User blog comment:Pseudobread/Assassins Creed Unity at E3 2014/@comment-5174994-20140521172943/@comment-1888015-20140521224643

This will probably be more of a statement than a question, but I figure I'll give some feedback about this point raised:

While it has been toned down a bit, I personally don't like the 100% sync at all.

Ubisoft have been slowly restricting approaches to gameplay through the years, so much so that it seems 100% sync is here to stay. What would really make this creative and engaging for the player is to see a reversal of this trend, I hope.

What I would like to see is a broader depth on investigation with no approach restrictions - tailing is okay in some missions, but it is overused now and needs to be scaled back, in favour of perhaps more pickpocketing, breaking and entering, or learning information about a target by doing tasks for other people. Freedom Cry helped this a little with the investigation mission regarding the expedition, but with the cramped atmosphere of the island... it came across as too easy to gather.

And let's not make every investigation about the subject matter. When people refer back to AC1's better grasp on research, not all of it was about the time and place where a target would be. Escape and entry points were discussed, gossip about the target - their affliations, aspirations and motivations, personal background and preferences were brought into the mix, which fleshed out their character a fair bit before they explained their actions in their dying words.

Perhaps also a journal page or a log detailing what tips, gossip and facts have been collected, and even some scribbles and theories from the Assassin's mind to present on the page, to give a sense of tactical and theorical whim to their own character. For instance "I learned that <target> professed interest in <subject>..." which could be followed by "The previous information was a false lead borne from a sympathiser loyal to <target> to send me down the wrong path..." (possibility for follow-up investigation e.g. beat up mission) or even "Following from gossip I extracted from another source, <target> is secretly rooting for <other cause>, and I suspect he aims to play both sides/flip affiliations to diminish <former cause>..." etc.

I will concede that when it comes to bigger missions with more plot exposition intended, restrictions are somewhat expected, but why must that mean full sync, or linear pathways? The biggest thing that people have accepted, but we rarely take for granted is the following: desynchronization. If we get spotted in a rather sensitive mission, we get desynchronized and sent back to a earlier point - for which the checkpoint system was a Godsend - but that's fair. If a guy dies who isn't supposed to die, I get desynch'ed, but that's fair because you can't complete a mission and have a dead guy help you out in a cutscene because that's fallacious. It's not fair to dismiss an alternate approach because "ancestor didn't do it that way" (boundaries, full sync) when it can be done, and there's no actual benefit to completing the mission in the method the developers intend you to, other than a contrived trophy or achievement that's actively shoehorned in.