Talkin' about Assassin's Creed.

Hey everyone long time no see!

I don't know if I'll get back to my regular weekly schedule just yet but I did have some words written about the Assassin's Creed series which has a new entry out and is about to enter it's ninth year with no sign of stopping. So let's talk about it! By which I mean you sit there and watch as I ramble on for thousands of words.

There's a lot to be said for the relative strengths and weaknesses of Ubisoft Montreal's flagship series so I'll try to give everything a fair shake as I come to it. That being said... Full Disclosure: I really like Assassin's Creed. I've liked it since the first one, warts and all. So I tend to give these games the benefit of the doubt when it comes to criticizing them but I do recognize there are areas of these games and how they're designed that are very deserving of it.

Let's start with a basic overview of just what an Assassin's Creed game actually is. An Assassin's Creed game is one where you play as a guy (or a girl since a couple have playable girl characters) and you run around climbing all over beautifully rendered architecture from various historical periods and stab people in the face over and over and over.

And that's basically it!

Nine years on and about a dozen games and that's pretty much what you do in just about all of them.

That's the first major criticism of the series right there, that the games are all basically the same. This is because the series, being a yearly affair like Madden or Call of Duty, opts for an iterative, evolutionary approach rather than something more revolutionary. Each year's entry is basically like last year's entry but a bit more polished, a couple new ideas worked in and some older ideas discarded.

Now, back in 2007 when the first game released it kind of was a revolutionary thing because it wasn't really like any other game at the time. A few years before Ubisoft had released a game called Prince of Persia: Sands of Time that had everyone talking. It was a modern Prince of Persia updated to be a 3D action puzzle platformer. In that game you played the titular Persian Prince clambering around big areas trying to hit a switch to open a door to the next area while occasionally fighting off monsters with some really simple but satisfying swordplay.

Some at Ubisoft saw how well that worked and decided they wanted to build on the premise of that basic design but go a lot bigger. And Assassin's Creed was born. The first Assassin's Creed was billed as a kind of pseudo-historical game where you played a member of the ancient Assassin order fighting off Templar knights during the Third Crusade in the middle east of the 11^th century.

Assassins and Templars and the Third Crusade were all actual organizations and events from history which is what made the premise so neat. This was a story about a hidden history between the two groups stretching throughout the ages as each group, Assassin and Templar, vied for control and influence throughout history.

And there was a bit of controversy due to the fact that you were playing as a Muslim dude in The Holy Land fighting off Christian invaders. This led to the game having a cheesy covering-our-asses message at the very beginning about how “this game was made by a diverse group of people from different cultural backgrounds and varying religious beliefs” or whatever it actually said.

Which is really funny because every other game after that first one has been set during different time periods where you play as non-Muslim characters. I mean, does anyone really believe that anyone might raise a stink about a game that has people playing as a Caucasian brother and sister pair during 19^th century London? Or an Italian guy in Italy during the Renaissance? Yeah I didn't think so either but ever since a certain event during the turn of the century the Western world has been a little weird about Muslims and Islam. Of course the Western world has always been weird about that, being mostly Christian but that's literally the only reason each Assassin's Creed game still features that message, is other peoples penchant for Islamophobia.

This being the Western world however it turned out that no one actually gave a shit about a video game where you play as a Muslim dude killing Christians except the usual folks who are already mostly ignored by mainstream society. Because living in the West is awesome like that.

Anyway.

The game came out and we found out it had a twist. In addition to playing the Muslim guy you were also playing as a regular present day White guy who shared some DNA with the Muslim guy. See, Ubisoft being Ubisoft, they were trying to tell a new story in a way that you can only do in a video game while being as painfully self-aware about that fact as possible. So you're actually playing as an annoying White guy who is plugged into a special machine that lets him relive the memories of distant, ancient ancestors he didn't even know he had.

That kind of science fiction premise speaks to the nerd in me because when it comes to nerdery I'm much more of a scifi nerd than a fantasy nerd. I don't have much use for the typical Medieval fantasy settings you see in a lot of games unless you tell me the setting is just the holodeck on a starship or whatever and things actually get a lot weirder as you go along.

So where this premise for the story really appealed to me it also put off a lot of other people. Which is a fair criticism against the games in general. Why set it up so that the story is only going to appeal to scifi nerds when you're clearly aiming for sales numbers that are driven by a mass audience, not all of whom are really that interested in science fiction? Why not just make the game a pseudo-historical game like everyone thought it was to begin with?

I guess one response might be that they were hedging their bets since they didn't know at the time if the game would actually be very successful or not as a pseudo-historical game. Maybe they figured they could always rope in scifi nerds like me if it didn't take off with the masses. I don't know. I think they were just trying to tell a cool story.

And it more or less worked out. The premise was solid enough for the kind of rooftop-parkouring-and-stabbing-people game they wanted to sell. The game was very well received. It didn't have any cutscenes or take the control away from the player at any point. Every story beat had you in control of your character while they interacted with NPCs. It was kind of awkward actually and they dropped their no-cutscenes rule for the sequels.

What drew me to the first game was it's approach to the open world. It featured three cities of the Levant: Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem. All of them were painstakingly rendered and wide open for exploration. The structure of the game was set up such that you had to do a few side mission type activities in each district of each city in order to unlock the main assassination assignment for that area.

It wasn't all open from the start either. Each area of each city was gated by the story so it was a good ways into the game before you had complete access to every area. Still though it was a good time even if the side activities quickly became repetitive. The main assassination assignments were all open ended as well, allowing you to take out your target however you pleased. If you interrogated enough people during the side activities you would know all the alternate routes available to you as well, some allowing for a stealthy or more creative approach.

Combat was a simple affair with a regular and a strong attack, as well as the ability to counter attack if your timing was right. As you completed assignments you gained more equipment such as a short blade and throwing knives. In a new twist that was made possible by the improved hardware of the time all your equipment was represented on your character as you acquired it. When you got a new weapon it would have its place holstered somewhere on your body where you could see it as you played. This gave things an added sense of progression as you started out having all your equipment taken away and then you got to see yourself slowly earning it back during the course of the game.

Being an open world game of 2007 it also featured a bunch of collectible doodads for the player to pick up. The doodads in question were just flags. Flags flags everywhere you went. I think they were meant to incentivize exploration. Ultimately another 2007 game, Crackdown on Xbox 360, did the collectible thing a whole lot better. In that game you collected orbs but they boosted your characters abilities so you had more reason to want to seek them out. In Assassin's Creed the collectibles were just kind of... there.

Which is another common criticism against the games: They feature a lot of meaningless cruft that is simply there to act as busywork to pad out playing time. In the first game this is quite true however as the series progressed many of the collectible elements they added did in fact add things beyond just their collectibility. Some sets would unlock weapons or armor upgrades, for instance. In Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag you can collect music pages that unlock sea shanties for the crew of your ship to sing while you're sailing about. The only thing to really remain just there to find and collect are the chests which just give out a bit of money.

Overall these things make up the original Assassin's Creeds contributions. Oh and I should also mention that this was the first game to make running and parkouring over everything really easy and accessible to do just as a matter of course. While you would occasionally try and zig only to end up zagging, often right off the top of a tower or whatever, for the most part the player did not have to fight the controls to get their character to do what they wanted him to do. That kind of ease-of-use is taken for granted these days but nine years ago it was a novel and welcome thing.

So while the first game established the basic formula the second game refined it into the gleaming, well-oiled machine the series has become today. The second game featured Italy during the height of the Renaissance with a side trip to Roma and a really deep property investment mini-game where you built up your countryside villa. Eventually you had your own little town complete with its own economy.

The second game improved literally every aspect of the first and amazingly they did all of this in a space of less than two years. Movement and combat were more fluid and varied with different types of weapons and this time the story of the game was told through traditional cutscenes. The best part about the story is that the last boss is the Pope. Like, for real, you literally go to the Vatican and beat up the Pope! Not many games have the Pope in them, let alone one that fights back.

It was around the time of the second game that someone at Ubisoft decided they were going to make this an annual series and that's sort of where things began to go wrong. Because while the Assassin's Creed formula isn't necessarily a bad one it definitely wore out its welcome after they started pumping these games out every year.

The one after the second was Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and it was the first game in the series to feature a fully explorable open world. That is, while in previous entries you explored cities and locations they were all separated in some way by disguised loading screens. In Brotherhood it was still set during the Renaissance and you were stilling playing as the same guy from the second game but this time it was set in Rome and everywhere you went was all right there on the same map.

Brotherhood also added a new assassin training minigame where you trained up assassin recruits and called them in to help you in battle if you wanted. Overall Brotherhood was a good game, about as good as the last one, but you could tell the writers were kind of treading water dragging things out by focusing on the one character.

After Brotherhood came Revelations which was set in Turkey at Constantinople. This game capped off the story that began with the second game and added in a really crummy tower defense minigame. Then came Assassin's Creed III which was set in North America during the American Revolution. At the end they killed off the Desmond character from the present day part of the story which kind of threw their whole narrative framework out of the window.

After III came IV: Black Flag, the pirate game where you play a dude sailing a ship around the Caribbean in the early 18^th century. Last year we saw Rogue on last gen consoles and Unity on current gen. Rogue capping off the story focusing on the characters from III and IV, with Unity featuring a new cast of characters set in Paris during the time of their first Revolution.

This year saw the release of Syndicate which is set in 19^th century Victorian London and features two playable characters. All of these games add and subtract bits and pieces of new ideas as the teams that make them decide. They all feature interesting locales and time periods. And they all seem like they would be better games if they weren't coming out one right after the other.

I mean, seriously, I don't know how the Call of Duty folks do it playing the same game year after year. Though you read any gaming message board you see just as many CoD fans who seem just fatigued by all the sequels as you do with the AssCreed fans. Also it is apparent by now that if they weren't churning these games out so often the people tasked with making them would be able to ship them in a more complete form.

For instance, all the games have had bugs here and there but it kind of came to a head with Unity last year. Unity released in a rather broken, unfinished state which unfortunately shaded popular opinion of it. While the story is kind of weak the game itself is quite good (after patching fixed the bugs and took out all the forced social media crap).

So Ubisoft is really just shooting themselves in the foot at this point with regard to the quality of the game. Because if they didn't have such short turnaround times the developers could actually experiment with the formula and try new things and maybe actually improve on it somehow. Instead they're in permanent crunch mode seemingly just throwing everything and anything out there to see what sticks.

And while they have increasingly downplayed the scifi part of the story (the lore part as it's now referred to) they haven't really made up for that by making the period specific stories they are telling that much more interesting. It's still just the same old excuse we've been using for the last 9 years to justify another game where you stab people over and over again.

Design-wise at this point the games are 80% collectible cruft and 20% finely crafted actually designed game with story motivations. Assassin's Creed II and Brotherhood had hidden platforming dungeon levels that kind of called back to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. They were a thing worth seeking out and finding and doing because they were fun. A nice little reward for all your exploration. The newer games have none of that sort of thing.

The Assassin's Creed series has thus earned itself a reputation for being uncreative, rote, boring murder sandboxes that, while pretty, don't actually offer much to players looking for something more substantial.

Playing an Assassin's Creed today is like mowing your lawn. You clear the map of collectible icons as you find them, checking them off the list, until the whole map is nice and pristine. In lieu of an interesting game we are instead left with a sloppily designed Skinner Box that is set up to appeal to our more obsessive compulsive instincts in order to keep us playing.

I still want to believe though! I still want to believe that this could be a good series but at this point it's kind of set. People who go back to the games expect the Skinner Box aspect of it and the games are apparently still profitable for Ubisoft so it doesn't look like they're going to stop anytime soon.

It's a shame. The first two games are still genuinely worth playing, I think. The second probably more than the first but I still like them both about the same. But each new game that comes out is kind of a crap shoot. Will this year's new gimmick make the game worth playing again, or is it just going to be another by-the-numbers AssCreed?

That's what your typical AssCreed fan asks themselves when confronted with a new entry in the series. And usually, it's just another by-the-numbers AssCreed with a new gameplay gimmick that may or may not become a future staple of the games.

But dang those locales sure do keep getting prettier and more finely detailed. Maybe the next game will be worth it when it's on sale for $20. Yeah, that's how they keep dragging me back. Just wait for it to get cheaper and then I'll go for one more round. Pavlov and Skinner had nothing on Ubisoft.

Thanks for reading.