Seems pointless.
Just show the fucking tree.

It sounds like a halfway house solution to the problem of scoping the skill tree for stuff you can’t have for 30+ vs the progression system that rewards you with unknown skills on level up.

The skill tree - I liked that it was a bit different. It's nice to find little surprises as you venture around it, and suddenly there's something new to play with that you weren't expecting. And then as you open up quite a lot of the web you can start to plot paths to the stuff you want most, trying to maximise the buffs in the areas you want along the way.

Lol. Thought there was a really awful graphical glitch on a tree in Assassins Creed then. Really bad as I looked around the landscape and it warped and went blocky.

Turns out its part of the game, and when I'd done it the cheevo said "It's not a bug, its a feature".

I like shit like that.

Blocks100 wrote:

@FranticPea   How is the HUD on this? If you weren't mindful on Odyssey to disable quest markers, your screen would quickly become cluttered with symbols and exclamation marks. Can you play this blind (ie disable HUD features) so you haven't got a crowd of angry markers blinking at you all the time?

In the options you can choose how much hud you want, quest log, loot, health etc. You can switch it all off

How is that better??

It doesn’t allow for good stealth essentially being the same as the origin mode.

When you could tag thing you could
Play like an actual assassin

I mean you press in the right stick and it reveals enemies, can do it as much as you want. Or use your raven to tag em.

There are whole sections areas you're encouraged to be stealthy. Although it usually goes wrong for me and I end up in a huge fight.

It's kind of crap that most enemies are so useless that you can win in a scrap against 20 or more. But it also means the penalties for mucking up stealth aren't too severe and there's more leeway to muck about and have a laugh with it.

Spent a couple of hours on this last night and it's clear that this is no Odyssey re-skin as I first feared. It's very clearly its own game whilst sticking close to the Ass Creed formula. 

Here's what I liked:

the little side missions that you come across while roaming the land are ace. Humorous little encounters that can be resolved by doing something in the local vicinity of the NPC that you meet. They are not side quests in the traditional sense that have you trudging off to some other distant location on other side of the world map. And they are a massive improvement over the robotic exchanges that you had with Odyssey's npcs: 'go kill me 10 sharks!' nonsense' .

I've got the HUD dialled down to 'pathfinder' level which means the only thing that crops up on my display after I do the twirly bird thing is the yellow and blue orbs representing hidden treasure and mini story encounters as detailed above. It's a pleasing change from Odyssey's fussy buzz of HUD info.

The Snow. I don't think I've seen snow done as good as this since RDR2. Never played the TLoU2 so I don't know how that compares, but it's a a winter wonderland here. Sliding down a snowy hillside on my backside had me grinning from ear to ear like a 5 year old doing it for real.

Voice acting of the protagonist. The Cnut guy from The Last Kingdom  is doing  a stirling job so far. Kassandra was far better in Odyssey, but here the role has flipped and the bloke delivers all the best lines.

Here's what's causing me some concerns:

- the combat. It feels more floaty and inconsequential that even Odyssey's. There is no heft or weight to it at all. 

- the skill tree fog thing is pants. Yes you can respec to invest your points elsewhere to temporarily reveal other upgrade paths, but not being able to plan out your build from the off is a bummer. What's worse is that actual trigger abilities aren't unlocked on the tree, but instead are randomly discovered on the world map. I unlocked 'sleepy-time arrows' that way, long before I stumbled upon the ability to throw axes - my preferred fighting style. ho-hum.

- the environmental puzzles. Had to consult online FAQs to find the hidden treasure caches because the solution was too obscure. It's nice that there is no hand-holding here I guess, but it does lead to a few unecessary head scratching moments.

MattyJ wrote:

Man they really need to up the drop rate on reindeer antlers.

Story of my life.

I'll have wiped out the population of Norwegian reindeer before I get enough of em.

I've just coughed up half a dog

And there's a Keith Flint tribute!

That's a nice touch. I've got this now and looking forward to the Series X shinies