Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag ligt sinds vorige week in de winkels en de game wordt wereldwijd goed ontvangen door de pers en de fans van de franchise. Nu was de website Topless Robot zo vriendelijk om deze lijst met zes voordelen en vier nadelen te maken.

4. Good Bye, Fare Thee Well (to Your Social Life) - The Endless Activities

I come from an era in gaming where, for the most part, the job was to get from point A to point B. Even the first open-world games like The Legend of Zelda were still rather goal oriented, and had to be played in a somewhat sequential order. As games like Grand Theft Auto 3 moved us into the realm of open-world/sandbox-style gaming, gamers with limited attention spans such as myself were easily distracted from quests when there was so much fun to be had trying to get that wanted meter high enough to involve the Army. Sit me down with a copy of Grand Theft Auto 5 and within seconds I will be distracted by something shiny.

That being said, the amount of activity in Assassin's Creed IV is beyond belief. Sure, you have the missions that advance the plot, but why do that when you can freelance as an Assassin, explore seemingly endless terrain, pillage and plunder the high seas, get into drunken bar fights, hunt and skin animals for crafting, set up ports of your own, upgrade your ship, play board games, search for buried treasure, piss off ye olde PETA by whaling and so much more. I spent the first few hours of play trying literally everything it had to offer, so much that by the end of my first night of gaming, I hadn't even finished Sequence 2. The amount of side-quests rivals that of modern Batman games, and all of them have some level of value (except maybe the board games, unless you are a virtual board game junkie).

2. "...the opium of pirates is actual opium." - The AI

It's safe to say that artificial intelligence is still pretty much in its infancy. Aside from Microsoft announcing that they are creating an AI based on Cortana from the Halo series for their smartphones, it's safe to say that we don't have to worry about Skynet (at least for five years, after which all Windows Phones will develop rampancy). AI in a video game is supposed to make characters act somewhat human-like. Instead of a Goomba walking forward until it hits a wall and turns around, most games now have bad guys who actively seek your character out. A game like Assassin's Creed which focuses on the concept of stealth, depends on having an AI system that responds to threats appropriately.

Some aspects of the AI system in Assassin's Creed IV are fantastic. Whistling to a potential victim from the brush will attract their attention, drawing them in for the kill. Tossing a sack of money will often send greedy guards off for a quick payday, allowing you to sneak by undetected and less blood soaked. Unfortunately, there is a distinct lack of consistency with the AI of characters. If you are spotted from a distance and quickly dash into cover, the enemy will usually blow it off like a figment of its imagination. Often though, an enemy can be mere feet in front of you, and a quick dash into a nearby haystack or leaf pile results in the enemy also thinking you're a figment. Jumping out of the bushes to slit a throat makes perfect sense in the game, but doing it literally in front of another enemy will likely go unnoticed. While some situations require the hiding of bodies, generally speaking, a corpse will generally be ignored. It's that lack of consistently that had me no longer caring so much about being stealthful, aside from the missions that required me to do so, and in doing so took away from the game.