It might just be me, but one thing players can't say about the Assassin's Creed franchise is how hard its combat is. The game has a parry button and it helps that enemy grunts take their turns taking a stab at the player.
So, if you're hoping for harder fights in Assassin's Creed III, you might be disappointed. In an interview with Digital Spy, creative director Alex Hutchinson talks about the game's revamped combat and how they can't make it "ridiculously hard."
We're trying to keep it as fluid and dynamic as possible. So the way we described it early on was that we're a relatively mass-market game so we can't make ridiculously hard combat, but we can make it hard to be amazing at it.So you can stumble your way through 90% of fights as a casual player, but if you want to run into a fight, assassinate a guy on the move, immediately begin a kills chain, pick everybody off, switch between pistols and close combat moves and basically wipe everybody out without ever being touched, this should be quite tricky.So we worked a lot on the archetypes, we worked a lot on base combat strategy of when you should use which move. We took out the need to lock onto anybody with the left trigger to keep it really, really fluid and we added running assassinations so you can charge enemies with any weapon.We have multiple enemies attacking simultaneously now, so there's lots of little things that we put in. You can kick people off buildings – there's a new one for you.
Hopefully, this news coupled with the game's new control scheme should spice things up a bit. I do know I don't want to kill a grunt out of a crowd of enemies one-by-one again.