An innocuous lantern in Assassin’s Creed 

This video was not supposed to go public, sorry. Got called into work today on my day off and I wasn’t able to get to a computer to delete it before it went live. So now here we are. Edit// what happens is I make videos of really dumb ideas and then if they aren’t good I don’t publish them, but I always upload them so I can see how they “feel” next to my other content. So this one was supposed to just disappear into the abyss like the others but instead it leaked out because of a clerical error.

Comparing stepping on tomatoes while Skyrim NPCs just look at it to stepping on tomatoes with quantum physics while real life people just look at it is such a brilliant comparison.

GTA IV is the opposite of this phenomenon and that's why it remains one of my all-time favorite games. In GTA IV it's entirely conceivable that you can: throw a soda can at a pedestrian, who runs to throw a punch at you, but his swing is too wide and hits another guy in the head, and they start to brawl, which causes two cops to get out of their car and hold them at gunpoint, so the first guy takes out a gun and shoots back, and then the gunfire spooks a passing motorist, who veers and strikes a propane can on the roadside, which explodes and kills three pedestrians, and a responding ambulance strikes and kills another fleeing pedestrian via terrible driving, and so on...

In Oblivion if you shoot an arrow into a well bucket the bucket will hang in favor of the side with the arrow because it now has that added weight. The blew my tiny little high school brain away.

consistently impressed by your ability to make engaging content out of things that nobody else has really put a notable amount of thought into while playing these games

This is actually good content, I wish more people would be making videos with this old-school rough charm to it, ironically enough it also feels lively.

Physical whimsy: the signs in Ocarina of Time can be cut... but not only can they be cut, they pay attention to how you are cutting them and cut off the appropriate part of the sign at the appropriate angle.

I love lamp

This is eerily similar to when I found out that ceiling lamps in Dishonored 2 had physics. They even cast dynamic shadows when you move them.

As soon as I saw the lantern move I thought of the elder scrolls signs, I remember being obsessed in Oblivion back in the day that you could shoot signs with arrows and theyd swing from the momentum. Another weird one for me was cutting up the signs in Ocarina of Time, not only were they destructible which felt odd but different sword hits would cut them differently and theres just no reason for it at all which is kind of mind blowing.

It's interesting you note this, because the "Director's Cut" of AC1, which is currently the version available on PC (Steam), actually does add objects that interact more with the physical environments. Market stands, or other such places in the world were given jugs/pots/jars which can be knocked over and broken by the player. I also think the pot carriers' pot interacts with the physics.

If Altair trips and falls a far distance, or if he's pushed off of a ledge by being attacked or failing an assassination, he will fall organically based off of the obstacles he faces in his descent. This typically occurs when he is pushed and his back hits a fence when he falls.

Back in the day we used to "warthog jump" or launch halo vehicles and ride them into space or strange places. But why? If you had just given me a jetpack or noclip, i would have never wanted to play the game in that strange way. The rules give us context for breaking and bending them.

There's an infamous glitch in AC2, during the Altair flashback section, there's a weirdly difficult section where you have to climb onto the beam of one of these lamps. To actually climb on top of it you have to do a parkour move that you literally don't have to do at any other point in the game which is why its so difficult. The glitch is that for some reason Altair can climb it in a way that breaks the physics of the lamp and it spins around the map at a high velocity. It's a weirdly common glitch that its suprising it wasn't patched.

Great video! Love the possibility for a new series: unremarkable and odd physics in .... I've always found the ragdoll physics in the Dark Souls games pretty weird. Roll onto a body and it flops into the air like an empty plastic bag and gets stuck into your player model.

In Jak and Daxter:The Precursor Legacy, Jak interacting with water actively changed his appearance. When i was like 5 and i couldn't get past the more difficult parts (again, 5), i'd just run around the sandbox and watch the ways Jak interacted with the world. My favorite was when he'd get even a little wet, his clothes would start dripping, and would take some time to dry. For a game that was a pioneer in open-world platforming, my favorite details were always in the water.

This makes me recall the very first time I played Oblivion. Sitting in the jail cell and making that chain wiggle was just magical for me as a teen.

It's not necessarily unexpected or even really naturalistic, but the GTAIV swing set and its physics have always stuck with me for obvious reasons.

I randomly got one of the employment stat videos recommended to me last week and I've been binging all your videos since. The combination of how niche the topics are paired with the level of detail you go into makes for a very interesting video.

In Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, you can run into people eating an apple. They'll drop it and it'll bounce accordingly. Very cute little detail for an older game.

Your ability to create engagement from the most pointless and unremarkable things is a national treasure and we thank you for your service.

The different kinds of suspension softness on cars in GTA 4 has always intrigued me.

the kind of hard hitting journalism that got me to subscribe to you to begin with

God I love this channel. It’s the perfect balance of mundane and profound

Also in Skyrim, the putting buckets on people’s heads letting you be undetected is pretty whimsical and fun. I’m glad they carried that over from oblivion.

I remember that stupid lamp from AC2. there's a flashback with altair and I think many people had a problem climbing a post because it had the lamp blocking

To jump outside of the scenario where you're sprinting off an edge and the game forces you to jump, hold *only* right trigger and tap legs. If you do this while standing still you'll go straight up, which is useful for grabbing objects above your head when you don't have a wall nearby to reach them from. If you do this while moving you'll go up a bit and whatever direction you're moving, which is useful for grabbing nearby ledges about 6 feet up or higher without needing to run up the connecting wall. You can also jump in any direction while cat hanging, but in spite of being the most powerful movement feature in the game, this is somewhat beholden to the safety snapping feature and will occasionally do odd things like making you jump down instead of up. My favorite example of a manual jump spot is this little staircase in Damascus with a lache bar above it that can only be grabbed using a manual jump. If you do this you'll land in exactly the same spot you would have if you just ran down the stairs, the only difference is that it looked cooler. It's the perfect microcosm of Assassin's Creed movement as a style-based system in which you'll reach your destination all the same, but pushing your ability to connect parts of the level design that can only be connected using advanced maneuvers will make the difference between satisfying and unsatisfying movement. Rather than Breath of the Wild, a closer point of comparison with smoother game feel would be something like Sunset Overdrive with lots of bounce pads, wires, and and corner bars that all lead into each other and encourage you to hold a perfect combo all the way from your starting point to your destination. For an Assassin's Creed game without a jump button, please see AC Origins, in which you can only jump while sliding down pyramids Assassin's Creed - November 13, 2007 Super Mario Galaxy (NA) - November 12, 2007 Gentle push: Dynamically chooses which of Altair's hands is closest to the closest NPC and re-paths their navmesh to avoid your personal space. Can be initiated whether the NPC is close or far and will have a smoother or more aggressive outcome accordingly Throw: Stumbles the target in any direction with a ton a force that dynamically transitions them first into ragdolling, then into the floored state, from which they can be executed with the hidden blade before they get back up and reengage. If they bump into another NPC, the effect radiates to them too, but it usually stops after two consecutive targets. If they bump into a wall there's a canned animation that doesn't blend very smoothly Grab break: Mostly the same as throw, but they always stumble straight back in the direction they grabbed you from Shove: Stumbles the target back shortly and sharply and ragdolls them straight into a floored state. This can radiate too Kills via damage: Quick ragdoll that leaves them in a slow bleedout state as seen at 0:27. This is actually negative action feedback telling you that you performed your combo incorrectly and you need to have better timing next time. Positive action feedback in Assassin's Creed looks like a canned takedown animation with much more spectacle and usually an automatic camera angle change, which is the only way to activate the fear system. In all cases except the special counter knockout, this will kill your opponent instantly, showing that you used the move correctly Falling: NPCs will flail about wildly and scream their heads off before transitioning into a floored state if they survive the fall or die if they don't. AC Valhalla doesn't have this feature, and you can tell something feels wrong when you throw someone off a cliff and they freeze in midair Flailing: Crashing into an NPC while sprinting will cause Altaïr to stumble and become harder to turn. Crashing into a second NPC while flailing will ragdoll him into a floored state. This is negative action feedback for not using shove or slowing down while running near crowds Terror: Most terrifying actions will just play a canned animation on a random guard nearby to telegraph that he's vulnerable to assassination, but if you get enough consecutive kills with a high enough aggression rating and low enough damage taken, they'll dynamically re-path their navmeshes to get as far away from you as possible. This also applies to beggars when you draw a blade after they start approaching, which is positive action feedback for responding with the correct social behavior for the situation Hanging platforms: These are supposed to swing, but there's a few reasons they may not be working for you. Try locking your framerate to 60FPS, turning on Vsync, or trying the Steam version if you're on Ubisoft Connect. This should also help with desynchronizing from leaps of faith. We know for a fact Altaïr's knife belts don't visually deplete to show his remaining ammo without HUD on the Ubisoft Connect version, which is actually a pretty important feature since the HUD was a last minute addition that clashes with the world design

In AC1 you can dive through the market stalls; you run up to them from the side and Altair will jump through them. And something through the AC games that i've always been intrigued by is the different animations and effects for assasination depending on your position and whether you are in low-profile or high-profile mode.

I’m reminded of how some games will create a trail of footsteps in the sand or snow, only for it to end like 20 feet later. Since it constantly magically fills in it looks less real than if they had just left it alone entirely.

This video makes me think of the recent Half-Life documentary, around the 16 minute mark. "The point I would make is, if I go up to a wall and shoot it, to me, it feels like the wall is ignoring me. I'm getting a narcissistic injury when the world is ignoring me." When you talk about the game feeling like Lego, the feeling of "on rails", canned animations, I think back to this quote because I think it exemplifies why that lantern is interesting. It's not that it's necessarily an interesting item, it is a light source on a stick, but it is one of the few things that you have total agency over as a player to move and see react, you can knock it back and forth, you can make it swing, you can try and make it land on your head, and it accomplishes that not by providing a "swing the lantern" button. It just provides the the object, the physics to move it, and the freedom to interact with it. It's maybe a bit of an overanalysis sure (but if there is any place for it, it's on a 6 minute video of a random lamp in a 16 year old game). But I think it's a fun little microcosm of what gaming can uniquely provide. Sandboxes that respond to player actions are fun, and the more you get away from the that the more "Lego" everything feels.

In the first Borderlands (and, I suppose, all other entries in the series), corpses have physics up until a certain point. They can be damaged and even launched (w/ a high-knockback weapon, like a Jakobs shotgun) soon after death, but they're on a timer from when they were last hit: after a set amount of time, they become intangible. In the first Halo, corpses are immovable but give a satisfying sound effect and blood spatter (Covenant elites especially) when melee'd. Subsequent titles added movement iirc. Might be cause for investigation.

one of those moments I like was in Fallout 4, there is a seesaw at a playground, it not only works, but if you put on object of weight "20" on one side and other of weight "10" on the other, the side with more weight is lower. I like this video, please make more!

I was impressed by the sign bonking physics in the Last Story. The whole game had more physics and interactions than it needed like being able to bump into people or knock anyone on the ground with bananas... and of course walking into signs like an oaf.

loving these videos about this strange niche observations next video should be 5 hours

AC1 is very cozy for the nostalgia but has some eeriness to it that I could never quite explain, I think this video helps with that in the fact that it feels devoid of reality whilst being based in reality. Heavy stuff maaaan, more AC1 would be great! Maybe the devs also saw the importance of those lamps because in AC2 you can swing from them.

Fun video, I would like to see more Assassins Creed videos from you!

My thing is: Body Parts in Gears of War. Every other object is completely static, and the player character adn enemies are very on-rails (the movement is extremely restrictive like you're glued to the ground), guns and ammo are frozen in air, all interactable things are just floating meshes. BUT, when you kill an enemy, whether they die as a whole piece, or explode into giblets, they are completely physically unbound, and it was always really fun to shoot dead bodies in that game for this reason. Another incredible video props for evolving the video topics. Many youtubers would just stick to the same format 100% and be too afraid to try different stuff, so thanks for putting in the work (not that i don't LOVE the other series. I still want more of those too, just like the variety and drive to create new stuff too)

I spent a good portion of Amnesia: The Dark Descent dragging chairs with me because I found it so delightfully hilarious. As a youngin', I was also fascinated that you could cut signs down in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

I meant to watch your other Assassin's Creed video, but since I haven't yet this is my first video of yours! Love the niche concept and would love to see future AC titles covered!

Very important discussion that the society needed today

This video amounts to "I liked it when this object has physics" but you explained it in such a meaningful and genuinely insightful way that i loved every second, thx

On my way to start a parasocial relationship with this brave new lamp content

i love that you're covering ac1 in such detail

You can absolutely jump whenever you want. Press R2 (high profile mode) + X (jump once R2 is held) and you'll do a regular jump. If R2 is not held, you will pray, because you'll be in low profile. If you do R2 + X + forward, you will jump forward. It does not need to be a contextual action or near a ledge, the character will always do it if you command it. I don't know why this even has to be explained, I don't know if it's a joke that went over my head because you do jump later in the video. Regardless, I really like your videos.

This game was mind blowing at the time, but i guess you'd had to have been an adult at the time who remembers older games

Legos versus playing with clay is a freaking great and succinct way of describing the design and feel of the two games. Beautiful. Also, I'm imagining something like metal gear solid V as the mid-point between the two. Smooth legos. You have to love the ways your brain interacts differently with each.

I like how personal your writing style feels and the topics you focus on are always interesting to my fractured brain!

I liked this video. I love when you do really long form content too, but I also appreciate something like this which is really looking at one specific thing and is more of a quick watch. It's funny how quick that light accelerates when you hit it. It really SHOOTS away from your head.

The second game improves on a lot of this, I think. It feels more alive, in the cities you go to and the people and things you interact with. In any case, great video!

"I've always been fascinated by lights.. in.. video games." -Any 'Definitely Not a Moth' Austin

My favorite physics quirk in Skyrim is when you step on a skeleton. The bones go flying in every direction, you get shot off a few feet, and sometimes you even take damage.

“Nothing else that you walk into has this kind of physical life” me looking at Altair’s flowing robes the whole time:

I had a literal wow moment playing Oblivion as a kid for the exact reason you highlighted in Skyrim. I remember the signs in the Imperial City were static, so I assumed they would be everywhere else. I think I was running and jumping around in Bruma waiting for the shops to open, possibly leveling my acrobatics and athletic skills at the same time. I noticed I could jump high enough to hit the signs and I was just expecting to see this janky looking sudden stop, face mushing thing from a cartoon. Nope, the sign swung out of the way and I actually said aloud "Wow!". I was easily entertained as a kid. Also, praying is absolutely cool. Praying helps me with my anxiety and depression. It's just all about belief. If you believe you're being listened to, it can be a wonderful thing. Now I'm beginning to feel like that jogger from Bojack Horseman. "You just have to do it every day..." 😝😅

Building with Legos vs building with clay, love that comparison. Open world games are so different from each other. I also love that "door in a theme park" comparison, that's exactly how most games feel to me. I would love more commentary on physics if you come up with anything else to talk about

Please, more of this... I need it.

Whenever I leave whiterun I love pushing the drunken huntsman sign. Getting that extra hit of immersion

Can’t remember if this has come up before, but the first time you could pick up a basketball and try to make a basket in Half-Life 2 will always stick with me as magical. Thief Dark Project had some really cool physics moments I remember, just a very living environment for 1998.

I love these kinds of videos, focusing on the small things or places in games that rarely get any attention in a normal playthrough. Would love to see more of this, keep up the great work!

I used to play a lot of GTA San Andreas on my ps2 and I quickly learned that hedges and bushes were as solid as a wall. When I played gta 5 for the first time i literally gasped when I could drive my car through a hedge ( I learned later this does not apply to every hedge though, just some of them)

“Whimsical moments of physics” could be a series in itself. Despite how much people hated the game, Forspoken had really impressive crate/box breaking physics which was completely unnecessary. Hogwarts Legacy also actually put physics objects in breakable crates and boxes which I’m so rarely used to seeing any game do ever. Glad this video accidentally went live!

My biggest Skyrim memory is, within like.. the first 30 minutes or so of starting the game, I ran into one of the signs in Riverwood, and was fascinated by the fact it was actually moving. So, I kept running into it... and was killed by the physics of it going too fast.

That vaseline sign really got me going. Thanks for sticking with the upload! Have been enjoying your content all week, keep it up!

007 nightfire the first game I played that you could ride moving objects with out having to enter them with a button or eny animation to tie you to the vehicle.

The reason it comes down to lamps/signs as physics objects are fun to deduce from a "why tho" way. Conclusion: because they A) are in small number, so it's unlikely to cause a performance issue if too many try to move at once, B) are in fixed positions, so you can't move enough together to cause an issue bypassing A, and C) they are perceivable as light and relatively unimportant, and have no gameplay effects, so their being physics based can't cause any problems are the actual game. They didn't do it for bushes because of A, they don't do it for weapons/objects you can move because of B (Skyrim does, which is why that's a common way to break the game), and they don't do it for this like that hanging platform because of C.

great great vid, I love when you focus on a weird detail like this. it's kinda like the snow one. thank u!!

Love this video, and fully on board for the inevitable wave of aesthetic appreciation for the PS3/X360 era that the internet is hurtling towards. And Assassins Creed is kind of the perfect entry point to it IMO - a perfect encapsulation of the moment in video games when it came out.

The sign outside the pub in last story made me grin every time. I kept forgetting it was there, iirc it’s the only sign like this. Also bananas in your bow, everyone says something. On the wii no less.

Exanina has fantastic physics. It's always funny when you trip over a stone in a dark hallway. Never gets old.

Super Mario Galaxy came out in 2007, which really shows how game mechanics really can be varied and contemporary games might feel very different from one another.

You CAN jump whenever you want, you just need to switch to high profile mode

I think a universal experience of *Dark Souls* must be noticing how dramatically and cartoonishly all the corpses are affected by the physics, as any battle in which you slay a great number of foes ends with you likely having to walk through them, and see their limbs be tangled and tossed about by your (unaffected) movement

That was such a nice video! You're great at talking about super specific stuff, could listen to that all day

This is the greatest content Austin has ever released.

If you want another suggestion for Odd and Unremarkable Places, I think there are definitely several to be had in Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. Especially in the main city of Gran Soren, which is surprisingly well detailed for the time - but has a lot of odd corners and sections of the rooftops and city walls which you can get to with a little effort. There's also a fairly large outdoors environment with odd places.

Every video released by this channel is like a fever dream and I am meth levels of addicted

I know shitting on Assassin's Creed is popular, but I loved this game and all the sequels. I want you to actually look at this game again and remind yourself that is from 2007. That is over 15 years ago yet this game looks incredible and feels incredible, even by today's standards. It looks better than a lot of games today and even though the story progression and gameplay is weird, there is so much that is great about this game, you don't see them made like this anymore. Every game nowadays is so boring and formulaic compared to games that actually pushed technology with a creative vision, which felt common in the 2000s.

The pool tables in Fallout 3. They don't work as pool tables, but there's physics for sure.

thanks for making videos about my favourite assassin's creed game 💗

From the PoV of a game designer, it’s possible the game’s NPC pathfinding couldn’t consider head-height obstructions that don’t also extend to the ground, so they employed this physics to ensure they don’t have someone walking aimlessly against a rigid lamp.

I love your ability to find the most random things and just make an engaging rant about it

4:21 bottom right, jar physics

In morrowind you can't move things that much, but i love the way that if you kill things in the sky they'll just like. Fall. Like they fall and land like you've just shot a bird. Which i guess makes sense, but to me it was cool.

2:28 i think it is one of these things that became lost with time as open worlds became more common but the parkour alone in AC gave the player so much freedom of movement and exploration that made everyone drop their jaws, it wss a big deal(Kojima was so impressed that to this day kojima still puts a little bit climbing and verticality in his games) i dare to say AC1 had the same spot in people's minds that Breath of the wild currently occuppy,

4:30 AFAIK these types of hanging platforms do actually have physics on them, though it's very subtle. Sometimes the physics can go a little crazy and it becomes more obvious.

It's very entertaining to listen to you talk about benign things you're passionate about. You have a talent for talking about small things that no one else would speak about

You talk about the most obscure things in video games and that’s why I subbed long ago. Keep it up

Really enjoying this sort of laid back analysis regarding the mundane

I actually really appreciate your perspective. I didn't realize I felt the same way until you said it.

It's like the Skyrim store signs. Oh nevermind he fucking showed it 1 minute later.

Praying, the opposite of jumping. Truth to live by.

The torches in AC Origins. The first time i played it I was positively surprised by the dynamic nature of it. You cannot only make light with it but also burn stuff and even burn yourself while standing in bushes

"If someone was mucking about, stepping on our tomatoes in a quantum-physical space, you too would just be standing there looking" has got to be among the most thought-provoking things ive ever heard

A new Any Austin video is a nice way to improve a Monday afternoon. 🙂 I was impressed by the bushes in Hyrule Field of OoT moving when we ran through them, back in 1998.

Similar to how you sprinted into the lamp and it swung around its post, if you take a springing leap down onto the lamps, they build so much momentum that they stretch and swing several feet away from their base for a long time

I don't know why but this is one of my favorite videos you've done.

I always really loved the rock-it launcher in fallout three. Especially because you could load it up with stuff like baseballs or gnomes or sacs of viscera. That game didnt feel like it was quite ready for that weapon and especially in vats, it could be fun to watch stuff bounce around in slow motion

5:29 If I saw somebody save the city from a dragon, consume its soul, and gain the ability to send people flying by yelling at them, I'm not going to make a fuss about him kicking around some fruits and vegies or spinning a sign for fun.

I would fucking LOVE to see more assassins creed. Maybe the arcitecture in it? I just loved wandering around the buildings.

I'm not sure if you intentionally had the music sync up with his steps at 2:11, but I enjoyed it very much regardless. New sub, love your content! These small details in games are super interesting and your deadpan humor is hilarious.

BotW/TotK had to take so much influence from this game I played this back in the day so keep the content coming. I’ve been inspired to play through again since you posted the last AC video, and realized I was young then and wasn’t playing the game at all but having a middle eastern GTA V jihad/pilgrimage and now I’m older and actually playing and hear me when I say I soon will be checking these lamps out