Yep, it's insane how much control you have in the last two AC games. Quick tips OP, pick and choose when to tap or hold X or O while running. DO NOT just hold X at all times. You need to think of the level design as a 3D space and constantly decide what move to make next to keep your momentum going.
This is just using R2
How is this not automated and contextual? You not only don't have to press any kind of jump button (or grab button for that matter) but the button you'd usually hold down for just running suddenly also causes you to vault, jump, swing and grab shit. If that's not a text-book example of contextualised, automated controls, I don't know what is.
This is what happens if you hold R2+X after as you're swinging from the first monkey bar
This is what happens if you hold R2+O as you swing from the first monkey bar
This is basically just the designers themselves admitting that their automation algorithm is shit and giving the players tools to fight against it. Sure, it's slightly more consistent than the pure automation from the previous example but it's built on an incredibly inconsistent base and it's an inelegant solution at best. It also isn't actually truly consistent. Look at the second example with the downwards movement. There's no consistency to how far the character moves forward within that downward motion or when exactly he'll decide to grab sth and where precisely he ends up. Like I said, the movement is being twisted to accomodate the environment and the game isn't moving the character solely based on player input but very much based on environmental context. It tries to find the next thing the character can hold onto and transports them there. Again, slightly more consistent but not truly consistent because there's still too much of a layer of abstraction between player input and character action. Now, I suppose you could bill this as complexity because it shows that the same part of the environment can be traversed in three separate ways but it's still incredibly simplistic in its complexity, if that makes any sense. It gives you three rather nebulous options (forward, up, down) that can mean all kinds of different things in different circumstances and doesn't let you actually control your character's specific actions or know with any kind of real consistency what exactly they're going to do beyond "forward", "up" or "down". Like I said, there's a layer of abstraction there.
A bit more complex.
This is what happens if you hold R2+X for the first jump and then hold O as you grab the monkey bar followed by double tapping O to roll, which negates fall damage.
The roll is indeed consistent IIRC, yes.
And this is what happens if you slide and use the parkour down control followed by just holding R2
And another example of automation and contextualisation. The game decides how far to jump, it probably also steered the jump on its own and the game decides to grab onto that gargoyle instead of, say the banister. This is really just proving my point for the most part.
Always remember that R2+O while running=vaulting to get over obstacles to keep your momentum going
Like with the rolling, I'll give you this one.
All of that being said, whether Assassin's Creed actually needs as much depth in its controls as, say, Mirror's Edge is a somewhat different discussion. It can probably get away with its movement system being less precise, less challenging and less complex but I do think that, either way, it's current movement system needs some serious changes like actually requiring people to press a jump button to make the character jump. (Which, that kind of thing is what I mean when I say that the original AC games had better controls which allowed for more complexity. Sure, they didn't have up or down buttons but they gave you more
direct control over the character which, in turn facilitated more complex movement.)