Assassin's Creed: Syndicate (2015). Notable Bugs, Tips, Strange Observations, Fun Diversions, etc.
I have written two long entries about Syndicate here and here. There's a lot of crabbing about Syndicate on the net, but I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of it. If you are looking for an open-world game, Syndicate might be of interest. If you like elaborate/different/well-thought-out missions/events, you will for the most part not like Syndicate. The first half is better than the second half (on my 2nd/3rd/4th run-through I quit before the kids started having weapon/dress problems again), the main story is better than the wacky celebrity side missions (Marx, Darwin, etc). There are a subset of missions that force varying loss of agency (mostly concentrated in the second half) -- no-weapons-allowed missions; you-must-stealth missions; no-weapons-allowed and you can't climb because of your goddamn party dress mission, escort someone extremely slowly but don't let enemies see you mission, jackass hypnotizes you if you accidentally look at him for 0.1 second mission, a mythological being neuters your ability to attack mission etc. Maybe each of these would be good mechanics in a good mission but they're shit mechanics in shit missions. With the rest, there's just too many that are identical/very similar. Go here, fight baddies/protect someone/stealth with poor instructions, get/defuse/destroy thing, deliver thing/return. Like Grand Theft Auto V for the last ten years.
One trick to keep things lively, at least the open-world non-main story missions, is to spice up the chaos, turn a normal grab-n-go into a clusterfuck. There are a few ways to up the nonsense, my favorite is to start one mission that has a wandering icon (hijack this shipment convoy, etc), and literally drive that through another stationary mission (Templar hunt etc). It is nice that this is an option. Though sometimes this doesn't work: when in Cargo Escort, if you command Rooks to attack someone on the Train Robbery train, the Cargo Escort mission disappears.
Honestly the side missions are more fun. Have your Rooks do the mission, or see if you can just run through the area and quickly finish it, cram two side missions together as just mentioned, etc. Play with the algorithms without grinding through the time it takes to reset main missions over and over.
There are some great hilarious moments of random gameplay. A Rook struggles with his injuries lying on the ground. Valiantly, he composes himself, starts rising to his feet ... and is immediately is trampled to death by horses frightened by the gunfire.
Odd/Stupid Things.
One of your Rooks throws a projectile that looks like a smoke bomb. The animation is quick, difficult to see. The bomb makes a quick red arc and lands, and creates an expanding red ring. When the red ring reaches its maximum, there's a "whump" sound and the screen goes semi-psychedelic/blurry. No damage iirc, just loss of movement for a short while. It affects you, the Rooks, probably anyone within the range of the ring. I do not know if the enemy possesses this frightening technology. One Rook randomly got stuck in some sort of aggro mode loop and kept alternately firing his gun/throwing these psych-bombs. "Someone's been playing with fireworks." After another skirmish, the original bomb-thrower (not an associate) left with two of his Rook companions, and an associate Rook took over bomb-throwing (but not gun-firing) until I ran him over with the carriage. Then he became docile and boarded the carriage without further incident. It would have been a lot more interesting if Rooks threw smoke bombs, especially if triggered contextually. Chaos boost. Instead, these mysterious psychedelic things.
One of the phrases the Rooks repeat endlessly, "shank's pony" was a reference to walkin' legs. The Rooks say a lot of things, mostly inspired by fresh kills. "I'll find out where you're buried and dance on your grave," "You won't be stirring up no more trouble." A Rook will say "It's shank's pony for someone" if the two wagon horses are killed in a Cargo Escort mission, or even just another NPC's single carriage horse. Though to my tin ear it sounds like they're saying "shank's boney." A timely aside: Napoleon Bonaparte used to be referred to as "Boney," as in "Boney's Ribs," a then-popular multi-colored lollipop as referenced in a 1847 issue of Punch. "Luckily" I can just stand over the dead horses and the NPCs will repeat the triggered dialogue over and over, "someone's going to be late for supper!" etc. So finally I heard the plosive bit of "pony" after the sixth time with the volume cranked.
Only the woman Rook with the hat will laugh after every kill. Seems easier to find one in Westminster.
Don't bother cutting down bells if you're not in a mission. They re-generate. Why? Dunno.
It's ridiculous that you can't fire a gun while driving a carriage. The Blighters can. There are at least two open-world missions that randomly spawn near you -- hijack/escort a carriage. You have to get off the carriage to shoot Blighters that have parked next to you. A Blighter may get a little icon above its head indicating that it's hot on taking the carriage -- good idea, good implementation, fair gameplay, the icon probably gives a little too much to the player, but okay. But now that you're not driving, one of your Rooks is now free to slide over to the driver's seat and quickly drive the carriage away (!??), past the mission boundary so you fail the mission. A Rook will try to get in the driver's seat you've just vacated around 80% of the time. "I'm helping." During "escort," you can climb onto the carriage and the driver goes bananas, constantly shifting around while going breakneck, really hugging the buildings which also have awnings which usually knock you off the carriage which doesn't stop for you and goes past the mission boundary: mission fail. Shitty gameplay, ridiculous. The capper is that then, ONLY THEN, the Rook driver will do a 180 and pull up beside you with the carriage which now is not a MISSION carriage but a REGULAR carriage. I usually shoot the driver. AYFKM. Did anyone actually play these missions. It's that bullshit when a team has this cockamamie idea about the "best" way to play a mission and then they code for only that. "No one would hole up when the Blighters come to shoot them down instead of trying to get to the mission objective point as fast as possible." Oddly enough, the Blighters have carriages that are just a little bit faster than yours, even if you've maxxed yours. So I hole up and try to find a good parking spot that an errant Rook driver can't manuever out of to fail the mission. "Send in the clowns." It's exactly like GTA5. Hole up or flee. Code for both.
Sometimes during a "case the building" mission at a party you can walk upstairs past the guards (Kohr-I-Noor) and sometimes during a "case the building" mission at a party you cannot walk upstairs past the guards (A Night To Remember). Here's a surprise, they don't let you know either way. You're apparently supposed to contextualize from the one clue -- that there's people standing on the stairs in the former mission, and no one in the latter even though in other areas of the former mission, party people are partying outside in a cordonned area but if you try to join the party people it's party over for you. There's a few things like this that are beyond common sense and rather annoying. Did you know you can kidnap someone and hustle them by guards while they're saying "you're hurting me" and the guards will not care, as long as your "circle of influence" -- or whatever that white ring is called -- doesn't touch them? Even if you're a foot away.
One of the items of clothing you can earn -- the one that takes the longest to acquire, that has good upgrades on specific abilities -- has some sort of electric interference pattern because: unknown, not explained. It's visually annoying. I switched back to the outfit that increases steak knife damage. "Folks, it's like I'm giving these knives away. Don't miss your chance to re-invigorate your personal lifestyle brand culture thing."
Your Rooks are constantly stumbling over each other as they follow you. When they do, they make grunting exclamations. So that follows you around, endlessly. if bump(rook1,rook2) audiogrunt(rnd(30)) I are good programmer what have solutions! Same thing with comments while you're looting dead bodies. "Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Finding collectibles is more teeth-gnashing than it has to be. You have to be right on top of a collectible w/Eagle-O-Vision to reveal it, it's not the outer perimeter of your circular radar inset. You can buy "treasure maps" that show where some things are, it's worth it. I tried just looking for the last two-three chests in two or more boroughs and it wears you out. The other categories, there aren't as many individual items, and some have location context -- beer always being in a corner pub, posters always being in a block opening etc., so they're easier to find. The "Secrets" category is the most fun, with the object being displayed in a photo in situ and you have to puzzle out where it was taken. More interesting, you can hear it when it's close by. So you're doing Thing A, you hear the tinkling ... and stop your murder spree. "Hold on, everyone, there's a collectible that needs my ... collecting."
One of the last quick cut scenes (w/no associated event/mission/quest) happens in your base and I have no idea how/why it was activated because I had already finished every event. I was spending time just gathering collectibles and mayheming. It wrapped up a part of the main story. About 30 seconds in length. Very odd.
There's a "quick shot combo" in which you block then throw a knife/shoot, point blank at someone. But there's a borough chief that is happy to take 10+ close-range bullets to the stomach because logic. I think it's only one of the lower-level ones, oddly. Update: other borough leaders are into the endless-bullet situation. Rubbish code, probably. "Oh right, the quick shot."
When you enter the street event to protect someone from "criminals," after you kill and start looting them the person you rescued will shout "stop, thief!" Ungrateful wretch. There's a lot of little things like this: try whistling while you're delivering a bit of dialogue, for example. The oddest is when one of your own Rooks calls you out for looting. "Uh, that's how we do things 'round here, Jerry."
Kill someone, come back a half-minute later and a crowd has gathered. "Help, murder!" Problem is, the body has despawned, so ten, twenty people are gathered around nothing. Or a hat, really. The hats don't despawn, usually. Sometimes I'll be on my way to Important Event and will cut through an intersection with seven, fifteen hats. "Oh right, this is when murders."
A Gang Upgrade: "Nimbler, faster and more reliable: fire trucks can reach the poor boroughs of London." ... Who cares? Fire trucks? This feels like a stub that was supposed to do something, like the red psych-bombs. You don't use fire trucks for anything. Fire trucks don't do anything. Fire trucks: you are useless.
I've already groused about the UI, but I'm 75% through second run-through and just noticed that my equipped weapons are indicated by a dingy faded triangle mark in the upper-lefthand corner and/or a incredibly slightly brighter white background. Again, odd choices. "We have to make a UI in a week? My cousin is great at UIs." A small dot in the corner? A small star? Something more distinct than "less white."
Tips.
If you just miss a helix gliding by on your rope, you can wiggle on it to move around a bit (flipping directions back and forth) and that will sometimes snag it.
You can get one more rook than your Rook level allows by signing up two rooks that are next to each other as your last pick. Sometimes. Sometimes you can get six. Without eggrolls, but still, one more than maximum. Sometimes you cannot get your maximum number of Rooks. The game is confused.
You can't skip certain "cinematics." I tried to skip one by force-quitting. No, when you start the game again ... there it is. I get it, Sterrick is a bland Snidley Whiplash. Fuck off. Consumers should have their own config file for this kind of horseshit. Oh that would be so tight, some sort of global "I like/hate the following" text file that all the game companies would follow to the letter. Hahahaha throw that on the fire, never going to happen.
Jacob has only about four responses when Evie hits the safe right next to his sleepytime couch. It gets tiring. I switched voice FX to French, much less annoying. "Oh how charming," even though it's the same Jacob idiocy. Amusingly half the NPCs still speak in English, and they didn't put down some bills to get enough French child voice actors ... so sometimes there's a kid waving papers and yelling out in a very adult voice. It's a very cosmopolitan city. Subtitles, however, are only shown during the main campaign, it seems. Running around randomly, everything you hear/say does not have a corresponding subtitle.
There's a gang upgrade called "City Takeover." It reduces the price of every other gang upgrade. But it's sort of buried. You may wish to prioritize it. There's a second column next to it with additional discounts as well.
There are a few missions that require you to kidnap someone and hustle them to a carriage waiting on the street, but there are a ridiculous number of baddies walking/standing around blocking all the entrances. The specific one I'm thinking of, Jacob has to kidnap a policeman in a police station w/far too many other policeman that all look like the same policeman. This is a time for your Rooks to shine. First, get on a roof, clear out as many police outside/inside the station as you can with your patented, lifetime warranty steak knives. Jump inside, clear out the rest except for your target. Kidnap him, then call your five Rooks. You kidnap him to prevent two mission fails: one, a Rook kills the target; two, the target "disappears" (even though he never leaves the station) if someone calls out the alarm. Stay on the top floor and hold your new friend tight; let the Rooks take care of things. You might have to call in two waves of them, you might have to walk a little closer to the closest policeman to be able to point him out to the Rooks. Doing this any other way is tedious, I don't want to play Super Fake Stealth Game Featuring Tiny Step Shuffle for thirty minutes. In subsequent runs, I quit the game before this mission.
Trying to get Rooks to clear out enemies in a Train Robbery. I holed up behind a crate on the train, signed up five Rooks, and ordered them to kill the Blighters in the next car. The problem is that the NPCs don't really understand the train. The Rooks will get close to the moving train but they don't know how to board. They also get hit by the train or (rarely) crushed between the train and a wall/different train. On the other hand, enemy NPCs occasionally fall off the train, and one time a Blighter clipped through the floor of the train and died. You can order a hit on a Blighter, and the Rooks come flying around the corner on their carriage(s), shooting, but they rarely have an angle. There is one segment in the whole loop (here I'm assuming there's just one loop) in which the train is level with the street and they're able to pick off Blighters, but there's another problem: additional Blighters will spawn, either randomly if there's a "leader" Blighter, or if the "sniper" Blighter whistles for reinforcements (above/beyond the "spotter" opening the door on the four-Blighter "storage" car). If there are less than four Blighters in one car and they're being actively shot at, one will whistle and sometimes a new Blighter will spawn on the same car. I think what's happening here is that it's trying to spawn each time but the train is in motion so it's doing wall checks etc and failing about 75% of the time. Is it only the level 9 Blighter that whistles? I do not know this.
I left the whole thing going for about an hour, calling the Rooks to make hits before/during the segments in which they had potential shots on the train, but the number of Blighters killed wasn't keeping up with the new spawns. Update: did it again, and was able to clear the train in about the same time. Get some IRL stuff going ... this is the computer playing against itself, you're just there to offer occasional well-timed suggestions.
The Rooks can navigate (at least) the Whitechapel train station (North center). They came storming in and boarded the train while it was parked at the station, but that only happened once over two long sessions. You can also just decouple the engine in a ground-level area and the Rooks will summon train-boarding courage and take care of things. Some times they will actually figure out a way to a decoupled train on an elevated/trench section, but it's not reliable.
A lot of times they're happy with just being directly under the bridge you stopped the train on, because it's the shortest distance and they're ... stuck in a local minimum, I think is how the math term goes. And some times, when you go to the map, you can see that your Rooks are all gathered somewhere far away, and stuck, and they're never going to move. You can dismiss them. I don't know when it happened, but at some point for me the game bugged out (or was it always like this?) and stopped showing the mini-icon for Rook dismissal -- the little count-down bar that snakes around the Rook profile icon. But it still applies. So you have to hold the dismissal button(s) down for the same amount of time (it will either show the countdown for you, or nothing will be shown), and your Rooks will be dismissed. Then you can call up new Rooks that will appear close to you, not two boroughs away.
Rooks/Blighters get caught between stationary train cars. A lot. Some pinwheel forever, some just stand on the ground between the cars and don't move. The obvious way to hustle this is to detach the engine. Wait until you're at relatively level ground, detach from the engine. A warning: multiple Blighters spawn in the train cars right as the cars come to a halt. It's odd, there are Blighters that already occupy the cars. My usual M.O. was to board the train and hide on the front of the engine, wait until level ground, detach, hide again if Blighters are too close, dismiss the crew because they're probably stuck somewhere, call a fresh crew, start ordering fights.
It's the strangest thing. Here's an interesting mechanic, train robberies, here's an interesting mechanic, commanding a crew. Let's skip testing the two together.
Carriage takeover variants. You can get inside a carriage and the driver will not move, will go slow, will go two different "medium" speeds, or go breakneck. They don't follow GPS lines, they just go in random directions. One time I was able to take over a carriage and it set me to drive randomly through the streets. Okay me. One time it was just a horse, and I was inside the carriage, and the horse just ran the streets of London. Okay horse. I think you're more likely to get a breakneck speed NPC if it's a Rook that is not in your crew. I used the breakneck NPCs, when I could get them, to scan with Eagle-Eye-Vision or whatever to reveal collectibles while I was off mending my jeans or whatever IRL. Ideally you want to be hidden in the cab if you're doing this AFK because occasionally there are skirmishes.
What I have found works sometimes is to have your 1-5 Rooks, and a hard-top four-person carriage in the middle of the street, nothing in front of it, and "hide" in the carriage. Then your Rooks clamber all about you, and sometimes one of them gets in the driver seat, and sometimes you'll take off. If you're still at a dead stop but you have a driver, "exit" ("E" on keyboard) and you'll crawl up onto the side of the carriage, and that usually activates the driver because of course it does. Repeat a few times, if it doesn't happen, try it w/another carriage somewhere else. Maybe different Rooks. Don't know, there's a strange element of randomness to it.
Treatin' the crew to ice cream after a fun day of killing!
Horseshit / Tedious Things.
Horseshit Top of the list: Disabling weapons and forcing melee at "close" range which (bullshit sub-problem) can also vary. SFA. Induces rage quickly.
"Child Liberation" is a whole sub-thing in this game. After you "Liberate" a factory from all the child doffers/sweepers/etc, sometimes children can still be seen shovelling literal shit/sweeping/etc around the grounds. Child Liberation Simulator (Inside Factory Only Edition).
Rare situation in which you "Hijack Carriage" w/two Blighters, coming up behind them to double-assassinate. You have the drop on them. But no, magically, one swings from their seat at you and knocks you, sending you spinning off the carriage, landing flat on the ground. Don't come up with rules for engagement then occasionally break them to the enemy's advantage because you want random things to happen. This happens in the Far Cry series as well. This is just another reason why I avoid melee. A bullet is a bullet, but the melee dance is where developers shine! [SFX: retching noise]
Tail missions are horseshit. Countdown clock starting the millisecond the quarry goes around a corner etc: horseshit. Fucking designers haven't unlocked the level one "object permanence" skill perk irl. All tail missions in any game are horseshit. Stop fucking making tail missions.
Long-ass cut scenes that are unskippable. This is an gaming industry obsession. These days, I just take the headphones off, turn off the screen, go do some errands irl, come back.
Killing people as Jack the Ripper in the Jack the Ripper DLC.
Child dipshit detective Arthur Conan Doyle's bloodthirsty quips about actual murders. Houdini razzed Doyle good, I can't remember the book it's in.
Rooks don't pay attention to GPS, if they commandeer a carriage it's random path time.
Rooks will sometimes commandeer driver's seat even if player is driving.
The train robbery icon disappears after getting to a particular station. There is no way (?) of knowing if the train will disappear or just trundle through stations. You could be within 100 meters of the train and suddenly the icon winks out. For a game obsessed with timers, perhaps throw one on the train if it's getting to w/in a minute of disappearing. Or it could, I don't know, never disappear once it's on the map, because sometimes it's not on the map at all. It could just trundle around alla time until it's robbed. During one run this happened four times in a row. Still feeling raw about it two days later.
Game mechanic "sitting in seat of carriage triggers Blighters in carriages that spawn right behind player; make electronic bell sound; repeat four times" feels very GTA-like. Not a compliment. Except for the bell sound. That's INNOVATION.
The upgrade that discounts future upgrades costs a boatload. Amount of discount is not indicated: "All other GANG UPGRADES will cost less money to purchase."
XP value never indicated except with blue gauge that has no numerical display.
"Meatier" missions to free boroughs like Child Liberation pay poorly; quick fun things that have no consequence like train robbery pay 3x-4x as much.
Can't sit anywhere except carriages. Cannot sit in train in comfy chair next to fireplace even though Evie is shown sitting in the same chair when playing as Jacob.
If you fast travel somewhere to get closer to the train robbery icon, it will have moved/disappeared because apparently you are not fast travelling, you're just time skipping.
No one needs to see the found-music-box cut scene 32 times. Sure, it's short, just ... perhaps give it a good think. Could just play the "collectible acquired" sound effect then follow it with the music box tune, so the player is now in the world walking/running/carriaging around with the tune for a little bit (this does happen when the game starts after you find the first box, and also sometimes when you warp etc, but it's a bug). A nice little touch. Not "Remember that you-found-a-thing cut scene you saw 27 times already? Here it is again."
If you are chasing the leader at the end of the Queen Victoria boat mission, it's a scripted chase and if you're too close your controls are semi-disabled so the scripted dynamite can go scripted off. This is so incredibly weak.
Bugs.
One of the Strand Bounty Hunts (I think Milton King to the West) kept crashing when I would bring the dead bounty to the end delivery point. Then I tried bringing a live bounty from the opposite way and it worked. YMMV.
During the Kohr-I-Noor jewel handoff sequence cut scene between Jacob/Evie (DLC), there was a guard trapped behind a door and occasionally clipping through it. The previous time was bugged, in that Jacob didn't show up, I was frozen in place, but guards showed up in the cut scene to beat the stuffing out of me (you can't do anything at all during cut scenes -- ultimate loss of control). A new take on entertainment. I would suggest not activating the cut scene and tossing a grenade (someone else suggested a smoke bomb) into the small tower room where the cut scene starts.
In the main story about halfway through Jacob is supposed to follow a carriage delivering explosives or some such. That's the whole mission [SFX: party favor noise here]. There's a checkpoint in the middle. If you screw up after the checkpoint, when you re-start at the checkpoint, sometimes the scenario will not properly start and there will be a message "desynchronizing due to carriage being fucky" or whatever and it unfortunately re-loads again. Stand still, let that happen; on the second or third re-load it resets properly, at least for me.
With two monitors, sometimes game loses focus on first screen, jumps out of game. Sometimes mouse can be seen on second screen. Have to switch to Windowed/Borderless.
During borough boss Cletus Strain fight, controls are broken, suddenly cannot move properly, camera angle is wrong, etc.
Following Rooks disappear after fast travel, mission complete, when you burn the plans ... basically any cut scene/time you don't have an eye on them, they're gone. Sometimes, oddly, the "completed Cargo Escort/Hijack" mission will not freeze the screen to show stats etc and you'll still have your Rooks afterward.
Markers disappear after fast travel, etc.
Rooks icons indicated on map, not present in world.
The Rook sub-menu does not come up sometimes. The "call carriage w/5 Rooks" command does not work sometimes (beyond the cool-down timer which is .. about a minute).
Boat Raid w/timed "mark crates" mechanic suddenly ends at around two-minute mark. Timer disappears, no markers on map.
Pretend elevator bug: Children when startled off high ledges fall to ground, then immediately stand up w/o fall damage.
Bounty Hunt parked carriage on road with body, Escort mission pulls up and it becomes a bloodbath, many Blighters shooting etc, horses running. Bounty Hunt mission just disappears.
Rook commandeered carriage even though player was driver, then player scooted to left, then again, then again, all while floating in air, always scooting to left until hitting a building. Then just repeating the animation while smacking into the building. Soft lock.
Child Rooks run to the place player was when the child was hailed, not player's current position.
Music box melody plays after fast travel after first music box is collected.
Player can encounter themselves in the train. Advise player to just ignore yourself, you'll go away eventually.
Rooks cannot pathfind in a lot of situations, especially the train. Only one area where tracks are flat with ground. Rooks also have trouble getting/staying on moving train, die a lot. If you are in an elevated station, and Rooks are street level, they usually can't find you and just stand around doing nothing. Take about FIVE steps down to street level which puts you in range and they scramble around corners/up the stairs to meet you, full of vim and vigor. Why is there a range at all? If you hijack an omnibus and do not move, your Rooks will stop adoring you if there's a gps route. They will follow the gps route for awhile (edge of range? just beyond?) and stop there. Then change the gps routing so it's no longer on the street that they're on, and they still just sit there. Probably because they're just beyond the range. Double logic.
Rooks die on the train randomly, even if they're all grouped together with you in the middle of a mail car, for example.
Cannot switch Evie/Jacob while on train.
Cannot call for more Rooks from train.
Cannot switch weapons while on train, even if just to see current inventory.
Rook died trying to board slow-moving omnibus.
Random outside shopkeeper would flash white every 20 seconds or so.
NPCs coming in or disappearing while walking forward. Very rarely see random blip of NPC standing on street. Was in the world for less than a second. RIP rando, you were missed entirely.
While Evie/Jacob are stealthing, random NPCs on the street will make comments. Over and over. "You all right, miss? Feeling faint?" This happens even when Evie's "invisible," which breaks immersion 100%. Invisible to enemies, randos see her (developers would probably argue that everything is lined up: they don't make comments until they're close to her, but the representation of inivisibility doesn't go away like it does if an enemy is close enough, oh it's just chaos). Similarly in Watch Dogs: Legion if you jump on a drone, which, to be honest: madness. Not every single character has to comment on the player's situation 24/7, especially when it doesn't comport with the world we're all supposed to be creating together in our player brains. I've read one comment complaining that the near-invisible representation itself is immersion-breaking, which, yeah.
Perhaps, instead of having a large amount of NPCs continue their little walk cycles but spouting off the same quips over and over THAT PERSON IS CRAZY etc, they could break their walk cycles to avoid the player, like it would happen in real life. Except for Evie, I mean, she becomes almost invisible so NPCs should accidentally bump into her instead of implying she's crazy. That would have added to the gameplay, you can't just go invisible on the sidewalk, etc.
Also your hired Rooks gather around your invisible ass, even if you're in the middle of a red zone trying to hunt a Templar or whatever. Instead, have them act as scouts, spreading out, not constantly looking at the player, crowding in. "Go away, idiots ... I'm assassinin' here."
I encountered these three blokes below, two of them are giving the what-for to the third. It's a looping animation, you can't interact with them/run into them/break their holds/shoot them etc. Probably got lost in the program sauce. "We'll get to them later." There's a similar thing in Watchdogs II: More Watchdogs in which people are tied up in a container and you can't open the container/do anything about it.
Why are horses outlined in yellow. Even when dead. Why can't I get close enough to turn it into a red outline ("assassinatin' zone"), if we're going to play that game. New DLC: Horsin' Around, five new exciting horse assassination missions featuring Ada Lovelace.
After finishing train robbery, Blighter spawned on train six feet away.
Ran to back of train while invisible, jumped off train; throwing knife appeared in mid-air for a few beats. Then after the train had done a complete route, went by the floating throwing knife again. Blink and your Rooks disappear, but throwing knives are forever.
Leap of Faith requires three keys to be hit at the same time. Either I'm just bad at this or 50% of the time it misreads and bobbles the handoff, turns you around 180 degrees.
You can "unlock" associate Frederick Abberline at the big "A" after doing every single bounty hunt. It's supposed to be the other way around -- you unlock the associate, then you can do the bounty hunt missions.
Marking icons on the map is fiddly.
Five Rooks were in called carriage, most/all stuck in endless loop getting in and out of carriage. Carriage was parked on a small curb on the Thames. Moved carriage to level ground, Rooks follow player afterward.
A Blighter got stuck on the edge of one of the train robbery cars, caught in a walking animation. Then, as the train shifted on a curve, the Blighter slid across the back edge to the other corner, still in the animation loop.
Rook pushed off train adopts impossible bent posture floating in mid-air, stays with train.
Shot a horse through the back of its carriage. Plausible, I guess.
During Cargo Escort while on a bridge, the last of the Blighters fell down below the wagon, and turned into the icon that indicated they had the bright idea of hijacking it. But they didn't move, staying directly below the carriage. The "you've been spotted" status never left, health was not increasing. After killing the Blighter, normal status returned, and health began increasing.
During Cargo Escort if you command your Rooks to open fire on a Train Robbery Blighter, the current mission switches to Train Robbery and Cargo Escort is no longer available even if you're driving the Cargo Escort wagon.
Rooks can go missing -- full five count, but two of them are not on the map and have been given more than enough time to report for duty. Can dismiss everyone and re-hire, but still.
Blighters/cops are excellent shots from moving/stationary carriage driver seats. Rooks are horrible at shooting Blighters/cops on moving/stationary carriage driver seats. Assuming it's a bug.
If riding on Cargo Escort wagon, the corpses of dead Rooks/Blighters will scream when they're jostled off the top of it.
Doesn't look like big letter signs were used as much in Victorian London as they are in Syndicate. Certainly not like this. Also, one of the big letter signs just reads "OFFICES." Really now.
