Jack Brickman
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AC2 is still one of the greatest games ever IMO, but I'm hesitant to get into this one. Didn't play Origins. It feels good as an open world RPG? What about combat?
Combat is fine. It's not particularly good, but it's serviceable. Keep in mind I don't have most of my combat abilities unlocked yet, though, so right now my fights are mostly just parry and dodge. I focused on a couple of quality of life upgrades first, like one that sends a ping out fifteen meters in a circle around you and identifies anything interesting you can interact with, making it much easier to find loot and money.
I only played a few minutes of Origins. I pirated it to see if it was any good but never got around to actually getting into it. Then I got into the free Project Stream beta to play this one, so I just uninstalled Origins, as it's unlikely I'll ever make my way back to it at this point. Probably end up buying it in a Steam sale in five years anyway.
And while I agree with you about AC2 (and the game or two after that...the entire Ezio arc was great), this series is more or less completely different now. It's still got a few of the same gimmicks, but for the most part they've basically merged it with Witcher 3's systems and veered further toward RPG than the action-adventure past the series was known for. I can't stress enough that this is an RPG. You have levels. Your quests have levels. If the quests are higher level than you, you're probably dying.
As an example, I had a bounty on my head early in the game after doing a mission. This, kind of like the Nemesis system in the Mordor games, means occasionally the bounty hunter will come after you, and your options are to hide, run, or fight. This guy was only a level above him, so I figured I could take him. I was mostly right, although it took me about four tries to actually beat him. There's very little margin for error when an enemy outlevels you, as you die in a couple of hits but they take dozens to bring down.
I think the main strides they've taken with this series, though, is in the story. In the past games, I felt like the only character of real note was usually your own. Everyone else just kind of existed to guide you through the story rather than to really be a compelling character. The focus on characters in this game feels much greater, and that's only in the first two hours. If you do play it, you'll notice how similar the dialogue and camera works to Witcher 3, even in dialogue. You can tell what they were trying to do with this game and it works, for the most part. It's like a poor man's Witcher 3, but given that Witcher 3 is one of the greatest games ever made, that's not a bad thing.
Also worth noting that I haven't unlocked some of the key systems in the game yet. I don't yet have a ship and there's a system that's similar to the Nemesis system in this game as well that I've only briefly been introduced to, and not in depth. Oh, and one nice feature in this game compared to Witcher 3 is that all of your quests level up with you. So if you have a bunch of level three quests and you level up to four, all those quests jump to four as well, with any higher level quests remaining the same. That's a smart feature in a loot-based game like this, as doing quests below your level wouldn't be optimal since you'd mostly be getting junk that's worse than what you already have.
I'd recommend giving it a pirate once the DRM is cracked and see if you like it. I'd imagine you will, since I know you loved Witcher 3. I doubt this game will be that good, or anywhere near that polished, but so far it's made me want to keep playing, and that's rare in games these days.