On Assassin's Creed

Hey, it's been awhile.

I'd intended my next post to be about Bungie's other set of games that ate up a huge portion of my life with their modding potential back in the day, but I just finished playing Assassin's Creed for the PC, and I figure it's worth talking about while the game is still fresh.

My impression of the general reactions to this game is that there seem to be a lot of people hating it just because they can. Even from friends of mine, I've heard complaints about how "stupid" the sci-fi future Abstergo portions of the game are, and that it should have just been made as a game set in Altair's time.

Personally, I loved the game. It doesn't do everything perfectly, for sure. Bad things out of the way first. I realize that with the whole sandboxed open-world thing, it's good to give players something to do, small objectives to accomplish within that free range setting, and I endorse that. But some of the "investigations" you have to do are silly and not fun at all. Flag collection while under a timer? If you miss just one, you're pretty well screwed. That challenge isn't fun, it's just annoying. Pickpocketing missions can be cool, but towards the end the places they're set in just make things more frustrating - guards who'll let your target pass but not you, lepers who shove you and break your cover, failing the mission, and so on and so forth. Combat gets really repetitive and frustrating. I found it annoying and lacking in credibility that everybody in this world seems able to do the same parkour stunts that I can. The last half hour or so of gameplay is frustrating and really just a whole shitload of combat, which is something that I've established needs to be interspersed with other stuff to be any fun. And perhaps the biggest "WTF?" moment I had was when I realized that, as a deadly, highly trained assassin who can run and leap across rooftops and climb up walls, I apparently never learned how to swim.

And somehow, all those things get mitigated mostly by the simple experience of playing the game, at least to me. Even with a frustrating, repetitive combat system, the game does a good enough job making me feel like a badass that I just don't mind. The designers seemed to have lost sight of the point of their game at some point, which is of course the assassinations. I loved the rush of chasing down a target as he flees in complete terror, and leaping onto his back, driving my hidden blade home through his throat, but all the planning, the information gleaned from investigations, came down to nothing in the end as I broke out in a run towards the target and everything burst into chaos. I suppose that it was up to ME more than anything to compose an elegant plan and execute it flawlessly, though.

The story (which HEY HO is the point of my blog, here) is great, in my opinion. Though there are quite a lot of historical inaccuracies, it's frankly awesome to see a game set in this time period. It's funny that with all of recorded human history, most games just take place in medieval fantasy or sci-fi space settings. I think this time period is something that hasn't been touched on much.

The pseudoscience about DNA memory and the Animus I completely bought - I love neat ideas like that, and I thought it was pulled off quite well. I didn't have any problems with the game-within-a-game, and the real setting being in the near future. A large portion of the story for that part of the game is conveyed through the emails stored on the computers, and this text-based revelation is something that I'm a big fan of. Also, there are references to some occult and other paranormal artifacts and incidents in mankind's history that I personally found compelling.

The story within the Animus with Altair is rather less headgamey, with an unfortunately predictable twist and what I felt to be a blatantly obvious mechanic to force the player to learn the ropes while keeping Altair's character seasoned and experienced. Each assassination target, when killed, leaps into a soliloquy about his motives and his perspective on what he's doing, but I never really felt the connections they had to each other and the significance that they held as targets. The whole plot of the game was overshadowed by the actual gameplay experience in town, and your investigations don't help uncover anything of significance except for ways to eliminate your target. The story that is there is pumped into you by way of semi-interactive unskippable cutscenes, which simply overwhelmed me under a deluge of information, losing my interest.

As much fun as I had wasting time hopping around rooftops, I found myself craving a dialogue system and NPCs to talk to. I wanted to collect information, put puzzle pieces together, discover some illuminating things about the politics of the 1191 Holy Land that would make things click. I admit to being a bit dismayed that, for me at least, the bulk of the story is in the future with Abstergo and in the end the bulk of the gameplay as Altair became irrelevant once you had located the information Abstergo wanted. I suppose if this is the first in a trilogy of games, and each is set in a different locale, it's not as big of a deal.

In the end, I suppose what I'm saying is this. Fewer minigames - instead, let me talk to people. Interactive storytelling would help this game immensely. I would have felt like even more of a badass if Altair's boss had simply told him to go do the job, but I went hopping around the rooftops of Damascus or Jerusalem, collecting information and unraveling plots that I wasn't supposed to be. And this would have fit with the game's plot, even.

The game is breathtaking visually, but I felt like it reminded me a bit too often that I was actually playing a game. Story-wise, I'm excited to see where they take the arc dealing with Desmond and Abstergo.