When comparing Far Cry Primal vs Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, the Slant community recommends Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag for most people. In the question“What are the best open world games on Steam?” Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is ranked 6th while Far Cry Primal is ranked 30th. The most important reason people chose Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is:
The stealth mechanics feel natural and fluid in how strategic they are. While tracking your targets, you blend in with each city's citizens or climb up to the tops of buildings to perch there and avoid getting spotted by the templar or their guards. You can either wait for the perfect opportunity to strike with a hidden blade up your sleeve that silently assassinates your target, or you can go all-out and have a sword duel with them if you'd rather take a more aggressive approach. After they're dead, you make your escape and become incognito again. Everything goes together nicely in a way that feels satisfying.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Humanized upgrade system
Instead of some static menu where you pick and choose what areas to upgrade skills the player need to find characters in the game, who can build and improve items for the character. This way the player is interacting with the upgrade system by taking part in finding and interacting with AI.
Pro Recaps when starting game
Each time the game is started there will be a recap of the story progression so far of the user time spent in the game, this makes for a good way to catch up on what was accomplished last and what is next when spending any long amount of time away from the game.
Pro Focuses on survival
Being that the game focuses more on animals in the wild as enemies instead of humans (like past games in the series) the player must survive when out in the wild by avoiding or fighting these creatures. An added day and night cycle adds on to this gameplay by making the animals more aggressive at night. The animals can be warned off with fire, but this means the player needs to collect animal fat in order to create torches. All of this adds up to more of a focus on survival, especially at night.
Pro Intuitive stealth gameplay
The stealth mechanics feel natural and fluid in how strategic they are.
While tracking your targets, you blend in with each city's citizens or climb up to the tops of buildings to perch there and avoid getting spotted by the templar or their guards. You can either wait for the perfect opportunity to strike with a hidden blade up your sleeve that silently assassinates your target, or you can go all-out and have a sword duel with them if you'd rather take a more aggressive approach. After they're dead, you make your escape and become incognito again.
Everything goes together nicely in a way that feels satisfying.
Pro Cool naval combat against other pirates out on the open seas
Naval battles with your own ship and crew are expanded here in Black Flag after they were first introduced in Assassin's Creed III. You're a pirate this time, so you get to explore the open world with your ship as much as you want.
The bread and butter of the game involves you as the captain of your ship, navigating out in the open waters to get from place to place, as well as getting hands-on with the full mechanics of steering while firing off cannons at enemy ships. There's a full crew aboard with you, helping to give plenty of liveliness to your surroundings as they shout in anger, sing shanties, and cheer in victory as you go along, along with dynamic weather like raging storms that adds to the realism and intensity. It's a lot of fun and serves as a nice way to break things up from the usual stealth missions on foot.
Pro Innovative multiplayer with online co-op for up to four friends
The multiplayer in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag offers a unique experience. It mixes the series' stealth mechanics with cat and mouse gameplay through a few different multiplayer modes.
Manhunt is the most interesting one, where you play one round with one team of four as the hunters and the other team of four as the hunted. The hunters have to kill as many of the opposing team as possible in the allotted time, whether it's through pure speed that offers fewer points, sneaky doses of lethal poison for tons of bonus points, and plenty more. The hunted, if they spot their hunters, can use certain defensive abilities like smoke bombs and disguises to outsmart their opponents, stun them, and then run away.
Other modes like Wanted offer a pure PvP experience with you against the full lobby of other players, where you try to stay hidden while making kills. For all gameplay modes, there's the neat, but chilling effect of hearing whispers as an opponent gets closer to you; trying to distinguish which way they're coming from while staying hidden. This and the sheer unpredictability of the gameplay makes the multiplayer incredibly addicting and fun.
Cons
Con Barely expanded from Far Cry 4
The game has taken many aspects found in Far Cry 4 out to focus on things such as hunting and crafting, sadly the hunting and crafting mechanics are barely improved over Far Cry 4, which does speak to the level of development the game received being that even areas that the core gameplay focuses on is not really improved or expanded in any way to make for a more in-depth experience.
Con Poor performance
The game does not utilize multi core threading very well and even on the highest end of PCs with a Titan GPU the game may still dip below 60fps when on max settings at 1080p.
Con Same map as Far Cry 4
While the art has changed to look more stone age, the map size and areas are pretty much the same. This of course makes for way less development time and people see it as a shortcut for a full priced game.
Con Really short
The game only has 4 main missions, which can be completed quite quickly. This shows how much this game should have been DLC instead of a full priced title.
Con No color blind option
Bad guys are marked in red and friends are marked in green, the most common color blindness is in the red a green spectrum's meaning that those that are affected by this will have quite a bit of trouble playing this game.
Con Difficult to connect to characters in the game
There is zero real language used in the game, it is all made up, which makes it difficult to connect to any character in the game since nothing is spoken that anyone can understand. This may have been to save money on voice actors, but no matter the reason it does detract from the story of the game and connecting to it.
Con Multiplayer is pretty much dead
Unfortunately, the multiplayer is all but abandoned by the player base. Even though the multiplayer itself is really cool and fun, you won't find too many people playing it these days. Since the game originally came out in 2013, it's quite old now, and it doesn't help that the devs don't actively update it anymore. The Assassin's Creed multiplayer base in general is also splintered between this game and the other installments with online play. So if you're a new player trying to get into things, don't be surprised if it takes a long time to find a match.
Con Dull story that rehashes the same old conflicts
There's nothing new here, just the usual war between the Assassins and the Templars. This was okay in previous games where the writers at least cared enough to put in more in-depth modern day scenarios that kept the war relevant, giving us a reason to explore these historical settings in the first place. Instead, the past portion with Edward would be completely boring without his entertaining personality, and the modern day stuff is so phoned-in that the devs shouldn't have even bothered in the first place. This game is great for the gameplay, but not at all for the narrative.
Con The setting isn't that great for climbing around on top of buildings and exploring
Getting to play on and around the islands of the Caribbean setting sounds cool, but it's not all that fun from a gameplay perspective. The wooden buildings and huts are quite small and basic, with only some taller churches in the bigger cities like Havana. Scaling them doesn't take much effort, and it doesn't reward you with a huge, beautiful view comparable to previous locations like Florence and Rome during the Italian Renaissance. Despite the unique history and culture in these places, they're weak settings to play through.