That sure was a game
The ending was good, i think. I think i liked it. It was hard to tell.
SO, what is assassin’s creed?
I ask this question because I have asscreed II, IV Black Flag, AND Origins now, so I’m gonna play through a bunch of assassins creed in 2018. And when I liveblob it all, I want to be able to articulate what makes these games assassins creed games. Is it the stealth? The conceit of the Animus? The assassins vs templars conflict? What makes this game an assassins creed game?
It is especially important for me to answer this question bc I feel like no one really tries to answer it very much. Like, something I complained about a lot in the beginning of this liveblob is that asscreed 3 felt like it didn’t know what was important to make an asscreed game. However, I feel like the fans and the common things people talk about the game are not necessarily what makes assassins creed feel like assassins creed. So what did 3 do wrong? Why didn’t it capture the feel it was going for? Why do people so often miss what makes a game an asscreed game?
And I suspect that part of why I disagree with so many people is that asscreed 2 exists, and I suspect that it will flesh out a lot of the things people associate with assassin’s creed (networking, token rpg elements, etc—I don’t actually know what 2 contains but it definitely contains something). However, one thing I pointed out in the liveblob is that the thing is I don’t think asscreed needs all those things. I think one of the things this game did really well is it contained nothing extraneous. OK, that’s not quite true (the flags come to mind, as do the 60 templars to kill). But notice that the major extraneous things are also completely unimportant. I don’t get anything from killing 60 templars or finding 520 flags; I just get the nice aesthetic of a completed DNA thingamajig. I don’t super care about that, you know? So beyond that, everything in the game was critical to making the game work. You would play through your 5 (6?) missions and each one, while not critical to completing the game, gave the player an important piece of info to help them assassinate the target; viewpoints allowed the player to find the missions; and civilians could be saved to better allow Altair to navigate the city. There wasn’t any other gameplay! This is, I think, why people call the game samey, but the point is there isn’t any other gameplay because there isn’t anything else that’s really needed for the game to work. And I can vouch, having played 3, that having other Things to Do does not make the game less samey. So when you ask “what is assassin’s creed”, I think it’s valid to take the mechanics of this game and enumerate them. Every mechanic in this game was a core mechanic, and I really appreciate that on a game design level.
So what are those mechanics? Well, in no particular order
· free-running/horse-riding
· Running and hiding from guards
· Sword fights
· Assassinating targets
· Staying unnoticed in plain sight
Those are the things you do. There are other things that are important story-wise:
· The animus
· Assassins vs templars (more on this later)
· People are more complex than they appear--sometimes
· Learning from mistakes
Something that’s fairly important is that staying unnoticed in plain sight is one of the least-priority gameplay mechanics present on the list. The game doesn’t really care if you can do that, for the most part, as long as you can run and hide from guards and/or sword fight. That’s something that people don’t seem to remember when talking about the game, though, and I suspect that’s because 2 will dramatically change the ratio of “staying unnoticed” to “sword fights.” But really, stealth only barely made the list, and that’s because of a few missions here and there.
So what did 3 get wrong? How do you mess up an assassin’s creed game? First: you can add too much of any given thing. Is free-running fun? Absolutely! Does it make sense to create forests where every single one of the above game mechanics is de-emphasized in favor of free-running? Not at all! 3 took all those mechanics and used them all, but didn’t really know how to put them all together. You can mix up the ratios, but all five mechanics have to be there. It still feels like an asscreed game, but there’s something missing—and that something is the balance.
Speaking of balance…
So first of all, what is the conflict between the assassins and the templars? Well, freedom vs peace, to oversimplify. Which is more important: making sure people survive, or making sure people can make their own decisions. Unfortunately, I don’t think even the original has that as confidently as it wants too; enough of the templars are well and truly evil, notably Al Mualim, that “the templars are good people who just don’t care about freedom” is really sold. But maybe that’s the point: maybe the game wants us to understand that when you think that peace is an important enough goal that it supersedes freedom, then you believe in slavery, and you cannot be that good a person after all, by definition. I talked about that earlier—that the templars are all super racist almost by definition. I am not sure that the game truly understands its conflicts though, and I might be giving it credit it doesn’t deserve.
The final bullet is really the core failing of the story of ac3, btw. This game was all about characters who were set in their beliefs coming to understand others, from Altair to Malik to Lucy. AC3 never had that. People never changed. It was fairly disappointing, more so now that I’ve seen what it was trying to build on.
So yeah, that’s what makes asscreed tick. Did I like the game? Yes! It was tedious at times, mostly because I absolutely do not think it knew the correct balance between sword fights, running and hiding, and staying unnoticed. But in general, I think it did what it needed to do, and well. It ran a tight ship, and it ran an efficient ship, and at the end I felt like I had been brought to my destination safely and comfortably. I still have questions (uh so how did the slaver and also de sable know I was coming? When does the game take place anyway—though that was a great reveal with the emails at the end btw. Why did Al Mualim work so hard to teach me to be an assassin if he didn’t believe any of it? Can the Piece of Eden part the red sea or can it make illusions?) but the fact is I enjoyed the game. Not my favorite, but honestly? Up there. It did what it needed to do, and well.
Now on to asscreed II and renaissance Italy! (idk when I’ll start, though; might be tomorrow, might be two months from now)