@kreutzgang I don't mind struggling, as I'm certain you don't, as long as it's reasonable (and what's reasonable will vary from player to player). Although I have a tendency to jump in the wrong direction and fall to my death, I liked most anomalies (except for the bugged ones, because I don't like breaking my head over an impossible situation that turns out to be a bug), but there were one or two, I believe, where the timing and the jumping were a little bit too much for me. I got them in the end, but that wasn't fun anymore. It was more or less the same with the tattoo papers for me, I guess. We had these chases in earlier AC games too, by the way.

For me, the more these puzzles (and the same goes for Immortals Fenyx Rising) focus on puzzle solving, the more I like them, the more they focus on complicated acrobatics and timers, the less I like them.

@hroozenbeek Yes, fully in agreement there. I know we had the paperchase in other AC's - I never completed them though, just did the odd ones (I did do them all in Valhalla, but via cheesing with the slow time ability), and the anomalies just made me RQ after a certain point. I liked them as long as we were just figuring out the route, but figuring out the route and moving platforms and lasers and falling down for no apparent reason is just too much for my nerves xD

@kreutzgang I'm now playing the first Immortals DLC (A new god). Figuring out the puzzles is quite fun, the acrobatics are less fun to the point of irritating.

Once I know how to handle the situation and find my way, I don't want to fail just because I push one wrong button in a sequence of dozens of difficult moves or because I loose too much height when gliding because I push the buttons a little bit too slow.

@hroozenbeek Sounds like I have done right to skip it. Apart from being way too cartoonish, when I heard you spend stamina climbing and fall down when it runs out, I knew I didn't need that.

And about the original subject - NO. I do not want ANY kind of "parkour". This is not a Super Mario jump-and-run. I also found the papers super annoying and ignored them (until I found out about the cheese). And regarding the "anomalies" - just NO. I watched the video on YT. You can also watch it directly from the video folder, just without sound, but there isn't much of it anyway.

@kormac67 Parkour is essential to AC imo - as long as it's sneaking over rooftops, scaling buildings, escape routes etc. Not some ridiculous fantasy platforming like the anomalies.

@noooobslayer You missed an important one. Stop the meaningless implementation of a templar kill tree. It's boring, it adds nothing to the game and no one cares about any of the targets. Make an ASSASSIN's creed game feel like an ASSASSIN game. Let us plan our attack, let us actually know and understand our targets through story telling, not a small paragraph on a menu screen. Put effort into the story of Assassins instead of turning it into a shallow side activity that feels absent from the game as a whole. Oh, and stick to one character. I don't care if it's a male or female, just pick one and let the audience get attached to them like we did with Ezio. The biggest problem aside from [censored] story lines, is that no one cares for any of the characters post Edward apart from Bayek and Aya. Straight after Origins we should've gotten a game with Aya in Rome. Such wasted opportunities.

@mstrtarvos I personally struggle to see what's odd with their opinion. They all seem perfectly sound and tackle everything with truth.

-Parkour
The parkour in Odyssey and Valhalla is less impressive than AC3. It actually very closely matches the Shadow or Mordor games now.

-Animal finishers
I have to agree that they're awful. Badly animated, way too long and got old very very fast. If not remove them then add more variety or at the very least, an option to disable them. It feels like such a chore watching the same 10 second kill over and over again.

-Assassination Speed
Another acceptable critique. Assassinations are just as boring as ever. Unity, Syndicate and most games prior all had a wonderful variety of assassination animations and techniques with the added benefit of not being so slow and the same thing over and over again. The kills around corners also look super janky.

-Combat
I to miss the counter kills and combos. They looked badass and you felt like an assassin. I agree that the old combat was easy, but the current system only makes it hard via sponging the health bar. Now it feels and plays like an anime fantasy game and has lost the charm of feeling more grounded in reality.

All of these critiques actually appear more objective than subjective. Parkour has been dumbed down, the variety in assassinations has dropped and the combat doesn't look as cool as it used to.

First thing I would do is take Valhalla and bury it in the desert with E.T.

Next I would stick to a button layout like odyssey and not try to add 40 new things that completely remap half the controller.
Most changes should be upgrades not drastic moves to reinvent the game.

The best things about AC are Story, Characters, sweet outfits, and sweet moves, and playability the games dont end in 10 hours they have tons of extra stuff to do for fun. The worst things is jacking up the controller layout to fans who played through multiple previous games. I get when the new engine came out they remapped vs the old trilogy but at least it felt somewhat learnable and natural it was actually pretty fluid except I would of used the L-joystick button for the loot scan as its easier to push while running then to reach to the D-pad with the opposite hand so you can keep moving while doing it. That one change with a few small ones to improve the feel would be better then accommodating multiple new uses for buttons that really weren't needed.

What makes most AC games stale is watching your 390th overpower attack run through the exact same combo of animation over and over and over. There's a lack of combination strikes when running through light/heavy attacks, or being able to chain more attacks together through multiple enemies would be nice. Enemy patterns are to basic, every one attacks in pretty much the same way with the same combos making it very predictable and easy to overcome. Assassination's go one of two ways they get boring cause the same animation is used 90% of the time, or the one time you get a cool different animation its 14 seconds long and leaves you detected while you jib jab the guy in the gut 10 more times when all you wanted was a 1 and done go back to stealth.

If they spent more time on making more fight animations for finishers and assassinations and less time coming up with 15 mins of Q&A to accept a quest that is literally take this letter to the guy 100 meters away. There's a little to much talky for small inconsequential missions.

Also I don't which part of the team throws darts at the map to decide where fast travel checkpoints go but odyssey had small islands with 4 viewpoints, and then large areas early on that you had to run/ride or walk 1000 meters to get to somewhere. The viewpoints vs landmass should be evaluated. Although I am glad they did away with Eiffel tower puzzle climb your way to the top viewpoints. I don't need to spend 8 mins of my life climbing to just get a waypoint.