We Deserve Better Than Assassin's Creed Unity 

“Wasted Potential” sums up the entire Assassins creed IP perfectly

The story feels like Ubisoft gave its writers a set of things they wanted it to include, ordered them to finish in one week, and made the game out of the first draft with no editorial reviews at all.

I'll never forgive Unity for focusing on a boring love story instead of the FRENCH REVOLUTION THE GAME IS SET IN

Worst part of not being able to counter guns is that previous titles had a solution for that in human shields.

20:40 I can't count the number of times in Unity I was fighting a hoard of 15 guys and absolutely slaying them until 6 of them decided to whip out the glock and end my life before I could even reach them.

Glad to see someone critically analyzing this game and not just giving it the “hidden gem” treatment. I did a play-through of the entire series recently and Unity frustrated me the most out of all of them(on a moment-to-moment basis, especially with stealth). Plenty of great potential, but the honest truth is that it doesn’t live up to it. Still beautiful though!

I think the best way to describe this game, both for good and ill, is "It has its moments". It has its moments where the Parkour works and looks amazing, but it also has its moments where it is incredibly clunky to control and watch. It has its moments where the combat looks like a choreographed spectacle, but it also has its moments where it just stops functioning. It has its moments where the stealth is the best in the series, but it also has its moments where it has literally the worst. It has its moments where the story and acting flow wonderfully, but it also has its moments where it is almost as bad as Valhalla if not worse. It has its moments. But its good moments are often not enough to outweigh its bad moments.

I think the difficulty with the French Revolution, similar to the American Revolution, is that so many events are well documented. AC3 was basically a tour of the entire war for independence to the point people mocked Connor for somehow being at every notable event. Lots of the best parts of the Revolution are in this game but they needed more focus and cohesion with the other aspects of the story. The narrative of the French Revolution would have made much more sense if it felt like the Assassins and Templars were actually meddling in the Revolution instead of feeling incidental, and the star crossed lovers of Arno and Elise could have worked so well but all of these stories needed to be tied much closer together.

The story is exactly why I still haven't finished this game. While the gameplay can be a lot of fun, the story is so boring I can't bring myself to continue story missions a lot of the time. Just find myself doing side content around the city and soaking in the views. Great review bro!

People want AC to be more like Unity again. But there lies the irony. It was Unity itself that made people not want games like it ever again.

While I still mostly enjoy my playtime with Unity, every criticism you made is valid. Fantastic video once again!

This is now my favorite review or analysis of AC Unity I've ever seen. I thank you for making this video, and for also highlighting one critical point many creators who cover it _wish_ more people would actually hear whenever we say it. We _do_ complain and we _are_ often honest about the issues this game has, across the board. We really do deserve better than AC Unity, we deserve what AC Unity _promised_ to be, and it's something they never properly returned for a genuine second attempt at.

Rewriting history to turn what is universally considered a bad game into a "actually it's great" hidden gem type of thing, is a big trend that I really don't like.

I think that while the game was ahead of its time in terms of graphics, the story was mediocre at best, not engaging. The mechanical/gameplay changes were a step in the right direction, but it all felt so clunky and janky. Parkour was sometimes unresponsive and the animations unnatural, as if Arno was defying gravity with his long horizontal jumps. Stealth was something that Syndicate improved, adding whistling and a better cover system. I guess combat wasn't the worst, but I wasn't a fan. The unavoidable gun shots were annoying.

Thank you, God that we have an honest analysis of this game. I really wanted to love this game when it came out but everything noted in this video was what I noticed and had to accept as it was unfortunately never properly capitalized on. And ever since it baffles me that people want to go back to this. But I get it, they want the idea of what Unity was trying to be but never was. Hell, I want Unity to be what it never was, too.

For a while I've felt that Unity is incredibly ambitious, but Syndicate is consistently forgotten as the closest the series has got to perfecting its core ideas. Everything may be simplified from Unity, but it all works and is entirely readable. The carriages and boats provide unique parkour challenges Stealth has less options (no disguise for example) but has AI that responds realistically I, like all fans, want the ideas of Unity to be returned to. But whenever I want that type of game, Syndicate always attracts me more for these reasons

"Kill two dads in one hour" Oh, my god, how did I forget this? I was in hysterics when this unfolded, it was trying so hard to make me care. Probably not the tone they were going for.

You've quickly become one of my favorite channels, Jay. I like how you go in-depth with your points on and give a new perspective on them in a video essay format. Your channel will reach greater heights. Keep up the good work!

Calling your video a good take is an understatement-it hit the nail on the head of why this game is so beautiful yet utterly unplayable. While I didn't experience any bugs on my first playthrough, the story just felt so under done. There were the makings of a good story, but like every other part of this game it needed more time. If they had made Rogue the annual release that year, and gave Unity another year in the oven we'd be looking back at that game now as the game that reinvigorated the series for the next gen. I can't help thinking the series would be more genuinely "Assassin's Creed" had this game been given the time and resources it needed to stand tall. Now every AC game feels like a Witcher knockoff because they over corrected Unity's flaws and chased trends.

AC Unity, for its story, is like a trilogy but your just getting the cliffnotes all compacted into one game. And yet even then, you feel like the cliffnotes are leaving out many details.

I have never met a more flocking fanbase than Assassin's Creed. A few people say a thing and then everybody bleats the same thing repeatedly as if it's their new gospel. I couldn't believe how much Unity is put on a pedestal. Have they never played it? It's....not amazing.

I remember I platinumed _Unity_ out of pure spite when it came out, lol. But in doing so, I did learn to appreciate it. People may look back on it with rose-colored glasses now, but I can't really blame them. If they actually worked on that system for a few years & really perfected that level of parkour, it would be amazing. It was a step in the right direction, but it never had a chance to live up to its full potential with that yearly release bs.

Bruh how is ur voice so calming..i can hear u read anything and ill believe it

Extremely good video Jay. I couldn't stay for all of your points but for the ones I did just so well said. Keep up with the content, can't wait for the next one.

Gotta get my snacks ready for this video. I love the long ones.

DUDE, I was waiting in the combat part for you saying something about the guns. Got so relieved when you started talking about them ❤️ love the vid.

an interesting thing i thought of this game of how anti revolutionary unity is, ac3 was good at showing both sides of the conflict showing that either side was willing to use and take whatever furthers their individual vendettas, whilst unity is just revolution bad, it’s weird because in the marketing it was shown that you would be fighting for the revolution, killing the kings guards and fighting against tyranny, just for the game to be anti revolutionary boot licking fest. it almost seems that none of the teams we’re communicating at all.

Honestly one of th only e assassin's creed youtubers worth taking seriously

I always wonder whenever I see someone praising how good the parkour was in Unity if they actually played the game, or just saw some cool video? Yes, you can do some cool stuff in the game. Just like DudePerfect can do crazy things in real life. Both after many retries.

This game really needs a current-gen remake imo

games really are unlike any other artform or medium, like im watching arno dynamically mix animations to parry each enemy attack and its beautiful and the artistry and technical knowhow on display are insane, and yet if if doesnt feel good its bad simple as that

I blindly supported this game as the "best" of the series until this video made me realize why I couldn't even get halfway through the game my most recent time trying. Now I'm actually giving Syndicate a chance and finding it much more enjoyable than Unity was.

Sometimes I got softlocked jumping in Notre Dame and flying forever in place not being able to land. Once I broke my arm apparently and all animations got wonky. I also remember the cartoony "5 guards in a row fall for the same hiding spot" encounters. Missed out on the platinum, because I did not feel like doing the multiplayer sync kills and stuff. Overall I had fun with it, but would never touch it again since it launched.

You forgot the "jumping cloth physics" in-between camera cuts!. Also, the fact that there's no safe profile to start a new game off. You literally can't start a new game without somehow deleting your previous profile or just replay individual missions through the progression tracker.

Thank you for actually acknowledging the flaws of this game and not just blindly praising it because it isn’t the new games

great to see your in depth thoughts on Unity - I look forward to your videos

AC Unity was the final nail in the coffin for me. I was a long time fan starting with AC 1. But after playing Unity, I knew that the AC that I loved was gone. Both narratively and mechanically.

Excellent video! I'm playing Syndicate lately and, despite removing manual jump, the game feels far more responsive and consistent than Unity in its moment to moment gameplay. Unity overly focused on fidelity over gameplay which runs contrary to their ambitions of crafting sandbox assassination missions where planning and precise execution should matter. Syndicate got hate for being formulaic, but for a game with significantly shorter development time than Unity, it salvaged the hell out of its wreckage into something that is safely enjoyable.

Great video Jay. Just found your channel, sure you're going to be big. I will say, I don't necessarily think Unity is incredible, but I do have a greater affection for it now than when it launched. But that affection is largly directly due to disappointment with the newer games. Unity isn't perfect by any means, but it feels the prototype amd proof of concept of how they could have furthered the original identity of AC. They may not have been successful, but they were trying to make improvements to stealth and parkour, densify the city architecture and crowds, and put an even greater and emphasis on assassinations. I think Unity could have been the beginning of recitalizing AC, adressing fan concerns of the franchise going stale without needing to completely reinvent it turn it into a whole new genre of game. I'm one of those who is really disappointed in the direction the series went after Syndicate, and I can't help but look back at Unity as a huge missed lesson. Ubisoft just thought we were tired of their formula when Unity got bad reviews. But personally, I just wanted them to refine the formula. Oh, and release a functioning piece of software.

Oh damn I've been binging your videos the whole day at work and didn't notice this one is just a few hours old. Fell in love with ur content man, keep it up :)

The way so many people called this a "hidden gem" made me expect a lot going into this on my first playthrough, but man, was I in for a flaming train ride. Honestly, I enjoyed a lot about this, but I think this game has actually become overrated in online circles. Additionally, great video Jay, agree with practically all your points!

I think most of the praise unity gets this days is due to short video plataforms, the game is simply gorgeous, and the animations are incredible, so seeing it on shorts or tik tok for 30 secs, being optimized by someone who practiced a lot, makes it look a lot better than it really is.

Content like this is why I’m subscribed, thank you.

Really good video. Your effort deserve way more attention

My biggest problem with all the parkour systems after brotherhood (which had a wall jump added to the second one) that they look nice and thats it. Everything is automated and what happens when everything is automated? they got rid of the parkour riddles. You just climb because its cool. Thats it. You dont think anymore you just press a button and the protagonist does everything else. the climbing become so boring it got almost irrelevant in assasins creed syndicate when they implemented the grappling hook.

Unity had amazing potential but itclearly needed an extra year of development. The game can be quite enjoyable and does some impressive things - it has huge crowds, ceautiful buildings and pretty flashy parkour. Unfortunately, it also cut a lot of great features from the previous games or went in the wrong direction. Overall it feels unfinished and broken. The parkour has cool animations, but it's clunky, imprecise and floaty. The combat is harder than before, but it's repetitive, uninteresting and it lacks the flair of previous games. The stealth is functional but barebones and unimaginative. Unity has so many fundamental issues that go well beyond bad performance or bugs: The controls are clunky and imprecise; stealth kills and finishers often don't connect with enemies in believable ways; you can't use the hidden blade in combat; there are very few gadgets and they don't have any interesting combat moves (like the hidden pistol, rope dart or even snares had in previous games); you can't carry bodies (why? All games since ACII had that feature); you can't have multiple weapons like the sword and a dagger (you are limited to one main weapon at a time); the cherry bombs are still broken and enemies can't hear them; you can't whistle to attract enemies; there are no combos or finishers with a pistol; regular soldiers don't carry muskets like they did in ACIII; the story is short and uninteresting; Arno becomes boring and loses all his charisma after he becomes the assassin; the romance between Arno and Elise doesn't work; the main villain is weak and forgettable; the piece of Eden makes no sense; the game wasted an opportunity to feature Connor; historical characters are pretty boring (apart from maybe one scene with Napoleon); the side content is weak; there are way too many pointless collectibles; the customization is mid and most cosmetic items are ugly af; the co-op isn't properly integrated into the story and it feels detached from the rest of the game. We could go on for hours. Unity is simply a wasted opportunity. It had some great ideas and it does some things well but overall it's an unfinished and unpolished mess of a game.

Just found your channel and I like your videos man. Keep the good work and the good quality.

I would 100% watch longform essays from you on every AC game

Another great, and necessary, video. Unity will always be a game I really like but it's hard to truly love, for all the reasons you lay out here.

every few months i get a strong urge to try out unity since as a photo and video guy the tone mapping and lighting in unity is still maybe the best in any game ever, hopefully this video will convince me otherwise cause i couldnt be assed waiting thru the download lol

People who praise Unity mindlessly should watch this video. It had the potential, but it just could not reach it.

Another great video, underrated RU-vid channel

I just want to say that I found this video fascinating despite the fact I gave up on AC after 3. I don't even like this series anymore but your videos and passion for the franchise is always great to watch. Keep up the good work!

Deserved a sub my man. I did only one video so far (on bad Valhalla stealth fittingly), and i can only imagine how much work this took. Keep at it !

I am replaying recently and I found that some of the issues are fixed from my earlier playthrough. Like the stealth and enemy detection being more realistic like you can still kill a guard before he has a chance to alert other guards unless they are around. It no longer alerts everyone unless they can literally see or hear you killing their buddy.

I love the fantasy this game presents but it is really bad objectively. Like Whitelight said, the IDEA of Unity > Unity.

I liked Unity, but I don't mind your more harsh attitude towards it at all, since I don't think I even remember much of the game. The city was pretty, the customization was cool, the story was bad - that's it. The fact that I don't even remember like 90% of my time with Unity tells me it wasn't that great to begin with

They should've based this game more on the book 'The Scarlet Pimpernel'. It's the perfect inspiration for an AC france game. The only problem I had other than the modern accuracy of 18th century muskets was the story. It's just terrible... It should've been that Arno's obsession with Elise gets her killed. Elise was the one to get murdered defending her father with her own body when that guy came to kill him. Arno and Francois cry over Elise's dead body. After they come up with a revenge plan and Francois goes into hiding. Francois knowing about Arno's father's assassin background directs him to go seek out the brotherhood so he may learn the skills to find and bring justice to the men who killed Elise. In this version the Assassins would never know of Arno's templar connections cuz Elise is not in front of them. Francois knows he was betrayed so he uses Arno to sniff out and eliminate these Germain allied Templars.

Another big problem, partly mentioned, that in the big picture of the AC series, this game doesn't matter, it doesn't add anything meaningful to the plot. Sure many don't like how the modern day parts pull them out of the immersive gameplay, but they are also necessary for stringing together these games. We had Desmond's story that was actually solid in AC3, but also ended there. In BF and Rogue we had those first person investigation like parts that added a lot to what happened after AC3, and started the Juno plotline (which was dropped, what a shame). But here it's just a big fat nothing, and at the end of the story we also find out there was nothing really to find out. I'd say every other game added something to the AC Lore, except Unity.

Your description of the game as MMO like does a great job of describing why I bounced off the game. I have never been able to enjoy MMOs and Unity's side quests definitely instill the same sense of intense boredom.

I had been a huge french revolution geek as a teenager. So I always dreamed about gettint an assassins creed in this time period. The possibilities in terms of story, conflicts, personal motivations for characters, the war between assassins and templars, clash of philosophies seemed endless. For example you could revert the typical start of an ac game, where it isnt the templars who are the ones in power, but the assassins, who are leading the revolution from the shadows, while they are themselves divided in different camps, who dont see eye to eye on where they want the revolution to lead. And while the brotherhood is busy with themselves all the overwhelming events and voilence of the revolution, they fail to see the templars moving in the dark until its too late. They were thought to have died with the old society, but they went through a transformation themselves and infiltrated the revolutionaries. That would have been a great premise imo and even back then I expected something similar at least. But all I got as a story was ... that

I think you sum it up well. It's hard for people to resolve conflicting ideas about a single thing, so some folk look at this game and see only the failure, others see only the promise. To really understand the game, you have to see both. I think this review captures both nicely. When I look over the AC series, at all the games, and at each individual aspect and feature of each game, a pattern emerges. Everything appears amazing, but falls apart on closer inspection. With few exceptions, all the protagonists are charming and likeable. Yet few actually serve as meaningful protagonists, with anything like a substantial story. Arno's story is based on his love for Elise, and his tragedy would be palpable, if there was much to their relationship beyond the excellent acting and direction of the performers, and, of course, the gorgeous character modeling and quality performance capture. But beneath all those surface aspects is a love story with no depth, not consistency, no real thematic weight. And beyond that, as the series goes on, the entire framing story has become like a dead, rotten limb they refuse to just cut off, instead dragging it from sequel to sequel and flailing it limply as if to say "See, this still works. It's fine." The frame of AC is actually three frames, the present-day vs the past, the philosophical battle between Templars and Assassins, and the legacy of the Isu. But these three frames simply don't line up into a single narrative meaning. Each entry in the series promises this clunky plot will move forward, but instead, it becomes more and more convoluted as it spins it wheels. Unity itself is a series of scenes in search of a story, and the series as a whole is a series of ideas in search of a narrative. The writers seem to think just trotting out the ideas in game after game is enough. Not in my estimation. With each new game, I find myself increasingly at a loss to see the relevance of the present-day frame story, or the purpose of each mention of the Isu to the story at hand. None of it adds up. And as with the stories, the game play is always similarly underdeveloped. Individual bits will be crafted to perfection. The combat in the recent RPG titles manages to have a touch of depth and variety. But once it combines with the story progression, it falls victim to the classic RPG problem. You start underpowered, and by the mid-game, you're so absurdly OP it hardly counts as a game at all, let alone a challenging one. But to me, the series' core problem is best seen in its stealth. Stealth is the core identity of the AC games. But stealth requires polish, and polish is the where these games truly fail. Anyone who's ever done anything artistic for a living knows that the first 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and the last 20% takes 80% of the time. This is where Ubisoft in general, and the AC team in particular, make their fatal mistake. They don't take the time to polish what they've made. They've streamlined their process toward bloat rather than perfection. And so even with games like Valhalla, which isn't riddled with bugs like Unity, nothing is particularly well done. It's not so much a game as a bunch of game components and systems chucked into an engine any old how, in the hopes that fun will emerge on its own. The greatest failure of AC: Unity, to my mind, isn't that the game was bad, but that the wrong lesson was learned. Instead of realizing they needed to make a better game, they decided they should just make one that's totally different. Don't get me wrong, I think the RPG format was a good direction for the series, a natural evolution. But while they didn't end up as badly broken as Unity, they made the same mistake, prioritizing "more" over "better." They took an extra year to develop AC: Origins, but instead of spending that time polishing and perfecting, they spent it bloating. They made larger games, but they're still undercooked. There's a famous Mark Twain quote, “I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.” That sums up everything wrong with AC games. Three frame stories where there should be one. Ten chapters when there should be four. A dozen half-baked game mechanics, all conflicting one another, because they didn't want to take the time to make sure five would interact seamlessly. A game series that tries to be all things to everyone, that never quite pleases anyone.

you forgot the replayability, on pc its literally impossible to replay the story and the game is boring once you finished everything

I'm replaying Unity right now as I finally have a PC powerful enough that the game looks how I imagined it would back in 2014 lol. Funnily enough, the one phrase I keep yelling while playing it is "wasted potential". So many good ideas were either implemented extremely poorly, or were dropped immediately in the games after Unity and never revisited. The parkour is so, so close to being right and they never used a system even remotely like it ever again.

I think AC Unity is the closest the series ever got to the IDEA of an Assassin's Creed game that started with AC1, but on practice, it falls so shortly, it's honestly disheartening to see. The parkour system is the perfect parkour system for this idea, but it doesn't work properly most of the time. The stealth system the perfect stealth system for this idea, but i doesn't work properly most of the time. The combat, the story. The only thing I think is done greatly is the world, Paris, it is dense, it is realistic and is a perfect place for an Assassin's Creed experience. It pains me so much that Ubisoft, instead of keeping on with these systems and improving them, to eventually turn them in the best Assassin's Creed experience ever, first completely butchered them with AC Syndicate, and then abandoned them with Origins.

thank you for this, too many people these days try to retcon reality as if ac unity s only problems were bugs and glitches

“splinter cell blacklist came out the year before unity” *matt damon saving private ryan aging gif*

Bro this video was fucking NEEDED I’m so sick of people telling me Unity is fixed and is the peak of Ac, this game brainwashed so many people

I loved the Shannon Sharpe clip "I got that tahng on me, I got that stick, that tool, I'm packin'" LOOOOL

I just found ur channel yesterday and i love the content, assassin’s creed has been my bread and butter for over a decade, and despite disliking valhalla,the series has a special place in my heart. Do u have plans to make a video on AC4? While unity was my favorite AC in terms of traversal, black flag was by and away my favorite for exploration and combat. I also loved edward’s personality specifically because of how it clashed with the established ways of the creed and broke the mold of a traditional assassin

Thank you for putting into words some (yes, SOME) of the frustrations I have with Unity's parkour. I've always chalked it up to me just not being good at it but having at this stage over a decade of twisting and mastering the earlier parkour systems, so just... 'not getting it', but to hear someone lay out a lot of it's systems in words and why they don't work or feel good after a chorus of people and the wider AC community 'vibe' calling it the greatest thing to ever exist, I feel a little less like an insane person now. Those clips from other people showing that most of the time it'll still be a janky weird mess that obviously doesn't go where you want it to even in the hands of very experienced runners are a breath of fresh air.

Amazing video. I remember when AC Unity came out I was devastated by how bad the game in it's entirety was. When it went on sale on steam, I prayed that over a year later, the bugs and glitches had been ironed out to at least a playable state; mind you I had a i7 4th gen and a 980ti; but not only was I disappointed, I couldn't wait to get the game over with. It felt like I wasn't playing a game, more like drudging through a mess, tbh, until I watched this video, I couldn't tell you what the story was, outside of the time period it was set in. That's just how disconnected I was playing it. Once again, I pray and hope that Mirage will be a return to form for AC. Keep up the amazing videos, Jay

I agree 100% with pretty much everything said in this video and I wish that more people understood that Assassin's Creed Unity is a broken game, not just because of the bug's but because of the design flaws. The Combat, Parkour, and stealth don't work as intended at the best of times, I don't know how the parkour was meant to work at all with there being no consistency, no predictability in where Arno will jump, the guards with there guns made me wish you could use human shields or even dodge the bullets like in Syndicate for how silly that was, and the detection being all over the place made me wonder sometimes why I even try. But all of these problems could at least be solved with more time and effort, maybe even with mods if you care to do so, but in my opinion it wouldn't be worthwhile because even if the game worked fine the story and the side missions would still suck. Above all the story's lightning fast pace and skimming over of interesting historical events really just pisses me off, and as if that isn't bad enough the unceremonious dropping of every plot thread besides the love story really leaves you feeling like when you take into consideration everything else wrong with every aspect of this game it there is not a single thing they did well. It's like every mechanic, every element, every part of the plot, everything about the game was half-baked, there isn't a single finished or fully functional aspect of this game and it is just frustrating to play, but despite that it looks so pretty and so people get nostalgic and can't remember how bad it really was, and don't realize how bad it still is, I replayed all of the AC games I own and it really stands out as being so much worse then what came before or after just in terms of being really frustrating almost every minute and almost never really satisfying.

This video was needed, everyone was sucking off unity after odyssey and despite me preferring the older style of games Unity is probably my least favourite in the series. It promises everything that I want but fails to deliver at everything

You can use the riot crowd event to you advantage, although only once. When infiltrating Palais de Luxembourg in 'Hoarders', you can kill the front gate guards and the crowd will rush in.

I would encourage you to take a closer look the Kenway movement system next. It includes basically all of the things Unity is credited for, with very little of the unnecessary streamlining that goes strategically ignored. While your breakdown of Unity's movement was highly accurate, the context for it based on previous games left out some important things that honestly make it look even more damning. My video (AC Rogue) Controlled Descents in New York will get you started in the right direction Leo's testing turned out to be a little bit incomplete since he's not that into combat in AC. Everything for swords, maces, and muskets if accurate, but what we figured out recently is that heavy weapons, spears and guillotine guns do have unique heavy attacks that floor every enemy type - even brutes! So your weapon choice essentially changes how much you need to spam staggering strike (You know about the double right? Your clips never show it) vs strategically using heavy attacks while attacking and staggering strikes while defending, at the cost of the clunky control scheme, trying to get over to your circle button if you get attacked while charging one up, which will happen a *lot,* especially if you don't have the ammo capacity to quickshot everyone and need to go for those heavy ground executes. You can even get away with playing without the staggering strike unlocked for a time. Finally, I figured out how to combine a bunch of exploits we figured out over the years and create an entirely new combat style. The smoke bomb breaking combat stance can actually be used to your advantage, and it's not the only way. I showcase it in my most popular video "Unity has hidden blade combat" front and center on my channel, it's impossible to miss, complete with a writeup of how to perform everything. I also made a handy chart of how to instakill every enemy type in the most efficient way possible using everything we know now, both intended and unintended. The real problem with the smoke bomb being the solution for everything is that once you run out of them the game becomes unplayable. I really feel no remorse for breaking the combat system over my knee, but once I can no longer do that and I'm forced to engage with something that is demonstrably not fun, the whole illusion dissipates. This is true of the gunner enemy type, this is true of stealth layouts that are otherwise unapproachable, this is true of abrupt ambushes, this is true of the cover system, this is true of almost every problem you have to solve because you have to solve all of them with smoke bombs Holding high profile helps to widen the targeting radius of double air assassinations, but there's a reason BlackTIE always throws stun bombs too Social stealth is also about how enemies react to what you do. I'm still not good at it, but idea is to trick them into isolating themselves by intentionally creating a minor disturbance, then temporarily vanishing and ambushing then once they reach an advantageous position. What trips me up is that minor disturbances also disturb civilians, so once you begin to work your concealment becomes very thin, very fast. Kinography can really talk your ear off this idea. His video " Ezio Trilogy Social Stealth Guide, Episode 2: Detection and Investigations" is a good place to start. Again, I recommend you look into this for context on this franchise's legacy There is some kind of meta-narrative connecting every main and side mission in this game about the cult of Nostradamus and its connection to De Molay's betrayal, but the religious themes have gone over my head so far. I also haven't finished it all because it's so vast and time-consuming, so maybe one day I'll wrap my head around what the game is trying to tell me Use the blue Paris missions to get some quick money for consumables on minimal side content or low upgrades run. The objectives consist of extremely simple things like assassinating one guy and they pay out multiple times what your average sidequest will give you. The pricing for different items is also extremely unbalanced. Berserks are appropriately expensive, but smoke bombs are only 10 livres, so no matter how poor you are, you can always scrape by on a few smoke bombs. No upgrades is an extremely well-documented challenge run for this that Leo created on a whim one time just to disprove someone making that same point, and it went so well that it turned into an annual tradition and spawned a bunch of even harder variants Can Dead Kings be its own video? I love Dead Kings Let me know if you want to learn more about any of our favorite stealth games. We have our resources organized better on Discord, and if all else fails you can even ask an expert to make sure you have accurate information. If something new is discovered it usually happens there first. You'd be surprised how often we learn new things about decade plus-old games. Just let me know where I can send you a link

Great video and it captures a lot of my feelings towards the game. The idea of AC Unity was always better than the game. Your point about Unity being an imposter Assassin's Creed story is something I heavily agree with, especially compared to Black Flag which dresses itself up as an imposter AC story but in reality is one of the purest AC stories I've ever seen.

You know, I can excuse most of the problems with this game. I really can. But the story is what kills it for me. How could it manage to have so many good ideas and drop the ball with every single one of them? It's honestly baffling to me. One of the coolest and least explored settings (the French revolution) and they do fuck all with it, serving as a backdrop that barely even sets the mood. Heck, they managed to screw up even the romance plotline which was, in a lot of ways, new to the franchise. And Élise was such a strong character that I honestly wish she was the protagonist. Not to mention it doesn't really go anywhere, it's only set-up with no pay-off? Every time Arno chose love instead of duty, something terrible happened. Now, in the very end, when it's Élise's turn, she doesn't and something terrible also happens. I guess damned if you do, damned if you don't? Like, what's the message here? Duty over love? Love over duty? You're fucked either way? Like there's a couple of ways of fixing it, and it's just a matter of switching Arno's and Élise's position in the fight against Germain. - have *Arno* have to make the same decision he's been making the whole game one last time, but this time he learned from his mistakes and choses duty over love, he loses Élise, but saves the world or whatever. This is just pay-off for finally choosing responsibility, earning him the monologue in the end realizing that sometimes, you can't always have what you want and sacrifices are necessary in the name of a larger cause and even Élise understood that. Which would go perfectly with the backdrop as people were literally dying for a larger cause. - have Arno chose Élise, like he always has and always will and then they could take Germain down together thanks to the power of love or something (I'm not a writer, figure it out lol) and it could conclude in a sweet moment where they have to figure out what to do next now that Arno has been expelled and the Order is in shambles. So now that they have love, they can both chose duty and set out to continue the work that De La Serre and Mirabeu started. An assassin and a templar working together for the greater good and hey, we don't kill Élise for the sake of killing her. Everything else is *whatever*, give it a couple more games to refine it or a few patches and I'm sure it would've been great. But the story... man, what a miss. Like I really wish they would retcon Unity just for the sake of using the french revolution again.

I always want another assassin creed game set in French Revolution, such a waste of perfect setting for Assassin Creed

Good content bro! Hope you'll get more subscribers!

need more content! i love these

This video so perfectly sums up my feelings for this game, thank you for helping me finally process my trauma. Now I finally understand why it felt so limiting going back to a city after Black Flag's open world, not because it's a problem that it's smaller, but because it has no memorable side content just the main story and a bunch of soulles generic mmo style side missions. If only people realized this back then maybe we wouldn't have these massive open world rpgs now. People complain now that you're not a real assassin anymore in Valhalla, but you're not really one in Unity either, they both have a hidden blade and they both work for their own selfish reasons sometimes collaborating with the Brotherhood. The bugs really distracted people from how bad the story really was, it honestly makes no sense why they didn't induct Arno into the Templar order even though the Grand Master raised him, it worked with Haytham. Since they never mentoin Shay in Unity I don't consider him (or his game) cannon, in my head cannon it was Monsieur de la Serre that killed Arno's father, why else would he have been there on the same day as an assassin, it's also highly suspicous that his daughter was the one that distracted Arno and she appeared right away after his father left.

It drives me crazy when people say the game is completely bug fixed now

Another fantastic video, Jay.

now i'm curious about your opinion on ac syndicate

I hope more people can for 1 second let go of there beliefs and open there eyes. Good video from a better man.

One of my least favorite things about the game is that, if you accidentally fast travel to the carriage that takes you to the DLC, you can't fast travel back to Paris until you've done the first mission of the DLC.

Great video! This is the first of yours that I've watched. You make wonderful and concise points. I had more fun than I had any right to with this game when it came out, but most of that came from looking past flaws and enjoying the scraps that did stand out, like the scale and grandeur of the setting, and I will say, I got very good at bending the game's broken mechanics in my favour (I also co-oped with my little brother which was fun just as a social way of sharing our experience with the franchise since we had got into it in 2009 when I got a psp with AC Bloodlines and used to take the umd out while in the open world so that he could boot the game up on his and we'd swap for loading screens) Assassin's Creed feels almost like a crack addiction now, where I know it's shit, but the memory of the good times can still tempt me to relapse and waste more of my life on something that is just not good.

Never seen your channel and I haven't consumed AC contenct since AC 2 and brotherhood multiplayer* and somehow your video got me recomended IN THE SAME DAY that I've reinstalled Unity. And I must say that you hit the nail on every single grievances I had with the serie, that start around that time and ended with syndicate, when I stopped playing the series that I loved. And without even opening the game again, uninstalled. As you said. I wanted to revisit some constructed memory that I had that was actually from trailers, not from the game itself. In a weird way, I loved the trailer, the promise. *And man how I loved the multiplayer. I wasnt that young (19), so I don't know if I'd like it today. But I loved stealthy killing people while watching clowns running around roofs.

When you mentioned input queuing... I finally get the hate... Queuing has screwed my experience in newer CoDs on quite a few occasions because sometimes a single input doesn't go through, so I was forced to spam an input to get it to work... but once I do, now I'm stuck firing, meleeing, or do other crap more than I wanted to.

I think the idea of AC Unity is much better than the actual game that is AC Unity. It's still one of the most gorgeous games I've ever played but so broken mechanically. In a better timeline Ubisoft would have either given the game the time and money it really needed or realized that the issue was not the ideas, but implementation, and expanded the series in this direction.

I would honestly love to watch a video from you about Dead Kings

The lack of any acknowledgement of Arno’s real father and the events of rogue drive me nuts! I know it’s because of the development timeline etc but still. He was old enough where he would’ve remembered his bio dads death and I’d imagine want to know who killed him. Arno’s voice actor is the best aspect of this game for me personally, and the murder mysteries. Like why would he not try and kill Shay?? Or at least learn who he is?

I gave up on this one because I it never felt I have control over the character

The more times I replay unity and syndicate, the less I like unity and the more I appreciate syndicate.

I'll be 100% honest, Unity is my second favorite AC game, behind Syndicate. I love Arno, and I love exploring Paris and the Café Théâtre. I've also poured many hours into trying to better my skills with the combat and parkour, because of how awesome it looks when it works correctly. That being said, after watching this video through to the end, I think some of your criticisms are absolutely valid. Despite playing Unity for the first time in late 2019-early 2020 on PC after it had been patched, I did find myself getting frustrated with some of the unpolished mechanics, such as the sticky cover system and Arno not obeying button commands. The poor balancing in some of the Co-op Missions can also be a pain, as certain tasks are borderline impossible to complete if you're playing solo - which wouldn't be too bad, if certain weapons and armor pieces weren't locked behind them (this in particular drives me up a wall). Not to mention, the Arno-Elise romance will always frustrate me as well, because it started out so beautifully, only for it morph into a one-sided relationship that made Arno appear like he was developing an increasingly unhealthy obsession with a woman who may or may not still care about him, and even at one point LITERALLY discarded him because he didn't fit in her 'revenge agenda', due to his caring more about her ACTUAL LIFE and wanting to protect her over taking out Germain. But in spite of its clear problems, I can't bring myself to hate this game, because I've genuinely enjoyed a lot of it and still do. I did enjoy watching your video as well; it's always nice to hear varied opinions, whether one agrees with them or not. Good work with editing and scripting this, and thanks for sharing!

Arno and Elise being wasted was my biggest frustration. He, and they as a couple, have such a strong start. But then the story insists on separating them, and wasting time on far less compelling things. I get the feeling Series X BC is the best way to play Unity, though. I had a very smooth experience with very little technical issues or bugs. And whilst it cannot fix all of Unity's issues, playing in French really seals the deal on its setting and atmosphere (just like ACII/Brotherhood in Italian). It at least makes its great moments feel all the better.

really well done video dude!!

At this stage, I'd much prefer they let other studios try to make Assassins Creed. Sucker punch, Naughty Dog, Insomniac or Fromsoft Ware perhaps; it's unlikely, but I'd prefer that to Ubisoft.

every time i get the itch to download Unity again i watch a video essay on it and think of something better to feed my SSD AC as a franchise, as a formula is so unique in the industry that even though the individual pieces always fall short, the games feel like more than the sum of their lackluster parts. I *want* to love the games, I *need* something like them to be objectively good, but it's frustrating that Ubisoft just seems incapable. I wonder if they should try something like Bethesda and Fallout NV, where they hand the tools and IP to a different, enthusiastic studio for a game.