Liberation got announced at Sony's conference and is apparently a full open-world AC game designed from the ground up for the Vita. We've got a link to the trailer here. This could be promising. My interest in AC3 got renewed by the gameplay we saw today, and if Liberation really is a console-quality title and not like the horrid Bloodlines for PSP, then it should definitely be good. I especially like the New Orleans setting and the female assassin.
I'm VERY excited for the game. The gameplay looked exactly like a console AC game, which is good, while the graphics looked to be roughly on-par with the original game. I definitely want to get the bundle. I like to pretend that game doesn't exist. I'd rather read the novel than play it, and the novel is boring as hell.
Kotaku has previewed some of the changes they made for Liberation, and I'm honestly kind of skeptical of some of them. There's now a jump button, so no more free running. Honestly, that seems like it would make the gameplay less fluid. :/ Also, you can't just sit there and block during combat. You have to draw enemies out and counter while still being vulnerable. I guess this could make it so combat actually requires some skill, so I'll keep an open mind about that. But the biggest offender is that you can just use the touch screen to perform a "chain kill" at any time and basically Aveline wipes out all enemies on screen. It's designed for people who don't want to bother with combat. So I have to ask...why bother?
I don't like the chain kill thing (It sounds like it makes combat too easy), but other than that, I actually sorta like the changes they mentioned. They make you have to actually pay attention to what's going on in-game.
I still have to go watch some gameplay of this. (I'm sitting in class atm or I'd do it right now.) I'm excited for it, though I won't be picking it up until there are more games on Vita that I want to get. I imagine the jump button won't be too bad. Unless it's a 2D platformer, they can't get rid of free run; you'll probably just have to be more careful about where you start trying to climb buildings and whatnot which, honestly, might be kind of nice. (Soooo often I've had issues with Ezio/Altair running up buildings instead of running near them or they'll jump off a ledge when I wanted them to walk on it. A jump button might fix this.) I can't imagine they'd have added it if it wasn't necessary so we'll see how it works and what their reasoning is. I'm also kind of excited for the battle system now. Battles have gotten ridiculously boring in AC. Block, counter, repeat. They made it so you can't counter some moves in later AC games but that was more frustrating than challenging. So maybe now battles will actually be difficult instead of just long. And I'm so excited to be able to bypass them entirely if need be. I'm so lazy and quite often I only find myself fighting when I just can't shake guards off my tail while trying to run away so it'll be nice to skip them when I actually want to. Don't care if it's cheap; I don't play the games for mindless battles in the street.
So Sony sneakily removed the memory card from the bundle of this game. It was only 4GB anyway, but still...kind of underhanded to advertise something then silently remove it. That white Vita is sexy though.
Yeah, 4GB is barely enough to put anything on though. 8GB is the bare minimum most people recommend for Vita. Still, proprietary memory is one of the reasons the Vita is failing miserably, and Sony doesn't really seem to be in a hurry to remedy the problem.
Bumping this because I've played a bit of the game! I'm still very close to the beginning, but so far it seems like AC-lite. Aveline is wholly unlikable so far, and the gameplay isn't as refined as the console titles. Lots more combat and the enemies are a lot more suspicious. It's not a bad game so far, and again, I'm not very far into it so it may get a lot better. It's much better than Bloodlines, at least. Also, the bundle does have a 4GB memory card, just to confirm that.
I tried replaying Bloodlines the other day, and couldn't figure out how I was able to stand it a year or two ago. The controls felt much looser than a normal AC game, the voice acting was bad, the story wasn't presented well... It was just a bad game. Glad to hear Liberation isn't as bad as it, but then again, that isn't saying much.
