Assassin’s Creed IV goes to piracy

The next installment of Ubisoft‘s Assassin’s Creed series, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, was announced a few weeks ago. It was a surprising announcement from Ubisoft. In the grand scheme of gaming developers, most game sequels take about 2-3 years to create, develop and release.

In Black Flag, just like the other games in the series will have you play two stories of the same coin, past and present. In the present day, you play as an Abstergo agent brought in solely to investigate Desmond Miles memories. In the past, you play as Edward Kenway, a notorious pirate and privateer and a member of the Assassin Order. Edward Kenway is also the father of Haythem Kenway and grandfather of Ratonhnhaké:ton or Connor Davenport from Assassin’s Creed 3.

As is the normalcy of these games and their historic points intertwined in the plot, the player will meet a few characters notoriously known in their time. In Black Flag, the player will meet notorious pirate Blackbeard, Benjamin Hornigold, Anne Bonny, Calico Jack and Charles Vane.

Black Flag will feature an expansive open world with three major cities, Havana, Kingston and Nassau. Theses cities will feature your average run of the mill Assassin’s Creed cities, meaning all the free-running, building climbing you could want. As well as the cities, the game will also feature 50 explorable islands with many mysteries and great treasures. In past Assassin’s Creed games, they say you have an open world to explore but it’s not necessarily true. Black Flag will have a more open world feel, as well as fewer restrictions on the player.

The game will feature a 60/40 land to sea ratio for exploration. Ranging from exploring an old abandoned lighthouse to traveling into unfriendly waters. You can expect more of everyone’s favorite thing from Assassin’s Creed 3, ship battles. It is definitely one of my favorite parts of AC3. I think the only thing Ubisoft could do better, besides making more missions, is to add the random wave generator from Uncharted 3. The wave generator produces synthetic, dynamic, game-changing waves; no two waves come at the ship the same.

I think we can expect an interesting multiplayer experience. Ubisoft would be dumb to not include the very popular online game modes like Manhunt and Wanted; but with the expansion of the naval system, I think we can expect epic ship battles in our future.

Overall, I am extremely excited for this game. First reason being the swiftness with creating and getting the game out to the fans. Second being that Ubisoft has improved on my favorite missions, the naval missions. I also think it is really awesome that in Black Flag, the player will be able to go the many small islands of the Caribbean and explore them.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag will be released October 29, 2013 and on PC December 31, 2013. This is a game you definitely do not want to miss, get out there a pre-order it.

Destiny awaits

Everyone knows who the developing company, Bungie, is. The sole innovators of changing the face of first-person shooters with the Halo Series. They brought to us a world, much like our own, on the same Earth but in a different time. We all fell in love with the Master Chief and Cortana the AI providing Master Chief with all the tactical information he could need whilst trying to stop the universe from being taken over by the Covenant and the Flood.

All the fans were sad when Bungie announced they would not be doing anymore Halo games. But since the announcement of Destiny, all the fans are getting really excited again. At the 2009 E3 conference, Bungie had posters that read “Destiny Awaits” while many vague statements were given from 2009-2011 when they finally were willing to talk. All that was known was that “Project Tiger” is actually a project to develop Destiny.

The plot from the Destiny Website explains it as this:

           “Everything changed with the arrival of the Traveler. It sparked a Golden Age when our civilization spanned the solar system, but it didn’t last. Something hit us, knocked us down. The survivors built a city beneath the Traveler, and have begun to explore our old worlds, only to find them filled with deadly foes.

You are a Guardian of the last safe city on Earth, able to wield incredible power. Defend the City. Defeat our enemies. Reclaim all that we have lost.

Be brave.” http://www.destinythegame.com/info

“The next evolution of entertainment — an incredible story set within a newly imagined, always-connected universe filled with action and adventure. Create your character, forge your legend by defeating powerful foes, and earn unique and customizable weapons, gear, and vehicles. Unprecedented variety of FPS gameplay, including story, cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes combined with public and social activities.” http://www.destinythegame.com/info

I included Bungie’s description of the game because who better to tell you than the creators themselves. From my understanding of the game, from different blogs and speaking with Gamestop employees, the game is an open-world first-person shooter that will have awesome online capabilities. The best game I can compare the online Cooperative and Competitive modes to is the Borderlands series. Borderlands features a first-person shooter system and cooperative capabilities with up to four other players joining your lobby to play the story or just kill stuff. This is what Destiny will have but I think it will have it on a much larger scale.

Overall, I am very excited for this game. Bungie is known for being on the Xbox, but the good news for everyone, Bungie will be releasing Destiny on the Xbox 360 consoles and on the Ps3 and Ps4 consoles. For now, we can expect Destiny October 6th, 2013. You will definitely want to get your pre-orders in now, this is a game you will not want stores to be out of stock on. Head to your local Gamestop and pre-order and you will receive a free double-sided poster for the game.

What expectations do you have for this game?

 

Runescape is back to those who remember

This post doesn’t really have anything to do with Playstation, but seeing the news got me really excited for days gone by.

 

A month or so ago, Jagex, the creators of the hit MMORPG Runescape, brought out a poll for all the players. The poll was whether players would like to see the old Runescape come back to life. They ended up actually short of their voting goals of 500k and 750k and ended with 450k+ votes. But the awesome, incredibly nice developers at Jagex decided that even though their goals weren’t met, they would be bringing about 40 servers online 100% dedicated to the pre-2007 update to Runescape. This is just a trial run for now and it is free with your Runescape subscription if you are interested.

To be honest I probably won’t end up playing the game again. But the 2007 update to Runescape was the main reason I stopped playing the game in the first place. Hearing the news just makes me remember the sweet bliss of playing this game for the first time, back in 2003 when it still wasn’t very popular yet.

Hearing this news will you end up going back to playing just for the way the game originally was?