I recently finished AC Shadows (as much as you can "finish" it without the DLC, which is really where the story actually wraps up). And I wanted to share a few thoughts, going section by section.

Graphics:

The game is genuinely gorgeous. I struggle to think of another game set in Japan that looks better, especially when it comes to the Sengoku period. No complaints here at all.

Stealth:

This is by far the strongest part of the game. Honestly, I can't remember a better stealth system since peak Splinter Cell. Whoever designed this part of the game did excellent work.

Parkour:

Very solid, the best since AC:Unity. Climbing finally feels meaningful. In the last three entries you could often climb, but it rarely mattered since the environment was mostly low anyway. Apparently, there were technical issues at launch, but what's there now works well.

Combat:

This is where things get mediocre. As in previous entries, the RPG system inherited from Odyssey means that even on higher difficulties, stealth loses its point, since you can just tank your way through as a walking bulldozer. Enemy animations, and Yasuke's in particular, come off pretty stiff and puppet-like, hard to describe it any other way. I also dislike how the enemy armor works visually: once you break it, the armor just pops and suddenly you've got a dozen naked enemies chasing you, which breaks immersion a bit.

Base and crafting system:

This is the weakest part of the game for me. Gathering resources and waiting for them to get transported back to your base feels lifted straight out of a survival or economy game and AC Shadows is neither. In practice it just artificially padding playtime and slowing the pace, without adding any real value to the game. I was constantly low on cash and resources as I wanted to upgrade both characters and the Base. It's hard not to suspect this system was designed mainly to push microtransactions.

Story:

The core premise is interesting: a classic samurai/western movie setup, visible even in how the cutscenes are framed. The problem is the execution falls apart. In the prologue, a group of twelve masked men attacks, kills the protagonist's father, and steals a mysterious MacGuffin in a box that we never actually see. These attackers aren't connected to any previously established faction, the thing in the box would supposedly allow them to change the fate of Japan. (AFAIK it's not an Isu artefact). Later it turns out most of them didn't even know what is inside the box, and one of them doesn't even know it exists. (I guess guy just decided to nap during the cutscene)

The pacing is worse than even the content-bloated Valhalla. At least Valhalla's regional quests had some story to them, here it's usually just "kill five bandits marked on the map." The main story quest works the same way, just with cutscenes and fetchquests attached. The twelve antagonists from the prologue blur together. By the time you kill the second one, you've already forgotten who the first one was. On top of that, there are dozens of characters who exist solely to hand you a regional quest and then never appear again (even after quest completion), which makes it hard to tell who actually matters in this story versus who's just an avatar on the quest map (since the game doesn't have a proper quest log).

Overall, it's just not very engaging. The Assassins vs Templars conflict has even less weight here than in recent entries. The series mostly moved away from that theme after Syndicate, but before that you could still point to something meaningful:

• Origins - the founding of the Brotherhood
• Odyssey - the Templars' backstory (Edit: In the Legacy of the First Blade DLC)
• Valhalla - the Isu backstory and their reincarnation (a theme borrowed from AC4, honestly)
• Shadows - the protagonist's mother was supposedly an Assassin, except that character never actually appears in the game, and there is a single (Historically Significant) assassin in the game, but he is only an episodic character with little connection to the main plot. The Templar who kills Yasuke's mother feels tacked on just to tie him into the series' main conflict, even though that thread barely affects the story at all.

What really got to me, though, was a moment in the epilogue: the kid you're forced to babysit for most of the game makes a banner for your settlement and it happens to feature the Assassin symbol on it. Where did he saw it? He could’ve not see it anywhere, yet he made a symbol established since 44BC. What a coincidence.
Like they needed to remind us that this game is connected to the rest of the series.

Summary:

If I hadn't gotten this game bundled with a laptop, I'd probably regret spending money on it. The stealth system deserves to carry over into future entries, it would be a shame if it disappeared along with the rest of the game. Other than that, this is probably the weakest Assassin's Creed in a long time. Less exhausting than Valhalla, but at least that game's story kept pulling me forward, here, I just didn't feel that at all.

Hi everyone!

I’m moving away from mainstream cloud LLMs (ChatGPT Projects, NotebookLM) due to heavy censorship and strict usage limits. I want to transition my long-form text adventure campaign entirely to SillyTavern (running a local model backend), but I need some guidance on the best workflow and configuration to replicate my previous setup.

I treat the AI Agent as a GM/Narrator who controls the world and all NPCs, rather than playing as a single character.

I want to create a persistent "Campaign/Project" structure, and I'm unsure how to best organize my lore. My Lorebook/World Info has a specific structure:

1. World Lore: General setting description, factions, and brief historical context.
2. Minor NPCs: Quick descriptions and summaries for minor characters.
3. Major NPCs: Deep character sheets including their personal goals, personality traits, and stats.

My questions regarding the best setup in SillyTavern:

• 1. Single Character Card vs. System Prompt for the Narrator: Should I create a dedicated "Grandmaster/Narrator" Character Card, or is it better to handle the narrative style entirely through the System Prompt / Main Prompt?
• 2. Lorebook (World Info) Structure: What is the best way to format and trigger my 3-tier lorebook in ST? Should I pack everything into one World Info file, or separate it? How should I handle the entry triggers (keywords) so the Narrator knows when to pull info about Major NPCs vs. minor ones without blowing up the context window?
• 3. Cross-Chat Memory / Continuity: In NotebookLM, I could start a new chat thread within the same project, and it would still access the same sources. In SillyTavern, what is the best way to "split" a massive story into acts/chapters while maintaining the continuity of past events? Group chats? Moving specific summaries to the Character Book?

Thanks!

I decided to give Linux a serious try on my main gaming rig. It wasn't my absolute first encounter; I already use Bazzite on an older laptop for tinkering and an old Dell hooked up to my TV for web browsing and retro emulation. I got a spare SSD I figured installing it in my main rig would be the perfect opportunity to compare Linux and Windows usability side-by-side. I was already planning to ditch the Adobe suite for open-source alternatives anyway. The only real anchor tying me to Windows was my M$ Store purchases. I've bought a lot of "Xbox Play Anywhere" games like Guilty Gear and Forza so I can play them both on the XBOX and PC without paying twice. But I figured if Linux blew me away, I could just keep Windows on a "side drive" for those rare UWP gaming sessions.

Friday

I started on Friday. It had been a while since my last clean install, so I went for a complete wipe of all my drives:

• 500GB SSD: Windows OS
• 2TB SSD: Windows Games
• 1TB SSD: Linux Test Bench

I installed Windows first. Once everything was reinstalled and my data (photos, documents, saves) was imported, I ran a benchmark on Cyberpunk 2077. After some research, I chose CachyOS (Arch, btw) because I heard about its gaming performance and I felt too restricted by Bazzite’s immutableOS on my laptop.

The installation was relatively smooth, and I liked how clearly the options were explained, I love customization and hate how locked-down Windows 11. I ended up with the Limine boot manager though I might have missed an option to change or disable it, but whatever, seeing a bootloader that let me easily choose between Linux and Windows without entering the UEFI every time felt like a win.

The cracks started to show. As soon as I began downloading apps and games, my internet connection completely choked. Wired connection management was atrocious, if an application wanted bandwidth, it took 100% of it, starving the rest of the OS. I had to manually throttle Steam's download speeds just to browse the web. Hilariously, the Wi-Fi card worked perfectly out of the box without drivers (which Windows fails at), but I use it only as an emergency if my cable connection is down.

When crisis was averted, I tried launching Wuthering Waves (don’t judge me). It refused to boot on every single Proton version except for CachyOS's custom one. Fine, whatever, got it working. But before every single boot, I had to sit through a 10-minute Vulkan shader processing. Every. Single. Time. It didn't happen with every game, but it was a mandatory tax for about anything running on Unreal Engine 4 or 5.

Next up was personalizing the desktop. I failed to get the Wallpaper Engine plugin working properly for KDE, so I settled for static backgrounds. Then I tried to change my user avatar. KDE threw a generic "Failed to save the changes" error for both admin and new users. I searched online and found about six similar cases dating back to 2015, none of which matched my error code, and the old config-file fixes were already applied to my system. I manually swapped the avatar files in the root directories, but it still didn't update the login screen. I gave up.

Downloaded Cyberpunk 2077 for a benchmark. It clocked in at about 5-10% worse than on Windows. I complained to a Linux-head friend, and he gave me a specific launch option command to paste into Steam. I tried it, and suddenly Linux beat Windows by about 5%. That’s nice, except... if it weren't for my friend, I would have had absolutely no clue. Why isn't this optimization clearly presented during setup as it’s specific to the CachyOS Proton? To make matters worse, I realised that my Eye Tracker had zero Linux support, turning a 30cm piece of premium hardware into a useless plastic paperweight glued to my monitor.

Saturday

I decided to boot up Marathon, only to realize it uses kernel-level anti-cheat. No-go. I can already hear the Linux fanboys memeing "that's a win for Linux then," but memes like that isn't how you convert fencesitters who just want to play games with their friends.

I loaded up a classic: Icewind Dale. Despite Steam Cloud claiming that Cloud Sync is done, my saves were completely missing. No big deal. I'll just mount my Windows drive and copy them from the Documents folder. Except Linux refused to mount the drive, spitting out a massive, verbose error block. Google told me to disable Fast Boot (already disabled) or run chkdsk inside Windows.

So, I tried to reboot into Windows. Limine couldn't boot it. UEFI boot manager couldn't boot it. I couldn't even force it into recovery mode. The Linux bootloader setup had completely corrupted my Windows boot partition I have no idea how or why as it was on a physically separate drive. I had to create a bootable Windows USB, use the command prompt to manually rebuild the BCD, and try system restore. Nothing worked. Less than 24 hours after a clean install, Linux forced me to completely wipe the drive and reinstall Windows from scratch.

I spent the rest of Saturday formatting, reinstalling Windows, restoring my personal backups from an external HDD, and setting up all my accounts again. While double-checking my SSD seating inside the motherboard, I probably loosened some fan cables and realised it only after I shut the case. I had to spend an hour unfucking my atrocious cable management at 2 AM while my cat tried to actively steal the chassis screws. By 3 AM Sunday, both OS environments were finally booting independently via UEFI, and the Windows drives were successfully mounting in Linux. I went to the bed as morning birds decided to scream outside the window.

Sunday

On Sunday afternoon, after doing some daily quests and sitting through another agonizing round of Vulkan shader processing, I finally went to play Icewind Dale. I tried to mount the Windows drive to grab my saves.

ERROR. The exact same mount error from Friday night. I tried mounting my 2TB games drive instead, a drive that had given me zero issues previously and it threw the exact same error.

I panicked, rebooted straight into Windows via UEFI, and checked the drives. They were completely fine. chkdsk reported absolutely zero errors. At that exact moment, the exhaustion and frustration won. I booted back, wiped the entire Linux drive, and didn't even bother checking if there was anything to back up.

Conclusion:

I intended to give Linux a fair one-month trial. I lasted roughly 45 hours from installation to format. Unless Linux desktop environments and gaming compatibility layers make a massive breakthrough, I am never looking back. It was hands-down the most frustrating, agonizing 45 hours of PC troubleshooting I've endured in the last 7 years, and I literally work in IT for a large corporation. After debloating, Windows is about as snappy as CachyOS, and it didn't require an hour of forum digging just to fail at changing a profile picture.