enough traction that keeping it entirely a one-man operation became impossible. He took on interns and part-timers, which helped, but nothing could prepare him for the onslaught that would come after he designed The Kenway Hoodie in September 2012, right before the release of Assassin's Creed 3. You might be familiar with the design—we posted about it last year, and it was one of our most popular articles. Heck, if you Google "Assassin's Creed hoodie," Volante's design is one of the first results. His inbox blew up. He decided to make a website, put the Kenway on it, and he took on three times the orders he had taken over the course of a year and a half leading up to that point. He sold out in five hours, and had to hire some extra hands. As you might expect, not all of this attention was positive per se. Other folk would go on to copy his design, at a cheaper price—and at lower quality. The issue was that people would associate Volante's product with something they didn't actually make, which hurts the brand. But beyond that, Volante Design also came across "copyright difficulties" which they're not at liberty to talk about. Still, it's fascinating to hear Volante talk about the design in Assassin's Creed. It's clear that he has an eye for fashion. "I love the Assassin designs, but to be completely honest, I hate how physically impossible some of them are. Connor, for instance, I wont get started on how the tails make no sense. But his jacket fits him like a glove...but is supposedly hanging open. I don't care how fitted your jacket is, it doesn't work like that. He's got a quiver, and straps, but nothing is holding his jacket to him below the ribcage. In fact, he's got a gun belt that would be pulling the jacket OPEN, rather than holding it close to him." "My favorite design from the entire series if the Renegade multiplayer character from Revelations. It just has everything I like: boots, giant pants, cool lines, fitted torso but loose everywhere else. Straps, buckles, hanging bits. Scarf, badass mask. And a horrifying fishing hook spear as the cherry on top." Nowadays, Volante Design is a three-man operation with a better capacity for taking orders than when it first started. To wit, the recently launched "Kestrel," a hooded jacket "for the protagonist on-the-go," is taking as many orders as Volante Design gets. Here it is, in "motion"—which is intentional, as Volante has started focusing on "superhuman streetwear." Anyone can wear it, but those of you who are more mobile will find it suits their needs well. This collection deliberately doesn't make reference to any specific games or characters, but judging from Volante's prior designs, you can probably bet they'll be the type of clothes any fashionable hero—even an assassin—would love to wear.

It’s like something out of a storybook. Guy meets gigantic, monolithic game publisher. Guy helps create publisher’s flagship franchise. Guy leaves to pursue something new and different. Guy’s company is bought by said gigantic, monolithic publisher due to hilariously unfortunate circumstances. Guy reluctantly returns to company. Guy gets fired a couple months later. AND FINALLY: Guy’s project is “suspended for an undisclosed period of time.” And some unrelated people somewhere else all lived happily ever after.

(more…)

A new look at the swashbuckling, sunken-treasure antics in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

Desilets has now commented on his departure, revealing that he was in fact fired.

Eventually, Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Desilets will make another game. He’ll just have to make some excruciating blood sacrifice on an arcane altar in some Mayan ruins first, because he is clearly cursed. First he left Ubisoft to chase his new vision, then eventual partner THQ drowned in a sea of unsold uDraws, and now – only a few months after being brought back into the Ubisoft fold – he’s flying solo once again. This time, however, he claims the departure wasn’t voluntary at all. Well, unless you define “being unceremoniously booted out the front door by security guards” as voluntary, anyway.

(more…)