Assassin’s Flack, Design Choices that Stack, and Not Looking Back (Patreon)

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla has now officially come out and I’m getting all reflective about it. Because after thirteen years of games, I’ve realized I have a lot of thoughts of a series, from the broad to the minute, ranging to the mechanics, the story, and the company itself. And so, I just finally want to dig into all of it. But at its core, it really just starts with a question…

Why the heck have I played all of the Assassin’s Creed games?

The answer is simple! I like running around historical locations. That’s it. That’s literally just it. Each and every time they’ve gotten me to bite purely because I like doing this one single thing very, very, very much. And since I like doing that, I have played every single one of them (the one caveat is that I’ve always waited until they’re on sale later because, well, because that’s just a sensible thing to do). But since I’ve played this series in almost obligatory fashion, that also means that the “relative goodness” of a given entry can seem like an afterthought. I’m just there for the time travel itself. And if it’s surprisingly good otherwise? Then it’s the proverbial icing on the cake. And if it’s not so good? Well, then I think it provides a fascinating conversation about how little choices in game design can really stack up and have cumulatively negative effects.

Now, whenever I write about video games I feel like I always have to provide a caveat for two important factors. The first is that when I write, I understand that I’m coming from a weird middle ground between film and gaming. Because I know there are amazing game critics who have been writing about a lot of these ideas for a damn decades now. But the truth is with a lot of people who read traditional film criticism are maybe not digging into game criticism in the same way (I was especially guilty of this early on and didn’t know how much I didn’t know). And so my simple goal isn’t to blow the doors off with new revelations, my goal is to live in that middle ground and help try to bridge gaps between the two realms of understanding (which is why I write about game narrative a lot).

But such understanding brings us to the second caveat: I know that designing games is madness. If you think film directing is the art of managing a difficult collaborative art, well, game development dwarfs it by a factor of ten. Because you have hundreds of people separated into these little pods, working on their different aspects, designing and coordinating the best they can, just trying to achieve the impossible. It’s often years of build up and endless problems and screaming, “JUST FUCKING WORK!” Plus, they put up with unconscionable working conditions and companies that turn a deaf ear to just about everything (don’t worry, we’ll come back to this). So to everyone who works in games, know that I think you are saints and wizards.

To that very point, I completely understand how lack of overall vision and simple imbalances can ruin experiences that took you years of amazing work. But this happens mostly because imbalances are often the subject of the 11th hour work. For it’s the part of the process where elements finally combine and need to groove together in order to actually become fun for the player. But the 11th hour is when demands and stress are most precarious. I’m not just talking about system bugs and other (important) technical issues. I’m saying it’s the point whether or not there was a “cohesive vision” for the game and the feelings it creates in the player will hit the pass / fail test. Meaning it’s where something becomes part of a refined experience or just a broken collection of mechanics. Because of this, I genuinely understand that all good games are relative miracles.

And for whatever it’s worth, I think the Assassin’s Creed series is a good overall series! I mean, I HAVE played them all. But I also think only half of the entries are *actually* good. But because of this distinction, I’d argue it provides a fascinating framework with which to examine the medium because 1) there are some ways the games never change, especially in regard to core mechanics. Which means that 2) the devil is in the details, with clear indications of how little problematic choices can stack up to secretly devastating consequences.

So let’s go through each game and look at the evolutions / de-evolutions therein…

Assassin’s Creed - “Let’s Parkour Through History!”

Wow. 2007 turned out to be a landmark year for video games, largely because there were a lot of first entries that would go on to be massive hit series. We’re talking games like the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and the landmark first entry of Bioshock (both I would argue are still the best entries in their respective series). But there were also a number of games that would go on to have even-more-superior follow-ups, like the first Mass Effect, the first Portal, the first Uncharted, the first Mario Galaxy, and even the first entry of The Witcher… And, yes, there was the first Assassin’s Creed game. A game which was similarly ambitious in scope and only half-realized in terms of execution. But like most successful games, it had good core mechanics driving its central engagement.

What are core mechanics, exactly? Well, they are the main actions of a game that you will perform again and again and again (like shooting guns, or solving puzzles, etc). It may sound obvious that your core mechanics have to “work good,” but I don’t think a lot of casual gamers realize HOW important this is to the function of your big sprawling video game, precisely because they affect your minute-to-minute enjoyment. A great example of a lovely core mechanic is in Luigi’s Mansion, where you have to do all these relatively simple interactions with the vacuum cleaner, but it always feels SO SATISFYING to suck ghosts and stuff up. And you get the rewarding feelings with noises and coins, etc. Yes, it's the same dopamine-feeding stuff that drives slot machine addiction, but that’s a crucial part of all game theory. So if it’s a shooter, you ask “do the guns feel good in your hand and accurate and satisfying in order to handle that amount of repetition”? If you’re driving in a game, “does the care feel like there is enough weight and response yet I’m control and yet going so fast as to be fun?” In fighting games, “do the actions and hit-boxes reflect what I’m actually seeing so that fighting feels fair?” These mechanics drive your moment to moment success.

The Assassin’s Creed games were built on three simple, but ultimately brilliant mechanics. The first is the parkour flow of running around an ancient city, climbing up walls, and hopping over tables. I don’t think people realize how revolutionary and freeing this movement felt at the time (years later it feels clunky in comparison to today’s standards). The second is the hidden blade, where you would carefully walk up and you do a secret little stabby stab, then walk on your merry murderous way. It’s just such an outrageously satisfying little shiv mechanic with a satisfying noise that seamlessly integrates into your larger stealth approach. And the last mechanic was probably the most surface-level one, but the “leap of faith” was this absurd(ly fun) thing where you could dive off a thousand foot tower or something and totally survive if you landed in a little hay cart. Impossible? Yes! Delightful? Also yes! And while it may seem that these three mechanics are old hat now and certainly have diminishing returns, the truth is that all games have diminishing returns. The key is that you keep being addicted to the baseline enjoyment of that mechanic. And I have been doing these three things for nearly thirteen years now and they STILL always provide that almost imperceptible little dopamine rush. Simply put: they work.

Admittedly, the first Assassin’s Creed had a lot of other mechanical problems. The non-assassination fighting left a lot to be desired. These historical locations of ancient Jerusalem weren’t really historical, but more sketched out assumptions. And honestly there just wasn’t a whole lot to do whilst navigating the world’s terrain (I mean, the only extra in the original Assassin’s Creed was collecting 100 random flags, which is hilarious looking at the overkill to-do-lists the games have now). But even with these problems, the three core mechanics drove the game's success, it also invites another obvious question… How do elevate a game beyond mere mechanics? How do you drive the player’s interest?

The best path, though sometimes least obvious to some, is making a compelling story. I’m not saying you have to make aThe Last of Us style drama filled with nuance and restraint. In fact, good game stories can often be really simple and straight-forward when it comes to motivations. It can be stopping Bowser’s shenanigans, or finding the tri-force, or anything really. And you can tell so much of your journey through fun environmental challenges. But it’s all about establishing clear objectives and making the player actively want to engage in those goals. Then sometimes you can find these moments of grand punctuation (the Portal games are masterclasses in using subtle moments to drive narrative depth beyond the obvious conflict of your interaction). But some games don’t want to be simple. Some games get really ambitious in their thematic designs and want to hit you with mind-bending approaches and, like, big truths, man! Which is often good! I like when games swing for the fences. But sometimes you don’t hit it.

And so, the problems with the first Assassin’s Creed story are also three-fold.

The first deals with the way the story gets trapped in (what might seem like) a neat diegetic idea. I don’t know if you remember, but 13 years ago it was all the rage in game criticism to talk about ludo-narrative dissonance, that is the idea that the language of game play (save points, dying in character, endless murder, etc) didn’t just fail to reflect reality itself, but often didn’t reflect the given game’s story or theme. In effort to solve this dissonance issue, Assassin’s Creed created this whole parallel bookend story where you are Desmond Miles, a man in the present day going back in time using an “animus” machine that unlocks your ancestor’s memories. Honestly, it’s a neat idea and, yes, it technically solves a lot of ludo-narrative problems. Like missions in the game are just new memories! Death is just desynchronization from what really happened! But there’s a real problem with that.

Because it turns out that most players don’t *really* care about such hang ups of dissonance. These gaming conventions have been around for so long and just fit the language of their medium in the same way most mediums do (think about if we had to sit around arguing about whether or not a cut in a movie was realistic). I mean, sometimes the ideas of ludo-narrative dissonance, particularly with violence (I wrote about them recently in Last of Us Part II), but our brain is good at working around concepts like save points and such. And when your attempts to address dissonance just end up taking so much time, you only really just draw more attention to it. And in this game we spend SO MUCH time in the wrap-around (with Kristen Bell! Remember that!?). It may have seemed neat, but even looking at the series now, it is STILL struggling with the albatross of this ongoing wraparound narrative. And while I know the choice has its fans, the reality is that most players are always way more interested in the historical stories themselves… Some of which have their own problems.

Because the second story problem with the Assassin’s Creed series is that with the overall mythology they are telling is one of those endlessly convoluted mysteries that constantly keeps moving the goalposts. You just always feel like diving deeper and deeper into lore between the assassins and templars with actually getting anywhere. This not only makes the player feel like they are treading water, it removes a lot of rooting interest because it’s constantly milking your curiosity over your clear emotional investment.

And the third problem with the story of the game is directly related to the same ambivalence. Because, on the thematic level, the series and especially the first game are obsessed with moral reflexivity. You know, that is kind of like that freshman philosophy class where someone gets lost in the very concept of goodness and everything slides into this post-modern malaise. Characters don’t so much have a story as they do “speech at each other.” And as such, grandiose statements fly fast and furious, “nothing is true, everything is permitted!” And basically, the whole thing kind of disappears up its own butt. Luckily, some entries of the series learned to eschew a lot of that, but the cumulative effect of this in the first entry was… a lot. But even if audiences were unsure how they felt about the overall game, people still felt like they had the start of something here.

So how were they going to fix this? How would they start improving the story? How were they going to make the regular fighting fun? How would they fill up the game time for everything else?. The truth is that this game series has been attempting to answer these questions in various ways since the onset, often with varying degrees of success.

Luckily for them, before it got worse, it got a whole lot better

Assassin’s Creed II - “Here, A Character!”

Ah, the benchmark entry! Assassin’s Creed 2 was a leap forward in all the things we wanted. Starting with semi-accurate historical locations! Behold the Tuscan countryside! Stride atop to roofs of Renaissance Florence! Dive into the canals of Venice! And hey, let’s go further! Let’s meet goofy real-life historical figures and test out Leonardo’s flying machine! Even in terms of basic game play, everything felt smoother and the new hiding mechanics worked pretty nicely. And yeah, it still wasn’t exactly a strong fighting game, but it totally understood that it’s NOT a fighting game at heart. It’s a stealth game where you want to run around and take out guards and infiltrate areas (even then, it at least had the dignity to introduce some fun fighting mechanics like beating people up with their own weapons). But most important to the game?

It had Ezio.

Meaning the game now had a compelling, fun, and funny character at the heart of it. Gone was the overt, dour seriousness of Altair and the philosophical deliberations about duty and morality. It was this charming young rogue who was pulled into a larger world! And he did so in a personal, conflict-ridden, interesting way! It felt like going on a genuine adventure! Even the Miles stuff and the labyrinthian lore took a back seat to this new straight-forward, more pulpy storytelling. Which featured the kind of writing that was utterly unafraid to be goofy (there are little beats like having your uncle say, “It’s a me, mario!”). Even the templars began to fit historical parallels in a fun, salacious way (you fight the ding dang Pope!). Everything about the tone of the game just suddenly felt dead on. And as a result, Assassin’s Creed II was a rousing success and I went from genuinely liking a few mechanics, to genuinely like the series.

But finding success is a tricky thing for an ongoing game series. Because it asks new questions of you like: Where do you go from there? How do you expand the story? How do you add new mechanics? Do you try to fix things that aren’t broken? Or in the case of this particular company, do you take the time to get it right or do you try to rush out a million carbon copy sequels?

Sigh.

AC II: Brotherhood (2.1) - “Time to Tread Water!”

Ahhhh, the lateral move.

Look, ultimately, there’s not much wrong with this game in and of itself. They wanted to keep a good thing going so they rushed out a sequel that now brings Ezio to renaissance era Rome. Hurray! You get to run around the… (still ancient) coliseum!  Yeah, it’s still fun, but it’s also one of those weird things to do with a setting because it kind of just makes me yearn for ACTUALLY going to ancient Rome and fighting in the Capital-C Coliseum. Plus, the whole Borgia’s plot-line is a little less fun than the Medici stuff, too. Even the dialogue feels less sharp and inventive. But I guess these are the things that happen with lateral moves?

Gameplay-wise, it actually puts in some nips / tucks that make the combat feel a little better. (I liked the counter attacks, for example). It also introduces the mechanic where you get to take over districts and cement your own enforcement. You also get to invest in shops that come with monetary rewards. You also get to ride horses in the actual city. But the big addition for the game (that gave it the title) is the recruiting of other assassins. Meaning you get to call out other assassins that help you do attacks and stuff!!! It’s actually semi-useful!!! Meanwhile, the less engaging aspect is this world-building mechanic where you send those assassins out on RPG missions and manage them like a coach (which largely got phased out because it’s one of those things that feels “gameplay adjacent”).

But even in the story arena you get this sense of real “treading water.” For starters, there’s the arrested development of its main character. At the end of ACII, Ezio’s arc feels pretty complete and so there’s this feeling of lingering here. Rather than create a new story about maturity or develop new important relationships, so much of the game is just about the plotty fallout / revenge with the Borgias. It doesn’t feel so much like part of an epic story (like the last one  did) and more just an extended series of missions, objectives, and directives that fiddle around with prior characters. And even with the wrap-around Miles stuff I kept questioning, where is this all going? How are they going to start actually resolving this stuff?

The answer is “poorly.”

AC II: Revelations  (2.2) - “Oh No, We’re Drowning!”

Oof… Sometimes the “apparent death” of game series can happen in a rather quiet way. Meaning you wouldn’t think it’s a disaster, but the non-engagement just hits HARD. The Istanbul location is fun, but it’s also sort of a non starter because it fails to provoke the epic imagination of the person playing in quite the same way (I mean, it was literally the one setting in these games I couldn’t remember and had to google when writing this). Mechanic-wise, there’s some fun new stuff. I like the hook blade which gives the ability to zip-line, which certainly adds to the core mechanic of “getting to zoom around historical cities and take it all in.” But much more problematic was the game’s use of “district battles” where the enemies now push back against your progress of areas you’ve already gained.

Now, I get why people make this choice, logically speaking. It’s the desire to create a more organic feeling of challenge and a back and forth with the enemy, but it’s actually a pretty significant choice because it gets into the philosophy of “how the game feels.” Because video games are largely built around rewarding the player with feelings of achievement. But there’s various ways to go about that. Some games like Dark Souls and Splunky are “learning games,” where you go through a lot of trial and error, continuously lose your progress, and really have to put in the work. This makes the feeling of success all the more joyful. But they are really, really hard to make and more importantly, you have to set up this contract with the audience where that is their understanding of what they are getting into / want from the experience.

On the flip-side, I’d say most AAA video games are “flow games” where you get the gist of how to go about it, then hit your steady flow of execution and thus get fun rewards for doing all the fun things. They aren’t incredibly challenging, but that’s sort of the point. You’re intentionally playing something to get into the flow of fun gaming loops. When I get in the rhythm of playing Mario Odyssey or Stardew Valley or Just Cause, I’m not looking for something to constantly stop and start me, nor make me feel like I’m losing things. I’m looking for something that I can stay in flow with and can give a feeling of meaningful progress. And given basically everything about the rest of its gameplay, the Assassin’s Creed series is successfully built on that feeling of flow. And so to put in this mini-game that makes you not only feel lost, but have to engage with the dreaded feeling of “upkeep” (especially with a chore-to-play tower defense game that barely functions?), well, then you rub too hard against your core goal. It just  feels wrong. Even outright contradictory. And as the result? With the overall game play, you can feel the entropy of things setting in…

But nowhere is entropy setting in more than with the story. In one way, you could say that it’s thematically appropriate. Because there’s this idea of “old Ezio” finally finishing his journey. I see the intention in the fact that he’s literally old and tired, but the problem is that the writing wanders from this focus all the time. His characterization ends up being completely inarticulate. And in the end, his entire life basically serves as a tiny sacrifice, he’s a mere link in getting a message to Desmond. And look, I understand the writers desire to make this some kind of poetic message, but there’s two problems with this. The first is that there was all this endless delay in the main story and it’s like FOR THIS!? And second, this is where the wrap-around problem hits HARD. Because simultaneously we get the worst incarnation of the Miles plot-line yet, with him wandering through abstract locations and getting his memory back or something? Really, those “Desmond’s journey” segments constantly feel like they go nowhere. And rather than build to a culmination, the vague ending credo of, “I know what I got to do!” feels like yet another moving goalpost. Which means Ezio’s epic journey basically ends with a wet fart.

Overall, the game completely exemplifies the utter push-pull of indulging the audience at the detriment to narrative momentum. They’ve just been treading water (and now drowning) this whole time because they've been so afraid to say goodbye and equally so afraid to start over. So it all ends with a confusing, muddled whimper. And in that process, they forgot all the things that made Ezio’s early journey so compelling and fun in the first place. But given the overwhelmingly tepid reaction to the game, one thing was clear…

Something desperately needed to change.

Assassin’s Creed III - “You Say You Want A Revolution?”

Okay, I’m going to throw down on this one.

Because I think the story and structural approach of Assassin’s Creed III is fucking great. I think the fake-out with Connor’s dad being a templar works. I think the lead up and context to Connor’s reveal is great. On the mechanics side, I think the free running was improved so dang much. I think the homestead missions are fun and lively and make me feel like I’m actually building a community full of people that I like. I think walking around the forest environments is a great change of setting. I think the seasonal changes were fun. I even think the hunting aspect is fun as hell. In terms of the world, I love the goofy side missions with Ben Franklin, UFOs, and Sasquatch enthusiasts. I even LOVE the extra naval combat missions because I felt like it actually reflected the way naval combat works (that is where you have to perfectly line up shot through your boating navigation and fire straight on). It was harder, yes, but it felt fair. And when you got the hang of it it turned the entire combat into this perfect game of inches. I love so much of what this game accomplished.

The problem is that I was playing this later on and was blissfully unaware that the game came into a rather loaded context. Because apparently, the game misled with some marketing that promised big sized battles. Moreover, the bait and switch with Connor felt like it was delaying long promised inclusion with it’s Native American protagonist (whereas I didn’t know what was coming at all). And it was apparently rushed and buggy and all that other stuff that comes with modern releases. As a result? The audience is fickle, they say. And nowhere is that more true than in video games. But in my ignorant playing context, I truly loved this one. But even I acknowledge the place where it has a real problem…

That would be one, singular, and completely insufferable gameplay mechanic. You see, there’s this thing where a game developer wants to give players “an out” on story missions and also doesn’t want people to get caught up in over-long scenes, because they believe it takes away from “the feeling of playing.” But as a result in this game, I can’t tell you how many times a cut scene would end, then you’d walk literally two feet to continue the story and… get another cut scene. It is AMAZING how often this happened. I mean, this isn’t a Yakuza game where you need save breaks from giant cutscenes. There was no reason for this and the annoying “stop / start” feeling of this really adds up. Worse, the very thing they sought to prevent (the feeling of too much cinema) actually becomes overbearing, precisely because it fails to capitalize on the benefit of cinema editing and move the character somewhere else. And as a result, I think a lot of players felt frustrated with the technical cinematic treatment of what is actually really, really good story stuff underneath it.

Luckily, I don’t think I’m alone on this one. I’ve seen some retrospectives that give this game the attention I feel it deserves, at least now that we’re miles away from those initial expectations. Oh, and for fun wrinkle, I also played AC: Liberation, which feels like mini-version of what could have been an EVEN BETTER game! I especially loved the chain kill, which had this amazing feeling. But rather than capitalize, the truth is that the Assassin’s Creed developers were about to hit that dangerous place in a game series where you misdiagnose the audience reaction, forget the lessons and what you know works, and instead over-react to perceptions of the last entry (the Bond franchise does this quite often). Which means we get an entry that feels like it tried too hard to distance itself from Assassin’s Creed III…

Both for good and for ill.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag - “It’s A Pirate’s Life for You!”

Now, this game is sort of the opposite in that fans loved it, but I actually had some reservations.

But first the good! Black Flag adds a new major core mechanic with the ship being your main mode of transportation and it turns out that sailing around the Caribbean on your pirate ship is a damn blast. Sure, I was excited for the naval combat to be more realistic like the last game (again, where you have to line up all those perfect shots), but instead they gave you this completely-impossible aim mechanic that allows you point the cannons in any direction and thus eases the learning curve. But honestly, I get it. Because the goal was to make a totally accessible, flowing game that’s fun for even the most casual players, not a realistic naval combat game. More importantly, these naval mechanics are much better suited for the massive open world gameplay with tons of ships moving around you (because your aim needs to be that much more precise). Now, did it make me desperately want a much more realistic naval combat game? Yup! Am I totally okay with what we got here? Also yup! Because it’s still a damn joy.

Now, the bad.

Because the thing that still surprises me is how much people liked the story of this one. On one hand it has a good anchor because Edward is return to Ezio-form in that he’s a likable rogue type (I had to look up his name because I keep wanting to call him Jack, not just because he really looks Jackson from Sons of Anarchy, but because it was the ship that was called the Jackdaw, which I kept wanting to call the Jackdraw… anyway). But honestly… Okay, I’ll be blunt: the storytelling around him was plainly incomprehensible.

Like it was a night and day difference to the last game. Scenes would play out endlessly with this pastiche of surliness, but little else. Dramatically-speaking, scenes had no idea how to set up context or motivation or even basic rooting interest. I couldn’t track characters, nor arcs, nor relationships, nor anything. Where it was a literal gameplay issue last time, here the story itself was providing the constant stop / start feeling. One where I had to constantly catch up on information being presented. So I don’t know how to say this, but I've been studying writing my entire life, and I just have to say that this was a failure of basic execution on almost all fronts.

Which sort of makes me question everything? Like, am *I* the insane one, here? There’s no way I just “missed” good stuff in 80 dang hours of playing. Did others feel the same way? Do people just skip cutscenes? Do they just watch it and sort of absorb it without thinking anything and wait for the mark on the map to tell them what to do? I need help here, because I. do. not. get. it. And truthfully, I want to get it. Mostly because I feel like the difference of approach with these two games (and fans' reaction to them) can, for better or worse, tell us a whole heck of a lot about how and why certain audiences engage their games. And in the end, I just want more understanding.

AC: ROGUE - “N/A”

Okay, I didn’t actually play this one because I had moved onto PS4 waters! Which is a metaphor that doesn’t work because I was actually going to the middle of France.

AC: Unity - “Look, We’ve Had Some Growing Pains”

Oh man. Unlike Assassin’s Creed III, I was there for the release of this one and… oof. The familiar big promises were there (man, there is such a toxic culture around the marketing / audience intersection, but that’s a different conversation). Nonetheless, we were told there would be a giant 1:1 recreation of revolution era Paris! Massive crowds packing every inch of the street! You can go INSIDE tons of the buildings! There’d be a billion missions everywhere on the map! Endless content! You can even play with other people online, kind of! Just look at how MUCH we can do! And here’s the thing: it technically delivered on all those promises.

So, of course, it died “the death of more.”

Because there’s an inherent danger to feeling like you need to feed the beast and keep up with some almost impossible standard of game hours / content. There’s no way you can do ALL OF IT well. Simultaneously, there is the added stress of trying to keep up with everything in order to properly launch with a new console. Then add the sudden overwhelming prevalence of / in-game begging for micro-transactions? Ugh. Between the three sets of pressure, AC: Unity was rushed to the point of constantly breaking). Yes, most 1.0’s are buggy this era. But this game had the unfortunate reality of being legendarily buggy. And as Shigeru Miyamoto warns, “a delayed game is eventually good. A bad game is bad forever.”

The funny thing is that this conventional wisdom has slowly changed in the early access / constant update era (I mean, look what eventually happened with No Man’s Sky). But  game launches come with a wave of PR pressure because it writes act 1 of the game’s popular narrative (and Ubisoft is having similar problems right now with the release of Watch Dogs: Legion). But even when this game gets past the technical limitations, it still faces similar problems in its core. Because AC: Unity is a game that has a litany of head writers and you can really feel it. Because it feels confusing. Different scenes head in a billion directions. Nothing feels coherent together or even memorable.

I mean, I don’t remember the main protagonist's name (it was apparently Arno). And with past protagonists, I could describe them aptly in a handful of words, but Arno was constantly changing with a mix of different affectations, trying to be rounded and everything and yet ultimately being nothing. Honestly, the only thing I remember with specificity are the weird time missions that go to La Belle Epoque and the Eiffel Tower during World War II (scenes which had a tenuous relation to the story at best). It was all part of The Death of More. And it resulted in a game that was overlong, rambling, confused, and rudderless. And thus gives way to way to one of the oldest adages we know…

Sometimes more is less.

AC: SYNDICATE - “No, You’re Missing Out! This is Good, We Swear!”

Because of the overlapping game development schedule that’s needed in order to put out a game every 1-2 years, the lack of success of Unity helped usher an overall decision to switch gears. Unfortunately, that happened while they were already knee-deep into the work on their next entry: AC: Syndicate, which would travel to industrial era London. On paper, it didn’t sound all that exciting, did it? Another colonial-ish, hyper-western European locale? I was like “No thank you.” But in reality? It was a game that took everything good about AC: Unity and past entries of the series, while actually innovating, and delivered something surprisingly fun.

Starting with the new core mechanic of the the rope launcher, which suddenly gives the player a Batman Arkham-esque doohicky that allows you to move around the rooftops of the city with an insane amount of raucous glee (which also delivers on the scale of the map, too). They also finally got little details right, like the way the annoying police mostly don’t bother you (especially with a few in game level-ups) Better yet, the turf battles with rival gangs finally felt deeply enjoyable. The bad guys and local toughs also include non gender conforming ideas!

But most of all, they got back to some solid storytelling. Not only did the series return to the fun, joking cameos of earlier games, but the main characters finally came alive with delightful verve. The twins, Jacob and Evie, are a great pair to base a game around. Not just because they each have different strengths which makes their play feel different. Evie gets the familiar stealth options along with some fun new tricks, but here it feels like they FINALLY got the combat right by turning it into a flowing, Arkham-like brawler (you can tell the game is a big influence, but hey, at least the cribs work). But more importantly, the two main characters work because of the dialogue and fully-realized personalities. Which made me realize I’ve been playing these games for 13 years now and playing this game is when I finally looked at who was responsible for the ding dang writing.

Which means it’s time to talk about Corey May! Look, authorship is weird in any collaborative medium, but especially in games, where so many great people can work on something. But all I know is this: they are either the sole credited writer or co-writer on AC I, II, III, and Syndicate… yes, that’s right, it’s all my favorite entries in the series. And yes, I know they were involved with almost every project in this series on some level, but we all know there’s a difference being overseeing something and “boots on the ground” writing. And I don’t know this person, so I can’t really offer much else to say other than “I’m a huge fan of how they approached this series.” Unfortunately, May also left after this game to start their own company.

Still, the truth is that Syndicate didn’t really make waves, even if it represents the ultimately learning lessons of a series. And maybe the audience isn’t wrong for wanting something new, regardless of how polished it was. Maybe their expectations were too much like mine. But eitehr way, after the lack of success with the last two entries, Ubisoft was at a point of identity crisis. So they finally took time off from their crazy schedule to really rethink the series and what it could be. They could write into the core DNA even! So what did they do?

Well, they just got more confused about their own identity.

AC Origins - “Wait! Come Back! We’re Changing Everything!!!”

Let’s be blunt: the DNA of The Witcher III is ALL OVER the revamp of Assassin's Creed: Origins. Right down to the virtually identical plethora of “?” marks that liter the over-sized map. But it’s in the core gameplay, too. Like Geralt, you now sit astride a horse and spend most of your time galloping through a vast landscape, uncovering little secrets on your epic journey. Similarly, the game eschews the flowing brawler mechanics to turn into a sword and shield hack and slash /defender. They also listened to all the complaints about how games were “too easy” and made it much easier to die, which will make the game more challenging, surely! And there are other games of clear influence, too. Instead of the fun gadget and power obtaining of Syndicate, here Origins instead opts for the yellow / purple / blue / color-coded item reward system of constant incremental progress that was born from Destiny. But really, you’ll see these influences from so many games and… I won’t go so far as to say the game is a disaster or anything…

But I really don’t think it all works when you smush it together.

I’ll put it like this: there’s this medical history podcast I love called Sawbones where they have a saying that “cure alls cure nothing.” And it’s emblematic of how anytime you try to have one treatment that can do anything and everything, you aren’t actually targeting something specific. And by trying to have too many different kinds of game aims within it, Origins suffers the same confusion. The utter de-emphasis on stealth and flow, AKA the core satisfying mechanic of the entire damn series, leaves the entire feeling of the game in a lurch. Especially because those other games its imitating do it much better. The execution of Origins was just clunky, dang it. I can’t tell you how many times I was trying to sneak and some freaking alligator would come attack me. Or if I was getting in a brawl and I’d alert something I didn’t want to. And even though it positions itself as a “harder game,” the truth is that I literally played this game ALL THE WAY through, collecting so much random stuff and in the end I didn’t feel like I was much better at the combat than I was at the beginning? Which is never a good sign.

Worse, I was constantly missing the feeling of the old games. Sure, there were moments when I’m going toward a fort and starting to take a string of people out en route to my target where it feels like old Creed games, but then everything will feel out of balance. With every fight, it becomes so easy to just opt for the over-powered “over-power” ability and start slashing away until everyone’s dead. The combat has no real timing or danger or dance. More importantly, it crucially misunderstands that what made the The Witcher III’s combat actually work was not just it’s free-swinging nature (which was WAY more fun to flow ith), but that combat with specific beast has all this required planning and forethought, where you HAD to use the right poisons and weapons, etc. To get an advantage. Moreover, you always understood what you were getting yourself into in a given fight. But with Origins, the swarming miasma of efforts felt random and indifferent. The use of bow and arrow felt tricky and not worth exploring. Even the different choices of weapon seemed to have no effect. Same goes for picking different abilities.

Which undermines the very concept of “challenge.” Nothing feels incentivized, so nothing invites variation, and thus success in everything is either automatic or random. If I beat someone, it wouldn’t be because I finally did X, it would because I finally got lucky or just over-leveled enough. It’s that second part that rankles. Where levels barely mattered in prior games compared to abilities, here it becomes EVERYTHING. And thus brings us right into the troubling presence of real-life money-sucking micro-transactions to get EXP. It sucks because you power level makes the sheer difference in combat that is either “impossible” or “a breezy beat-em up.” At this point, I don’t have to explain why this is such a big problem. But it’s all part and parcel of how design choices effectively “stack” in good or negative ways and create overall effects. So ultimately, it all comes down to that identity question:

“What is the feeling of playing the game?”

I can’t overstate how much this new entry changes the DNA feeling of the series. It went from the preeminent series of the empowering “Flow Game” and instead became yet another to landscape wandering beat-em-up. And a clunky one at that. Yes, the stealth mechanics are all still technically “there” if you want them, but they feel undirected and without point. Where the either / or style dynamics between Evie and Jacob felt like a fun, character-motivated choice, here my option of approach just sort existed in this sea of confusion. Which means it didn’t matter.

Granted, on the story front, we admittedly get something a little better. Staring with the fact that voice actor Abubakar Salim is incredible. He plays Bayek with a full gamut of emotions, mining his joy, his fear, his paternal kindness, and his raging frustration. He really deserves to be singled out for his work. And in the core, the writers get the central driving force of the character and his wife Aya (who is also playable in sections) as they are both driven to various forms of revenge over the murder of their son. There’s things that I genuinely like about how they don’t divert to stereotypes. I also like the treatment of sexuality between them (which is rare for marriage depictions, let alone those in mourning). And once again, the story has fun putting popular historical characters like Cleopatra to the forefront of the game’s narrative.

But that same narrative suffers in little ways. It’s a little more dour on the whole than the fun adventure entries. From basic plotting, there’s all these ways it misjudges what it needs to explain when and why. It’s always too much information or not enough, so you always feel like you’re playing catch-up or “please let me skip” (which to be clear, I never do. I stick even bad cutscenes out, dang it!). But there’s one thing that absolutely destroys your ability to emotionally invest in the story, especially in the moment to moment… and that is the complete lack of cutscenes in the smaller interactions and missions. You just stand there as a character gives you verbal instruction with non-animation.

Yes, this is crippling.

For a game that copied almost everything about The Witcher III, it directly misses the most important aspect. Because part of what makes you actually care about all the nooks and crannies of that world, even the smallest fetch quest, is that it brings you in for a moment with these people. It’s a simple shot / reverse shot where you get to see the character’s facial expressions and their humanity. This is virtually the backbone of all character-based storytelling and the idea that they would just abandon it for that world camera that never moves you in closer in anyway? Well, it’s the exact reason you feel so detached and don’t care about any of those small characters, let alone the missions themselves. It boggles my mind how many game designers don’t realize this matters. How many of them falsely assume it’s “more immersive” to just NOT do it and stick to realistic hovering cameras or something (or maybe it just saves money). But given The Witcher III, hell given every game they’ve done in the past, I think it’s advantage should be clear by now. But sadly, they went for the core misunderstanding of their own motive… A phrase actually reminds me of this little telling detail from the game itself.

You see, any time you dove in the water and started swimming around, they figured “shit, swimming takes a while, we should make it easier to commandeer a boat!” And so they have it so a little fisherman comes toward you… but like, REALLY comes right toward you. To the point that it basically hovers over and you constantly shadows you even if you’re just trying to swim or get on another boat and it’s completely clunky and hilarious and unnecessary and ultimately, hurts the fun flowing feeling of actually just trying to navigate in the water… which makes you realize a lesson that might just about apply to the entire game…

They were trying to fix something that didn’t need to be fixed.

But maybe that’s just part of an identity crisis. Maybe failure is a part of growth. Maybe first efforts at revamps still need more time to work right? Whatever it is, we know that Origins was successful enough to (perhaps due to the rebrand alone) to garner more interest in continuing down this path. So once again, the question is always about how the games evolve and don’t evolve… which brings us to ups and downs of the last entry before the new one…

AC Odyssey - Choices, Choices, Choices

I’ll say it from the very top: I don’t think I've ever gone so far from utterly disliking a game to kind of loving a game quite like this one.

Let’s start with the bad. There’s an early point of playing this game (like right after you get off your training island, levels 6-10) that feels… downright impossible. Enemies vision is like ten times sharper than previous games. You’re under-powered, you’re under-leveled, you’re even unable to pull off assassinations stabs  if you aren’t on equal level (aka the fun core mechanic of the entire damn series). It is completely artificial scaling that basically requires you keep pumping into your levels and equipment. It is AWFUL. And it eventually forced me to do something I *rarely* do, which is mess with the difficulty settings so I can over-level the enemies by four. This is emblematic of how the balances of everything feel completely off. Like okay, you want to get rid of the shield and make it based on a dodging mechanic? Well, then make it so the dodging mechanic actually dodges all the other attackers so I”m not just constantly side-stepping constantly into others' hits. I mean even Dark Souls does this, what the hell (it’s an utterly broken mechanic which failed so badly they’re putting the shield back into Valhalla).

There’s more examples, too, because so much of this game feels like this wrong calculation of two disparate parts. It’s shockingly easy to set yourself on fire. Future missions will get outright spoiled in their description. You constantly get told “you are close to an untracked target!” And as you try and navigate the world at first, you’re constantly interrupted and attacked and feel helpless. Why is that? Well, ever the impressional series, you can see The Shadow of Mordor all over this one, most obviously in the “Mercenaries” mechanic. That is there’s a bunch of random, ever-leveling assassins who mewl around and take you out unless you keep paying bounties.

Once again, we have an identity crisis. Because in The Shadow of Mordor the mercenary systme is, like, one of the core mechanics of the game. You feel like you are in this constant ebb and flow of space and time and hierarchies that you’re slaying down throughout a relatively small map (at least comparatively). Taking that “always in the threat of attack” mechanic and just dumping it into Assassin’s Creed? Like… WHY. Like why constantly randomize a giant attack when you’re trying to stealth through a fort, or even just buy some fucking dates or whatever at the agora. It doesn’t add to anything to the difficulty of what I’m trying to do — and by the time you can actually keep bounties in check with constant payment of your money? It therefore becomes this non-issue that doesn’t factor in AT ALL. And thus they’re more like fun optional bosses (which is what they should be in the first place). But even then, sometimes in the late game I'd be in the middle of a super tense mercenary battle when ANOTHER mercenary wanders in that’s four levels above me and kills me in a few hits. I have so many questions: why is this there? Why is it functioning like this? Well, it’s because someone in the development liked The Shadow of Mordor and didn’t think it through.

Like so much in these last two games, it’s subtraction by addition.

Again, the question is WHY. Why make the early game so challenging? I know everyone wants some of that Dark Souls juice and the satisfaction of the challenge, but they do it without actually making it a LEARNING game. It's an artificial difficulty because it’s just something you can out-level… and so… I hate to think this, but never has an early game just inspired the desire for micro-transactions to buy points and get on with it… because once you do start leveling up? Once you can power up your attacks and armor? Then it suddenly feels like more like old Creed games… the fact it takes so long to get there and is begging you to spend money to skip feels basically fucking immoral if I’m being honest… but once you do, you are finally feel free to really just enjoy the game as it was intended to be played.

Which brings us to the good! Because once you get to the higher power-up levels, you can actually breathe and enjoy this fucker (in a way that is absolutely not challenging, but fun). The pointed nips and tucks are just about everywhere. Starting with the fact that the special abilities are WAY MORE incentivized. Especially the Sparta Kick. Yes, it’s ripped form 300 and you kick people off cliffs and shit, which is the probably the most fun thing these games have added in their entire run. But the weapons all feel way more different (particularly the emphasis on spear combat). The bow is way easier to use and has great abilities. Even redistributing your abilities is something you can constantly do on the fly. No, it’s not some grand radical change in combat from Origins, and some of the problems are still there, but it’s definitely tighter on all fronts.

Better yet, once again we return for a big island to island sea adventure! This time substituting Ancient Greece for the Caribbean and a Trireme for the Jackdaw. The results are honestly mixed? I’ll say that the game is absolutely gorgeous, making the most of its lush Greek setting. But there’s something inherently less satisfying about the slower, bulkier ships and trireme combat. Moreover, the upgrades to the ship aren’t actually that much in terms of new abilities, just a gradual improvement of your core stats, which is way less fun. I honestly hate the way new games do this because it doesn’t feel like real improvement, it’s just artificial incrementalization where I barely notice a change. I swear, everyone wants the Destiny loot system, but fails to notice the special differences that make all those things really FEEL different. Because when I grow in a game, I want to feel it.

Meanwhile, much to it’s benefit, the game FINALLY opens up the mythical world and you start having some fun with the environment again. I’m not just talking about fighting Cyclops and Minotaurs, or staring at Atlantis, you get all these fun little bonuses and options. I mean YOU COULD RIDE A UNICORN WITH A MAGIC RAINBOW TRAIL FOR PETE'S SAKE, HOW IS THIS NOT GREAT. There’s so many playful bits of world-building, too. Which tangentially starts bringing us into the most important topic of conversation. Because for the first time in years with this series…

I loved the story.

It helps that once again Kassandra (who I played as) is the best character since Ezio and Melissanthi Mahut delivers a knock-out performance. She’s complex, forthright, funny, and to use popular internet parlance, “she fucks.” Which is to say she does so unapologetically in a way few games let female sexuality and bisexuality express itself. But it’s more than identity and affectation. The game brings back the shot / reverse shot cinematic interactions! And does so with beautiful evocation. Plus, Kassandra's journey from a forgotten cast-away back into the demons of her family is genuinely involving. So removed are the vague philosophical questions. Everything is much more personal and motivated and story driven. Even as Kassandra is brought into the massive web of cult members (and I feel like they FINALLY figured out how to do mass assassination webs and hierarchies by the way! The expansive clue system was great), you genuinely feel like you’re peeling back the layers of something and making fun progress toward the center. To boot, it’s really good about hiding bad guys in your midst!

Much less satisfying, unfortunately, is the Athenian / Spartan war that provides the story’s backdrop. Not so much because of the main story missions, but actually because of a gameplay mechanic that constantly punctuates your journey. Now, in most games, you’d be choosing some side to fight with (a la the prime example of Skyrim) but this game turns you into a roving mercenary that basically doesn’t make good on anything with a rooting interest. You just sort of randomly pick sides based on loot or momentary gain. Because you are a mithios or something and don’t give a shit about which side, etc (also, the game has real life history to consider). The clear problem with this is that I actually kind of give a shit about those sides as a player. And thus there’s this constant feeling of grinding up against my interests.

I’d argue it would have been so much better to incentivize your back and forth between the two sides within the context of actual story(especially given that the game does this with the big story missions). Hell, it could have actually could helped for some big reveals and betrayals that still play out in the story. But instead? The game is just deferring to that wishy-washy “everything is relative and just as bad” philosophy 101 approach that subtly kills so much of the rooting interest in this damn series.

But in the end, despite the near game-killing early features, the strengths of Odyssey take it and put it in the “good” side of the series for me. But this perhaps par for the course in a series that never changes and yet always changes. That moves up with good and down with bad at a moments notice. And as such…

It will presumably change again.

EPILOGUE

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has come out and… I’m not going to buy it.

No, not for the usual reasons of waiting until it’s cheaper. It’s for a lot of reasons, honestly. There’s the basic ethical question in purchasing from Ubisoft until there’s real change in toxicity at the company. There’s the fact that the same company has, no matter how many times, proven they will rush a given product rather than wait to deliver something more functional. And there’s the fact that, on a personal level, especially having written this column, I just feel like I’ve reached the end of this weird up and down cycle that happens within this game series.

What started with historical dalliance and three addictive core mechanics has slowly morphed into something more unfocused, a successful identity that’s been pulled apart time and time again. Not so much for the sake of growth, but as an effect of entropy and outside influence. In true Ubisoft fashion, it has sprawled and fiddled and fled and seemingly undone their own interest. For I once played these games to journey through history and put it underfoot. There was something transportive about the very act of playing them. Just as there always seemed some fun and adventure to be found within the corners of history. And perhaps there still is. But as they’ve spun their wheels with an endless story and searched for some magic solution to a problem that maybe never existed, they’ve Frankenstein-ed other game mechanics into their own revolutionary world, seemingly rather than trying to innovate new mechanics that make sense to their own world. And after all that flack, I’ve decided that perhaps it's just time to move on… and not look back.

To think, I made it so far without even mentioning the movie.

WAIT-

Aw, beans.

<3HULK