If this 12 weeks of challenges celebrating the 15th anniversary of AC ends in an announcement of AC1 remastered ill be impressed

Just want to put some appreciation out there for the difficulty options that have been in the last few games. I'm loving it so much. I'll break this down into three parts: Achievements, Stages of the Game, Playstyle.

Achievement:
I absolutely love that there is no achievement tied behind difficulty, this is such a great decision. being able to play the main gain on the hardest difficulty for the more realistic experience and then switch it back to normal difficulty for the dlc when im ticking off all the achievements is just really nice beginning till end.

Stages of the Game:
The early game is by far the worst, needing to fight PERFECTLY to avoid dying is frustrating as heck when new to the game, especially in odyssey when you get your first conquest battle and have a few of assassin skills but no warrior skills, the difficulty curve was steep. Being early game, even if i did put all my points into combat skills i'm not confident that battle would have been much easier due to weak gear.
On the flip side, mid game is perfect, with level scaling you dont stomp anyone and the game is ideal for an assassins game, i need to sneak around and pick people off before any open fighting because i know ill be destroyed by more than 2 or 3 enemies. if the assassin is revealed running for your life is a genuine option, it just feels like it suits a franchise about assassins perfectly, if only some 'specific' assassin missions were lost if you got revealed as target goes into hiding.
Late game it starts to get a bit easier again in origins/odyssey/valhalla. Some powerful bosses will still roll you and regular enemies will take you if you get sloppy and get hit, but at this point you have the best gear, the resoures to max that gear and every power in the game so you start to notice that you can kind of control a fight and take a few more hits that you used to.

Playstyle:
ABove i mentioned how it makes us play like an assassin but also, wanted to mention how it is kind of limiting in higher difficulties, while it makes sense that open combat is super difficult i do find some naval battles can get difficult due to the lack of dodge (just taking cover to reduce damage) and also i notice that i cant use all the usual options to kill a target, fire and poison seem to do very little to enemies on hardest difficulty making those upgrades honestly quite useless until i finish the game and go to the dlc and lower it to normal.
I would like something that allows fire/poison to still be relevant, such as a bonus to the damage (or reduction of enemy resistances to fire/poison) if you deal that damage from stealth, as opposed to it doing its usual 2% damage on nightmare difficulty. This alone would encourage the stealth playstyle to pick off enemies with various means on hardest difficulty before committing to any fights.


Hope someone enjoyed this

Hi,

Normally don't like the negative posts but wanted to share my opinion here and see if this is in the mind of others too.

Wrath of the druids and the french dlc were both interesting in their own ways but both honestly felt kind of small compared to the base game and were quite expensive. Thankfully the season pass helped a little there but this new ragnarok dlc isnt included in the pass as far as I know and in australian dollars (my local currency) it's $60 for this dlc.

I have to weigh that up against other options, I don't remember the original cost of the previous two dlc but I believe they launched at about $25 USD each which is like $35 AUD. Let's presume i got the base game at the curent price retail stores have of $80. That would mean i've already dropped $150 for the game so far. Now the first 80 was amazing, soooo much to do, the next $70 for the two dlc was mitigated by the season pass making it cheaper, but in terms of content compared to base game it does not even come close in size. Norway and America (i forget what valhalla called america ingame) might be about the same size/content as those two dlc and the price of the two dlc almost matched the base game! Now i look at ragnarok and i can't help but say "holy s**t, that's a lot of money did they add in another country or world the same size as England for us to explore?" I can't speak to the quality of the dlc yet as I havn't finished it.

Now i love valhalla, it has been a 10/10 experience for me but looking forward we have heard the next AC game will incorporate new live service elements and I can't help but worry, will we be getting $50 dlc drops 2-4 times a year for the next 5-10 years? That is a loooot of money......

If these DLC are them adding in new countries and new assassins from around history at different points in history it will no doubt be amazing, but I'm hesitant to expect anything as awesome as that, that is some world of warcraft sized dlc.

I worry we will be buying the next game in 2023 and then dropping up to $100 a year on that same game to return twice a year and play new zones before dropping off again. While I hope the dlc will be engaging and fresh if it is anything like valhalla so far it will be more of the same just reskinned with a new system or two to distract us.


I understand that the next game isnt coming this year and so the Valhalla DLC is the main revenue source from vassassins creed in the meantime but this is starting to feel like diminishing returns

Eager to hear what others think.

@Ubi-Mercury @Ubi-Peach So sorry for the @ I hate to spam.

Saw some suggestions online for this issue and tried it out, managed to get to the end game and finish the last few achievements of ac2 so im done!

Ingame the only changes i made were to actually participate in quick time events during cutscenes, not collecting the montergionni statues (lost save everytime i did) and yeah....

The big change i made that I saw suggested online though was short playsessions. In short, every couple of missions, at the minimum once every sequence I would wait for the save to finish then quit to main menu, fully close the game and then relaunch the game to resume my playthrough.

It seems that the cause of the file constantly being deleted has something to do with playing the new xbox's for a few hours or more, most likely inactivity until the xbox goes to sleep and/or minimising thhe game to play something else cause the issue. My assumption is that the game being paused by the new consoles disconnects it from the cloud saving that is the only option ac2 offers and then the next major autosave the game realises it cant reach the cloud because it never reconnected and so it wipes?

Also should note, this is an issue for ac valhalla as well. When i was working towards 100% of valhalla i noticed i was losing progress because the game got put to sleep and when i returned it REFUSED to reconnect to ubisoft servers until i restarted the game. Meaning missions id do would get wiped. I did also lose entire game progress 2 times however when I restarted the console (unplugging power too) it would reconnect to the server and my valhalla saves were restored thankfully (although individual missions i did since the game paused had to be redone)

I ended up finishing valhalla by doing the same thing really, everytime i paused and went afk id save and fully close the game and just restart it when I got back.

Considering this affected me on the newest game AND the second oldest game i'm going to operate under the assumption that every single AC game is incompatible with the xbox quick resume feature and since I don't know how to turn it off I will use the "restart every hour or two" for older games while i am finishing my 100% runs juuuust to be safe.

Hopefully these observations help developers.

P.s. Editing the post to add this in. I have raged to my best mate on both occasions valhalla fully wiped my save (before i recovered them) and when it failed to save progress after i had minimised the game and then returned later to play. My best mate was completely unaware of any of these issues, he plays on PS5, not sure if they have a quick resume feature but im assuming they dont as it seems mainly to occur on xbox in the online posts i have seen.

@ubi-peach I appreciate it, will try to hold off my next playthrough until I hear back

@ubi-mercury As far as I know, no. When i played it yesterday it was a straight afternoon leading up to the notification the save had failed.

The only possibility for the new xbox pausing the game is if it happened when I walked off to cook dinner due to inactivity. Not sure how to turn quick resume off though.

On Saturday I closed the game and when i reopened it the save file was gone. Yesterday I went into options tried to manually change the save location to the cloud, progressed the game another mission or two, saw save icons and then quit to main menu, even without fully closing the game and despite save icons the save file was still missing.

About a month ago when I first lost my almost 100% playthrough it happened when i collected the 8 statuettes in montegionni, the achievement didnt pop and i googled it saw that someone made the achievement pop by restarting, i tried restarting and my save was just gone.

Both playthroughs this weekend I did grab the statues, the achievement popped this time though.

Trying to 100% all AC games and my 95% + ac2 game wiped itselfd. as you can imagine I was pretty annoyed but after a month off I returned this weekend. Put 4 or 5 hours into it yesterday, completed sequence 4, the um, lorenzo medici? is that his name, you save him from being killed in florence, anyway he gives me a codex and when the cutscene ends I get told that 'Save options failed. The storage device containing the gamer profile in use has been removed.' Next time I started up AC2 my progress was lost. I was fuming again.

Today I tried for the 3rd time to get to the end of AC so I can do the last achievements and at the exact same point, 4 or 5 hours in it had the same error message when sequence 4 ended.

I'm using Xbox Series X if it matters and this issue never happened before in previous gens.

Any help fixing it? or at least avoiding it? Not sure what it means by profile, i never log out so maybe it is the xbox putting the ap to 'sleep' when i switch games?

Couldnt find any solutions using google

Was going to wait until I finished the game before posting in the forum but this one moment I have to ask about.

If it is a spoiler that I will find out later in the games story then please say so and don't tell me what happened.

Been clearing 100% of england and just got to winchestre. Found the Assassion bureau here and i noticed something interesting, the evacuation order is stuck on the map with a knife just like how it is in the other bureaus. The weird part is that the evacuation order seems to have come from the leader of the Venta Belgarum bureau and looking at the map I can see that is the bureau in winchestre.

That's all well and good but there are skeletons everywhere suggesting a fight, one of them had a sword in his mouth. So It seems clear this bureau was under attack and it looks like the leader of the bureau walled himself in with all his scrolls and his treasure before dying in his chair. So now I'm wondering....

Did he send the evacuation order and templars saw the messagers leaving the bureau secret entrance so they attacked the bureau before this particular one could evacuate?
Did the bureau get defeated and the templars sent a message with his name to the bureaus to get the rest of the assassins to leave themselves without further bloodshed?

If so that would be genius of the templars, why risk some getting away and being a problem in the future when you can impersonate the leader who is dead in the chair next to you and command the rest of the assassins to go bother another country. Gives england to the templars for centuries and wouldnt be surprising if they found all the knowledge they needed about other bureaus inside the Venta Belgarum bureau.

Any thoughts on how this played out? Again if it's a spoiler for later in the game please dont tell me anything more than "it's a spoiler you'll find out later"