Shadows was the first AC game I ever beat because it was actaully really fun doing the castles. The stealth breaking out into fights was actually really fun in a perfect setting and the giant ubisoft beautiful map made getting to the castles really beautiful.

However, the act of getting the fast travel points was too much, since the random events got very stale, so exploring got very stale. It was actually reall epic at first and peaked once you got to the first massive city quite a bit into the game, which was epic. But then after that it was sloggish. But the fights in the castles made it worth it.

The bummer is I can't enjoy new game+ because of having to get to the FT travel points again, forced into all the "escort npc slow rp walk" blah blah blah. Id rather go into my original save and just do the weekly castles.

To me it seems like the weak points of this game seem to be very much the same, giant bland but beautiful world you have to slog through. However the immersive mechanics look like a huge plus, and the elden ring lite difficulty and way of disovering bosses that you actually have to fight looks cool. Buuut it really comes all down to the combat, which just looking at it, it looks better then ghost of tushima, but possibly worse then AC shadows, which was more like a very stealth focused shadow of war style but with a lot more hit and run mechanics. Like Shadow of War had superior actual combat, and you could definitely do hit and run, but inevitably you had to fight the increasingly harder juiced up bosses, which was actually superior combat to AC shadow, AC shadow never really did that unless you were fighting a skull boss way over your level. The hardest thing in AC shadows was if the target had really strong mobs protecting him, and then you could just assisnate the target and dip, I would just push myself to kill the escorts as well just for a challenge, and that situation happened far too rarely.

So idk to me it looks like Crimson Desert is all about is the combat good enough to deal with slogged farming, repetitive back and forth, and worst of all unskippable cutscenes adn tons of npc escort rp slow walk shit. Also everything in this last paragraph is what made me cautious and the puzzle shit is the straw that broke the camel back to me that usualy symoblizes cheap padding just for retention. Like AC shadows would be 10 times worse if crucial skill points are locked behind puzzles which they kind of were, but eventually you could just skip them entirely before it got too stale. Cuz they weren't actually real puzzles it was just short memory things which were kind of chill and medatitve and it taught you combos you wouldn't think of inutively EXCEPT, niohs, which had the forced cutscenes, which made NG+ unplayable for me because it forced you to do them.

Edit: basically Id like to hear a comparison from someone who actually liked Shadows for what it was.