Assassin's Creed III: Deluxe Edition

Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by Ubisoft.

Assassin's Creed III Gameplay

The gameplay in Assassin's Creed III is pretty intuitive. It isn't hard to pick up and get started playing. For a controller, you can use your keyboard and mouse or you can use an attached Xbox style controller. One of the first things that bugged me about Assassin's Creed III, however, is that if you have a game controller connected, you can't opt to use the keyboard and mouse. I normally have a game controller connected, but I had to disconnect it to play with the keyboard and mouse. This is unfortunate because I found it much easier to play the game with keyboard and mouse than with the controller.

Assassin's Creed III gives you a detailed tutorial of how to do things each time a new type of activity is encountered. Even afterward, when you are fighting for the hundredth time, the heads up display still clues you in to what you should do. While this makes Assassin's Creed III easy to pick up after a long absence or if you are brand new to this style of gaming, I kind of think giving you all the keys is a little bit much. My brother and I were recently discussing how it seems games these days rely too much on the tutorials. They tell you exactly how to do everything in the game, which makes you a near expert player right from the start, but you lose that moment of discovery when a new skill or technique is unveiled by mistake or trial and error. After the 35th time getting attacked by a wolf, the game still told me to push ‘R' then ‘Q' to kill it.

One interesting part of the gameplay is the AI skill level. Your normal foot soldiers are easy to dispatch without much effort, but the officers and leaders often require more fine-tuned agility to take care of. The different mouse and keyboard combinations allow you to parry, block, disarm, reposte, or throw an opponent in addition to your basic attacks. Depending on the skill level of your foe, you will have to use these effectively in order to overcome your enemy. The only grievance I have with this is that after you have discovered that the officers carrying backpacks and wearing plumed helmets require a successful parry then disarm before you can beat them, you now know how to kill every officer of the same type. I think it would be more interesting if the styles varied and you were required to discover the way to beat higher skilled enemies individually for each encounter.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Assassin's Creed III is the free running. Although I did find the game to be less intuitive with the free running than Sleeping Dogs, there were a lot more areas in which I could use the feature. In fact, I think the entire countryside was specifically cultivated by the Iroquois to enable free running through the trees without touching the ground. The problems I ran into were minimal, but annoying nonetheless. Anytime you move with the left mouse key depressed you are in free running mode. You also cannot run at all unless you are in free running mode. That means that you either walk everywhere or free run a lot. Unfortunately, small things like lamp posts, boxes, or corners that you would easily ignore while walking become obstacles when running. If you get to close to the corner of a building, for example, you will notice yourself suddenly yanking in another direction attempting to scale the wall rather than continuing along your route. Similarly, you must make sure that you stop running a few steps before a door that you want to enter, lest you grab the door frame and climb onto the roof of the building instead. This can be especially dangerous in highly patrolled areas where, even when you are incognito, climbing a wall suddenly becomes an investigable offense.

The best part of Assassin's Creed III gameplay is that you are totally immersed in an extremely historically accurate world participating in the events that formed the United States of America. In fact, that is the only main contradiction to history; that some random half-native assassin was actually part of the signing of Declaration of Independence, the Boston Tea Party, and the every major battle of the Revolutionary War. Still, the intriguing story and rich history draw the player into the game like few other titles I have played.

Another highlight of the gameplay takes you into the seas and puts you at the helm of your own warship. This was actually one of the more challenging parts of the game for me and in the future, I think a large part of my time playing will be spent on the side missions attacking enemy ships or escorting allies through treacherous waters. This aspect of the game is the sole reason for building your homestead and earning money. Nothing else is worth spending the in-game coin on, other than your ship upgrades, and they cost quite a bit, so save up. Without exposing too much, at one point of the game you actually pilot your ship alongside your father. Depending on the personality of your own father, this might bring back bitter memories of Driver's Ed, with similar, albeit old English versions of the same old berating phrases.

The map system in Assassin's Creed III is something that I would have liked to see better done. The maps are nice, and an especially nice feature is the ability to fast travel to some of the locations, including the docks or your homestead. The maps are a little bland, though. They are done in somewhat monotoned graphics, with the points of interest in white and the rest of the map in bluescale. The map system is the absolute worst highlighting of the fact that Assassin's Creed III was made originally for a console and a console controller and then ported to the PC. It is very awkward to navigate with a mouse and keyboard until you get used to it.

My other issue with the map system is that it is very glitchy. If you are riding a horse, or standing on a fence, or maybe just not doing the magical map dance, then the map will glitch out and you be able to see any points of interest at all. This can get very annoying. I finally discovered that it was something to do with what my character was doing so I would move around, dismount, or otherwise change my position until the map suddenly reappeared.

Assassin's Creed III Graphics

Assassin's Creed III unveils a lot of new graphical prowess. Partnering with NVIDIA, Assassin's Creed III uses a new, advanced anti-aliasing technology to provide more efficiency in rendering. Because this new AA technology is only available using GeForce GTX 600 GPUs, those are the GPUs recommended for use by both NVIDIA and Ubisoft. Don't get me wrong, though, the game still looks awesome with a Radeon HD GPU.

Assassin's Creed III uses a brand-new graphics engine, that was designed exclusively for this game. It's known as Anvil Next, and I'm sure we will see it popping up in a lot of other games soon. The engine looks amazing, and it is very dynamic in nature. The historic cities that you visit throughout the game, including New York, Boston, Lexington, and Concord, change in appearance based on the season, the weather, and the time of day. It comes off as extremely realistic when you come back to a city and its familiar streets and buildings are now covered with snow.

The naval combat system in Assassin's Creed III also looks great. Water is typically a rough spot for many graphics engines, but in my opinion, the developers did a wonderful job making the water environments look very real. Unfortunately, some of the other aspects of the naval battles didn't impress me as much. When I shot the chained cannonballs at the enemies ships to take out there masts, it brought me out of the reality and back to the game. The masts and sails broke in what appeared to be predetermined placed regardless of where the chains hit.

These graphical issues were not isolated to just the sea battles, however. There were many times when Connor stabbed someone apparently so hard that his entire forearm penetrated their torso and came out the other side. In some of the areas, pathing issues would cause characters to occupy the same space and the graphics suffered. These issues didn't break the game by any means, but it did pull me out of my fantasy world for second. It's like reading a really good book and just when you are entrenched in the story and lost to the real world, a sleeping baby awakens and pulls you back to reality. It isn't terribly difficult to get back into the story, but there is a little disappointment.

So let's talk about TXAA. This new style of anti-aliasing is a film-style AA technique aimed at reducing temporal aliasing. TXAA uses samples both inside and outside of each pixel as well as samples from prior frames to filter out the aliasing effects. Spatial filtering is improved over standard MSAA as well, making movement and environmental effects look smoother. When combined with MSAA, TXAA provides much better quality, but you may see a bigger performance hit than you are used to with, say, FXAA. The following images help to highlight the difference with Ultra High settings, including TXAA, when compared to normal settings.

The image above on the left was captured at normal settings, while the one on the right had TXAA enabled. Pay special attention to Connor's shadow on the wall behind him as well as the shadows on his face. You can also clearly the see the smoother fabric on his leggings in the TXAA enabled image.

Once again, here, the image on the right has TXAA enabled while the image on the left does not. The smoothing effected by enabling TXAA is very clearly seen in environmental aspects. Look at the any of the edges on the building to see exactly what I mean. You can also see the smoothing to a lesser degree in the wood. Each of those grainy spots seems to move when you move the camera, but with TXAA enabled, all of that is smoothed out very nicely.

The image above was captured using a Radeon HD 7970 with all settings on high, except for the anti-aliasing. The image looks very good.

Unfortunately, whenever I tried to put the anti-aliasing up to the highest level when using a Radeon HD card, the image got destroyed. The option for TXAA was, of course, disabled, since it can only be used with a GTX 600 series card, but even just setting the MXAA to the highest setting made the image appear as it does above. I tried a 7870 and a 6870 to be sure and it did the same with all three. Maybe a newer driver edition will fix the problem. The bottom line is that this game was clearly made to perform better using an NVIDIA graphics card.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed Assassin's Creed III. I loved playing through the revolutionary period of the United States' history and really delving into the different ideologies and opinions presented. I was able to immerse myself in the story because of the excellent cut-scenes and the dynamic characters. The events were sufficiently challenging so that I was not able to achieve 100% synchronization on the first try every time and the variety of missions and challenges kept me interested and wanting to play more. This was especially true when I would jump forward to Desmond's true timeline. Those moments seemed to be perfectly interspersed throughout the story to provide some relief from the slaughter of red-coats.

But it wasn't all sunshine and roses. Assassin's Creed III definitely has some room to improve. The game makes no attempt to hide the fact that it is a console port, even though the graphics are certainly far superior on the PC. Some of the pathing and much of the combat graphics could have been improved to be more realistic. Overlapping objects and limbs going straight through NPC's bodies are things that should have been worked out before release, especially when they happen in a cut-scene. There are too many occasions when there is tearing and missing pixels in the graphics, like when my cloak suddenly becomes see-through in a few places. In the image below you can see some of this tearing at the bottom left. Also, you can see how the shadow from the tree doesn't quite match up with the tree itself.

Additionally, the free-running, which is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game, seems to take over movement in many occasions. Connor is constantly trying to run up walls that he can't get up or he climbs up onto a door frame when I clearly wanted to open the door and go inside. These transitions could have been smoother and I know it's possible because other games have done better, like Sleeping Dogs for example.

But even with the minor glitches, errors, and annoyances of console port-edness, Assassin's Creed III does not fail to impress. It is definitely a game that is high on my recommendations list for anyone with yet unspent holiday gift funds.

Assassin's Creed III Conclusion

Assassin's Creed III is a beautiful and exciting new addition to the Assassin's Creed line. The story is well written and the adaptation of an open world environment is very well implemented. The game is much longer than other current titles released around the same time and held my attention better as well.

Built on an all new graphics engine known as Anvil Next, Assassin's Creed III is stunningly realistic. The rendering detail is amazing and the environmental details have come a long way since previous iterations. The inclusion of NVIDIAs TXAA filtering for players using GTX 600 series GPUs really helps to smooth out the aliasing affects you might otherwise see. Just know that TXAA might come at a higher performance cost than other AA filtering, like FXAA.

Considering that Ubisoft declares that Assassin's Creed III has been in development for only over two years, I am pretty impressed with the results. That being said, part of me wishes the development team would have taken just a little more time to iron out some of the minor kinks that became a little annoying throughout the game.

Assassin's Creed III includes some of the best free-running and character movement of any game I have played. It does happen to take over any running at all, forcing you to walk through areas in order to avoid suddenly leaping on rooftops, but when you need it, it is awesome.

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COMMENT QUESTION: Are you going to play Assassin's Creed III?

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