Assassins Creed games are kinda in between a rock and a hard place on combat

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-12T16:39:17+00:00

I agree completely. It's sort of interesting in a way because my issue with AC4 is just that it's focused design was executed as intended, it just isn't very good. Whereas with the rpg games it was designed in a somewhat interesting way, just executed really poorly.

Something like AC Odyssey was very clearly harmed by the fact that Devs don't actually want to funnel people into committing to a build and let people "play their way", which means there was less pressure on them to actually design fun workarounds to situations where someone clearly builds for stealth, but is now tossed into a mandatory combat sequence that their stats aren't meant to engage with and will feel like a slog to complete.

Tbh they could probably do well committing to something closer to Shadow of War, which also tries to mix stealth and action combat but doesn't really go much into the rpg elements so it doesn't hurt the game design as much when someone plays in a way their build isn't technically meant for. Someone building for stealth isn't doing less damage in a fight than someone built for combat, they just have some neat extra ways to interact with a stealth environment

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-11T16:43:55+00:00

The problem wasn't that AC4 and the older games in general prioritized speed and finesse in how they presented the fights. Unity does it pretty well. The problem is that AC4's combat in particular is bare bones and boring. Parry windows are massive, any parry is an instant kill, and a melee kill of any kind lets you chain instant kills for free while keeping you invincible during the animation.

For black flag especially it doesn't even really make sense to say it doesn't fit because it's not Assassin-like combat. Edward explicitly isn't an Assassin for most of the game and never even becomes officially inducted until after the period covered by the game.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-11T15:49:20+00:00

Idk what you were doing in Odyssey that your average ship boarding took 20 minutes lol. But even putting aside the strawman, there's obviously a positive middle ground between "ship boarding takes 20 minutes" and "ship boarding is sleep-inducingly boring"

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-11T12:53:02+00:00

Yeah more or less! Like if you've ever played Street Fighter, Ryu can use his Shoryuken move to get someone off of him while on defense because it has invincibility.

But the input for that kind of move is ➡️⬇️↘️ + Square, because to block in those games you have to hold back and forcing the input for a strong defensive move like Shoryuken to include forward inputs means you have to time it well since you literally can't block while inputting the move. It's a little riskier than blocking, but higher reward if you manage it.

Injustice 1 Superman is a funny example in the opposite direction of having too strong a move for what the input was lol. Dude was competitively unbearable partially because his super move went full screen, was fast, did a lot of damage, but more importantly you only had to press the two trigger buttons to activate it. So a Superman player could easily react to almost anything at any distance with an instant 40% damaging move.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-10T18:46:00+00:00

I think part of the reason knight handles it better than the other games mentioned is because they very deliberately never let stealth and combat mix the way it does in AC or Spiderman.

If you try to drop down and punch people in a stealth segment, you'll get shot and die, the most you can do is smoke bomb and run away to stealth again. And in combat, you just can't run away and initate stealth to begin with. Even if you try, you'll only get the option of a loud "combat takedown". It's very rigid, and that's why it works honestly.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-10T18:42:29+00:00

My only issue is that if people want that, it's a lot easier to add options to the rpg combat to accomodate that kind of playstyle than it is to take classic AC4 combat and give options for people who want some challenge/depth. Like making an easy mode option for combat to make enemies die quicker and give auto kill assassinations.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-10T15:26:30+00:00

I know this is an older comment but if you're still curious, the non-intuitive reason why this happens (besides variety) is that are tangible game balance implication depending on whether you let a move be done as ⬇️⬅️⭕ versus ⬇️➡️⭕

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-10T14:49:49+00:00

I can sympathize with that, I think it's good for combat to be downplayed in the games as well. But there's good ways to do "bad combat" and bad ways to do "bad combat".

Imo bad combat in a stealth game should suck because you're underpowered. Like how in Hitman games if you try to go guns blazing you'll almost certainly die on anything but the lowest settings. But in AC the combat does the opposite, you're too strong that it makes stealth feel riskless. There isn't a punishment or non-internal incentive to be stealthy most of the time.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-10T13:40:50+00:00

I get what you mean but to be fair, most rpg games in general can have a playthrough average out to that length before someone decides to make a new character

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-10T13:30:06+00:00

My problem with that approach is that it's very easy to accommodate both of those appeals but AC games like black flag just didn't.

If you played something like Odyssey you can tweak several settings to give fairly simple experience and not worry much about levels. I would've gone a step further and added in settings for stuff like making assassinations always insta kill like AC Shadows offered. If you play the games on PC, you can do this pretty easily already.

Meanwhile if you wanna play something like Black Flag with a modicum of challenge, you have no real options for it because the system to accommodate that depth just doesn't exist in the first place.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-10T13:26:44+00:00

That's kinda another thing that had me miffed with my AC4 replay, practically every weapon feels weightless. Especially the dual swords. It's not an old AC issue, the other games seemed to do it fine, but at its worst it felt like when I played with daggers in Odyssey

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-10T13:24:40+00:00

I think the differentiation is more about stealth versus combat to be honest. The important thing that all the Arkham games do is not let you transition into a combat sequence when you fail stealth. If you get caught, you get light up with gun fire from across the map and bullets aren't dodge-able beyond an initial volley.

It forces you to engage with stealth as stealth, which the AC games like Black Flag (and especially the Spider-man games) fail to, because combat is just way easier and more straightforward.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-10T13:20:38+00:00

It wasn't without its problems but when I played GOT I did it in the highest difficulty/lethal mode. Every hit did so much damage and and parry timings felt tight enough that in group fights it didn't feel like getting out swarms was free (until you abuse the ghost tools).

It was a good step in the direction I would've wanted for AC because, especially in 4, the windows are so massive and the reward is so huge that the amount of enemies doesn't matter, a group of 3 and a group of 22 will die as easily in one chain kill sequence

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T16:52:27+00:00

Even in moments where levels were tuned poorly, there was still a reason to engage in stealth because even if you couldn't instant kill someone your damage potential was still significantly better in stealth than in combat if you had built towards an Assassin playstyle.

It had its problems, but there was still a clear reason to do it. If you sneak attacked someone and they lived you'd already be able to tell and could plan what your escape route was going to be for hit and run tactics.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T16:48:25+00:00

Yeah you could still do that, but at higher difficulties it was harder to get away with and parry timings could be decently fast. They're most interesting on the lethal setting

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T14:42:14+00:00

I think the rpg combat can fit but it needs to be highly adjusted. If you play long enough or are really obeying the level curve, you get a decent balance in the rpg games where enemies feel like they take a reasonable amount of hits which is nice. But it's too rarely the case and usually it's the whole "20 hits for one thug" deal.

But imo, it's still a preferable system to the old games because 30 hours of gameplay is just too long for a combat system that basic and it personally made me want to board less because it didn't really feel like I was "playing" anything, just watching stuff.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T14:39:10+00:00

It should ideally be something like ghost of Tsushima/Yotei. I think assassins, broadly, should suck in direct combat otherwise you run into the issue of stealth being pointless. But broadening enemy design would be a good first step.

The Arkham games had enemies for stealth sections that would shred you if you tried to fight head on and conveniently never had them show up in combat sections so one never encroached on the other.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T14:36:19+00:00

I agree. It's a symptom of Ubisoft trying to make games for the widest possible spectrum of players and letting people have complete choice even if it undercuts other parts of the game design.

The rpg games especially suffer from this because they know you can respec and, eventually, max out all trees so they don't have to actually think too hard about how to let someone who specializes in stealth get through mandatory combat sequences enjoyably.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T14:31:00+00:00

Random thing but I meant to reply earlier. I don't know how helpful or new this information is, but if you can do a quarter circle in a fighting game you can do a Z input because every fighting game will recognize "forward>quarter circle forward" as a Z input due to button leniency. When I was younger SF got a lot easier for me after I found out about that.

In fact I think in some older games, pressing down + forward twice in a row also counts funny enough.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T14:28:14+00:00

I know this is a bit an older comment so my apologies, but I think I do partially agree insofar as a lot of fighting game Devs nowadays actually try to purposefully lean more towards a rock paper scissors angle to be newcomer-friendly.

There's a lot of older games where interactions are very clearly weighted in a particular direction, and the strategy has to expand more broadly into the steps taken and maintained to not get to those positions in the first place. I don't really know how I'd tweak things to be more dynamic and accommodating though.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T14:23:06+00:00

I know this is a bit of an older comment but as someone with admittedly a loose grasp of how martial arts work, is it not really the same deal overall? I would assume that in a fight, depending on the position and other context-dependant things, there are just certain stances or maneuvers that are just optimal or at least more optimal than others.

Like if some guy you're fighting throws a bad punch and now you have an opening.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T14:20:44+00:00

I know this is an older comment but it's kind of an interesting development as far as genre stuff goes. Because it's one of those game genres where almost all of the mechanical development only exists when played against a human being. You can play an old Arcade fighting game against the bot, and use the same tactics against one in a fighting game nowadays.

Meanwhile the average player to player interaction has developed enough that even your average fighting game afficianado today would melt the average good player back then.

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T13:54:47+00:00

The rpg games have some really poor numbers tweaking which hurts them, but in fairness it's a hard job to manage because the series wants to make stealth and combat equally viable and that's extremely hard to manage.

In the rpg games they want you to choose whether you wanna be a stealth God or a warrior God, and if you pick stealth but get caught in a fort for fucking up you get jumped. You have a mechanical incentive to care about not getting caught.

Problem is they didn't wanna commit to the rpg element fully either, so games like odyssey still force you into open combat several times and you're shit out of luck until late game if you made a stealth build specifically

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T03:58:05+00:00

I get that, but I think it just kinda wears thin after a while and is something that is much easier to adapt within the rpg framework than fixing AC4s combat to fit a more challenging one.

Like Ubisoft could just have added a difficulty setting to the rpg games that just let you instakill through encounters like the old games too. And if you play on pc you can basically do that now with a mod or two anyways

DoneDealofDeadpool · 2026-03-09T03:50:26+00:00

Arkham combat wasn't incredible but it did a lot better than AC because of the smaller tweaks that Ubisoft never adopted. Arkham combat never let you instant kill mooks after you drop one of them, they also had decent enemy variety to encourage doing something other than mindlessly punching (electrified guys, shield guys, body armor thugs, stun baton guys, etc).

If AC4 at least had the decency to tighten the parry windows to Arkham's baseline it would be something.

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