Assassin's Creed Timeline (Part 8) - Assassin's Creed 3

So I've finished Assassin's Creed 3 and thought it was time to do a continuation of my series of posts about the game series.  I'll start by providing my honest opinion of the game; Assassin's Creed 3 is unequivocally awful. It's a terrible game with poor pacing, bad writing, a dull protagonist, and tedious gameplay. I'm going to throw in some mild spoilers here (for the first few hours of the game), but it's nothing that you probably wouldn't pick up anyway, nor anything worth crying about if you haven't played it.

So the game starts off with you playing Desmond Miles trying to prevent the end of the world, as part of the ongoing "main" plot of the game. It's still as vague and poorly developed as ever, and at this point, the whole charade is just starting to get a little tired.  The snippets we get of the modern day conflict were enough to intrigue for a little while, but continuing to attempt to string people along with vague and indistinct hints and suggestions can only last so long before there's a backlash. We've reached the point where it's no longer interesting, and it just comes across as attempt to sound mysterious without the writers having to actually put in any real effort. Now, I assume that the writers have put in some effort, which just makes this problem even worse because they're withholding information in order to seem brilliant, when all they're achieving is the opposite effect. This is the fifth game in the series - it's time to stop ignoring your "main" storyline. The three snippets of modern day gameplay with virtually no plot development are not sufficient to maintain interest at this point in time. Something needs to happen, but what does end up happening is so overblown that it just comes across as cheap.

"The results are in, guys... we're boring."

The guts of the "real" game is set around the American revolution, where you fight against the evil British loyalists... err, templars.  Seriously, this couldn't be attempting to appeal to American national pride any more if it tried. There's a few token things to try and paint George Washington in a less than favourable light, but there is an awfully large amount of "kill the evil British", which is supposed to be offset by some of this characterisation and the constant humor laden jabs at the US in animus database entries, which I'm guessing a lot of players will never read. There were some minor laughs to be had in that content, which was possibly the highlight of the game. Reading those was one of the few places in the game where I actually was engaged and even amused.

When you get dumped into the animus, because apparently that's the way templars and assassins solve every problem, you start off playing as one Haytham Kenway, in what are possibly some of the most boring hours of gameplay of any Assassin's Creed game. There are constant cutscenes, pre-ordained actions, and missions that feel less like an introduction to the game and more like filling time just so you get some characterisation of Haytham and his associates before the completely unsurprising reveal that Haytham is actually a templar.  For some reason, everyone is shocked by this revelation, even though it was shown in AC2 that Altair married and had children with a former templar. Whoopeedoo. What's more is this reveal is made fairly obvious through some of the dialogue, and stated outright if you actually read the animus entries as you're playing. Well done to the QA team for dropping the ball on that one. The whole first few hours of the game set the tone for the game as a whole, and it is that AC3 isn't about assassinations... it's about cutscenes and faffing about.

"What was that? Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of my smug self-satisfaction. "

After that's done, you start playing as Connor, part of an Native American tribe (he has a native name as well, but that mercifully gets dumped soon into the game) who eventually becomes an assassin. You do have to deal with playing him as a child and a teenager first, which I think is supposed to make him feel more like a real character. Unfortunately, it means you get a lot of tedious dialogue in long, drawn out native language, which is just plain dull. It's been stated previously that the animus does translations - any foreign language has been short and for emphasis, this seems to have been done just for the sake of reinforcing that Connor is a native, which is just unnecessary and makes any cutscenes with it plain dull. You did have to "come of age" in AC2 as Ezio, but this ascent was very short in comparison to AC3's multiple introductions, and handled in a far more engaging way. Playing hide and seek as a child isn't what players signed up for, and this kind of boredom is indicative of the game as a whole even once you do become an assassin.

Playing checkers or various other board games are another way the game artificially pads out its running time, but they simply aren't interesting. The series standard gameplay of "collect trinkets from around the world" is back, this time in the form of feathers, almanac pages (which move and potentially disappear if you don't get them in time) and peg leg trinkets (which can be placed in frustratingly difficult to find and reach places). Homestead missions are typically simple fetch quests, or something equally tedious. The worst case was where one man was asking for help to woo a woman. So Connor asks the farmer's wife for advice, who tells him to fetch some flowers. So the player must climb a cliff, pick flowers, then return to the man... and they are treated to a cutscene where the man is in an outhouse. That's right, the game has the protagonist having a conversation with someone in a toilet. There are various other delivery missions, and the ability to set up trade routes, but their only purpose is to make money, and as with previous games, there's little point to having money, because it's fairly easy to acquire enough for everything you need or want to buy.

Say hello to Connor's housecarl mentor, Token Achilles Davenport.

The assassin recruit and mission interface is unintuitive to the point of stupidity - you have to hold down a button in order to keep the damn thing up, except when you switch to the mission menu, because then you can let go. The weapon changing interface now has a lag as it switches screens, instead of having a neat overlay like ever game before, and it now uses a column setup instead of a wheel interface, which is significantly slower. The game offers "interactive conversation" markers on the map now, though apparently the game designers aren't aware of the meaning of the word "interactive". These are interactive in the sense that you walk up to the person, hit a button and then that person and Connor have a conversation without any input from the player. Then there's "hunting", which unlike hunting in Red Dead Redemption, offers virtually no danger because all the animals that can actually hurt you can be defeated through straightforwardly boring quicktime events. According to many "professional" reviewers, there was something extremely satisfying about leaping from trees to use your hidden blade to kill a hare. I'm sorry, I thought this was Assassin's Creed, not kill-defenseless-animals creed. I guess I forgot that I wanted to sign up with something that actually had entertaining gameplay.

Then there are the naval missions. Now, I loved playing Sid Meier's Pirates!, so I love some good ship combat. However, much like the rest of the game, AC3's ship combat gets repetitive and boring after only a few tries. It's a whole lot of circling around, then holding down and releasing the controller trigger to launch cannonballs. The strategy never really evolves beyond a basic level, and your assistant yells the same handful of lines at you over and over again to the point where you're inclined to mute the sound simply so you don't have to listen to him. It's basically a worse version of Pirates, and from a camera viewpoint that makes it hard to see what's going on. If you want ship combat, just go find yourself a copy of that - it'll be a lot more fun.

"I cannae take it any more, cap'n!"

What is perhaps most disappointing about AC3 is that the setting and the realisation of it is just fairly uninteresting, both of which have been highlights of the series to this point. The architecture simply doesn't compare to that of the previous games, and it's painfully obvious that the designers and art team have realised this at some point during development. Instead of massive sweeping shots that gloriously showcase the landscape and the art of the gameworld that used to be the reward for reaching a viewpoint and hitting that "synchronise" button, you get a short scene involving a couple of sharp camera sweeps, and Connor ends up occupying half the screen for a significant period of that. Even outside of this, fog and haze that obscures your view is commonplace, limiting the vista that you get to see, ensuring that you can't see the extent of the flat and monotonous art from above. While this is partially a result of the time period, the designers did choose this setting. It might be realistic, but that doesn't mean that it's not boring. The PC version appears to be slightly better in this regard, but it's still a clunky and poorly optimised port.

The protagonist is both bland and unlikelable; the few times Connor attempts to display a personality, he's simply whining or complaining about how the person who taught him everything he knows was completely useless. The game effectively wants you to be invested or care about the American Civil War without providing you with any reason to do so. The massive focus on this aspect of history is out of place in comparison to previous games. Though they brought in elements of history and had the protagonist playing a role at the edges, Altair and Ezio were never so heavily involved, and it was never the core focus of the entire narrative. It feels less like the story of the protagonist and more like an exercise of attempting to shoe-horn in as many famous battles, people and locations from the civil war as possible in order for that to be a drawcard. As a result, the game just winds up feeling like a postcard history tour of the period rather than an actual story. Ubisoft pretty much expects you to be impressed and engaged by that story and their telling of it, because they keep shoving cutscene after cutscene in your face. This is the first game I've ever played where I was getting bored and frustrated from too many cutscenes and felt the urge to skip them. I didn't because I kept expecting some sort of interesting plot development, but instead I just kept having to watch key moments of the game instead of getting to play them. I have never, ever felt this way about story and cutscenes in a game before, so the fact that I wanted to skip them should tell you something about how frequent and annoying they are.

But players HAVE to love this battle... because... American History!

Worse is that the main missions of the game don't really deliver anything particularly interesting. There's more than a few cases where you'll end up in a chase or just "travel from location a to location b", or even numerous occasions where the game forces you to WALK as part of a mission. That's right, it's an open world game, but occasionally you're forced to walk (usually at a slow pace) ... just because. There weren't any missions where you can think back and go "oh, that was memorable" - or if you do remember a mission, it was because the premise or the execution (or both) was stupid or annoying. The "optional objectives" that were also in the last two games have returned, but just like in Revelations, there's no reward for completing them, only the impression of punishment if you fail to achieve them. They range from the utterly trivial to the very difficult; and that's presuming that there's not some strange bug that can cause you to fail one of them when you shouldn't, which will likely happen at least a couple of times for many players.  The game also has a number of assassinations end via cutscene; the game sees a return of death monologues as per AC1, though they're slightly shorter, so that's at least a slight improvement.  Arguably the worst assassinations/cutscenes are the ones where deaths happen via... well, they're not so much quicktime events as... events. Numerous times during the game, you'll end up with a cutscene and the game will just stop, and a button will come up on screen, i.e. press X. Except in AC3, it's not "press X to not die", it's "press X to continue." If you don't press X, nothing happens. This is possibly the single most stupid design idea ever created in gaming, and any designer that thinks it is a good idea needs to actually go play some games that have actual gameplay. This isn't even lazy design, it's just plain awful.

There is so much filler content thrown into the game that the designers appear to have forgotten to how to actually make their game fun. Connor can't even kill civilians now, which while a great way to prevent that annoying occurrence where you would end up stabbing an innocent instead of a target, means you no longer have to be careful when hunting a target in a crowd. Now if you hit assassinate near a civilian, Connor just brandishes his blades, which while great for not drawing attention, is a loss for the game overall because it reduces the challenge and the feeling of freedom in the game. The player feels more hand-held and directed than ever before, which just robs the player of freedom. Most missions almost have to be completed in a certain way, particularly if you want to achieve full synchronisation, meaning there is one true way to complete a mission instead of allowing the player to make choices and pick their own means to success, which is a staple tenet/expectation of open-world games. Even the free running in the wilderness along the treetops dictates an almost linear path rather than allowing the player freedom to navigate as they wish. In Boston and New York, I spent most of my time running around on the ground, because there was little point getting onto the rooftops as it wouldn't take long before it was impossible to keep travelling in the direction I wanted without jumping back down to the street.

Parkour? No, players don't want to do that anymore, it's not like it was a key part of the series.

This lack of freedom and blatant hand-holding applies to combat as well, where you get big attack signals pop up over enemies, and for the most part, combat becomes very straightforward once you work out the new pattern of combat - which is different to the previous four games in the series. I don't know how the designers simultaneously managed to make the combat more complicated yet more trivial, but they succeeded. It's trivial apart from a few select enemies that will pretty much counter anything that you throw at them, leaving you two options - stealth kills/assassinations, or shooting them with a firearm. You could also use one of your various gadgets, but then you'd have to switch to your inventory menu screen, and that's a tedious mess that takes time to bring up and navigate instead of the instant overlay of previous games, so you simply won't bother. I should commend the animations in combat, which are fluid and impressive, as are the new climbing and parkour animations, but these do little to redeem the game except occasionally provide a brief "that looks cool" moment when Connor performs a counter on two enemies simultaneously.

The notoriety and alertness system has also been reworked, and as a result, occasionally you'll suddenly find yourself being chased by guards for no apparent reason. Escaping from enemies is now slightly more difficult due to glitchy line of sight issues. You'll be hidden, but as you jump into haycart, your arc takes you up to a height where a guard can see you, thus you're classed as being "seen" so can't hide in the haycart. Occasionally you'll be able to successfully jump into it on the third or fourth attempt, so sometimes it's worth trying that hiding spot multiple times.

Hiding spots are also less frequent than before, and they don't show up on the minimap, so most of the time it's actually more practical to just flee the search radius or kill or the enemies trailing you. It is important to be careful with the latter, however, as once you hit maximum notoriety, enemies will spawn almost constantly, leaving you with no recourse to escape. Furthermore, since this means that enemies attack you on sight, it becomes almost impossible to use the two mechanisms marked on the map to reduce your notoriety (because you can't use them if you're being chased), forcing you to run around the city with a cadre of guards in tow, trying to find and rip down posters to reduce your notoriety to zero before fleeing the search radius of the enemies chasing you. The whole scenario is so ridiculous that it almost feels as though it should be accompanied by Yakety Sax.

Who knew that all the British Regulars had incredible parkour skills?

All in all, there is nothing about Assassin's Creed 3 that is an improvement on the previous games, and almost everything feels like it has gotten worse. I rarely, if ever, felt that I was having fun. I was going through the motions and waiting and expecting to have fun, but it never happened because the game was just so awful. I don't know if it was produced by an entirely different team to the previous games, but it just felt like the whole thing was phoned in and written by a group of high school history students with no knowledge of game design.

In essence, it's still an Assassin's Creed game, so it should be fun, but the fact is that there are so many annoyances that game introduces that just add up to the whole package being bland, tedious, and outright annoying. Don't buy this game, not even if it's on sale. It's not worth your money or your time. At most, read a plot synopsis or watch a video of the ending. I don't like saying this, but AC3 is simply a terrible game from start to finish.

Shattered War: Still Progressing

I realise that I've been less active on this blog of late that I would like, and probably less active than I should be.  This is partly because I've been slightly busier than usual and been able to dedicate less time to blogging and modding than I would like, but also because a lot of the modding work I've been doing lately for The Shattered War hasn't been terribly interesting for people to read about.

Why is that? Mainly because a lot of the work has either been testing and fixing bugs, or writing dialogue scripts. Dialogue scripts are the text files that get sent to voice actors once a role has been filled. This is a test file with a full export of all the character's lines, but heavily annotated. It provides a character biography, so the voice actor has an insight into their personality. It has any background information on the lore or setting that people may not be familiar with that is relevant to the character and their dialogue, along with details of any plots/storylines that the character may be involved with. It also contains a pronunciation guide for the names of other characters or locations.

Voicing a templar would be less convincing without relevant lore knowledge

Finally, the lines are divided up into logical segments to indicate the structure of the dialogue, and also an indication of the character's emotions or thought process behind the line is provided. This allows the voice actor to inject their own skill and take on the character's personality, while remaining true to the core persona with which the character has been written.  There is a delicate balance here - being too prescriptive doesn't allow the voice actor to act properly or give a good range of emotion and characterisation, but too little information and the voice actor may convey something completely different from what is meant in the context of the conversation or situation.

However, all the dialogue and all the scripts for the entire mod have been written, so I'll be running open auditions for all roles until they're filled. If you're at all interested in providing voice acting for any of the characters in the mod, please check out this page for details on characters and how to audition.

That said, there are still a handful of levels in the game that haven't yet been finalised. Some of these I'll be keeping in reserve and won't be publishing screenshots for them - I don't want to give away all the eye candy in the game. Of course, I can't tease you like that with giving a shot from another area that shows off the cold and unforgiving landscape of the setting...

Brrr, it's cold out there...

I'll endeavor to get back to more regular updates of progress on The Shattered War, it's been a very long journey of development thus far, and there's still a substantial amount of work left, but there will be quite a lot of gameplay to show for it once it's finished.

No vision? No game

I contemplated letting this bit of news pass without comment, but it just grates on me too much. As many of you may have heard, BioWare's Casey Hudson, producer of Mass Effect, asked via his twitter account whether the announced Mass Effect 4 should be a prequel or a sequel.

I have a better question: Why are you making Mass Effect 4?

This isn't a question that comes from my deep-seated dislike of the ending of Mass Effect 3. I happily admit that I don't like the ending, but that's not why the question of whether the game should be a prequel or sequel disgusts me. This is a horrible question because it demonstrates unequivocally that there is no vision clear vision for Mass Effect 4. It tells me beyond all doubt that Mass Effect 4 should not be made, or at the very least, it should not be made with Casey Hudson at the helm.

Asking fans for ideas of the setting in this way indicates that either Casey Hudson and whomever else was involved in green-lighting this project does not have a vision for the game except that it must be "Mass Effect 4". This is a clear indication that the only reason that it is a Mass Effect game is because it is a bankable IP that has sold millions of copies previously. That's it. All I can say is: Shame on you.

I have possession of the intellectual property!

You might think I'm being a bit harsh on Casey Hudson here, but he is ultimately in charge of the IP. The buck stops with him, which means he has to own it, and if he doesn't have the vision of what the next game in the series should be, then he needs to hand the reigns to someone who does. If he's not doing that, then he's not doing his job properly, nor is he treating the series, its fans, or the IP itself with respect.

The reason this question is particularly abhorrent because if there is one thing that gamers and the gaming industry as a whole has a surplus of, it is ideas. The industry is filled with creative people and more ideas than could ever possibly turned into shippable games. To have to ask fans "what game should we make" indicates that the people behind the project don't have that vision and don't have a clear picture of what they want to do except to make a game that is part of a franchise.

This is kind the of attitude that gives us the stale churn of titles over and over again, what allows companies to get away with just delivering the same old formula just to get sales. To do this in any genre demonstrates a lack of imagination, but do it in the RPG genre in which storytelling is such a core element of the experience is a travesty for existing Mass Effect titles as well as the RPG genre as a whole.

What do you mean you don't have a story?

I understand that the content of a new Mass Effect game might be a touchy subject given the backlash against the ending of Mass Effect 3, but trying to make another game without a clear vision and strong idea of what game you want to make and why is only going to result in the production of an inferior and soulless product. If there was ever a way to attempt to repeat a backlash on par with that produced by Mass Effect 3, this would be how to start it.

I could make a whole post about the delicate balance between balancing what gamers want and how much the developers should stick to their core vision. While Mass Effect 3 arguably pushed the boundary too far in the latter direction (though many applaud it for doing so), relying on the audience even decide the core setting or the story swings the pendulum far too much in the other direction.

If you don't have a vision, don't make the game. Gamers deserve better, games deserve better, and developers deserve better.

Assassin's Creed Timeline (Part 7) - Gameplay

In this final post on the Assassin's Creed series, I'm going to talk about arguably the most important aspect of the series - the gameplay itself.  I've left this discussion to last because so much of the development of the game mechanics has been influenced by the other factors in its development. The shifting focus of the series and changes in other aspects of the design of the games is inherently related to how the game is played. This truly should allow anyone to appreciate the myriad of factors that have to come together in order to create a cohesive gaming experience. Games should be designed such that all these factors come together effectively.

Initially the game was a concept and an ideal more than a comprehensively designed gameplay experience. It was a sandbox with the primary character as a free-running assassin, and this is entirely reflected in the way the game plays out. It represented an interesting experiment that delivered a large world to the player, but gave them fewer direct reasons to explore it, instead rewarding those who wanted to roam of their own accord. Structured gameplay was minimal and mostly consisted of a small stable of repetitive tasks.

Then the "reward" of long-winded speeches...

Yet the designers recognised the shallow nature of the first experience and sought to expand upon it. This was a vast success in the second game, with the transformation in narrative and gameplay design leading to a superior and varied experience for players. Some of additions were not particularly exciting, races in particular being a somewhat tedious addition, and these rapidly dropped in number in Brotherhood and Revelations.  The increased variety in mission design and even changes to mechanics and structure are of significant note throughout the series.

Providing tangible benefits from doing additional content is something the series has always tried to do, firstly by provided increased health, then subsequently by making the player money, advancing recruits, and allowing them to buy better gear to make the do more damage or increase their health. Unfortunately, the designers have never seemed to quite pull this off entirely successfully. The first game's side content just ended up being repetitive and tedious, and in AC2 it was quite feasible to end up rolling around in ridiculous amounts of money with nothing to spend it on. Brotherhood and Revelations did reign this tendency in by introducing big money sinks, but aside from a few key valuable items, most of the point of making money was to spend money to make more money. The design was such that the goal was just a goal that helped fulfill that same goal, so ultimately didn't feel that rewarding for the player.

Yeah, because that made sense...

Subtle changes to stealth mechanics both made stealth more successful and viable, but at the same time, perhaps made it feel less special and involving for the player. The ditching of the "active blending" from AC2 is perhaps the biggest step back for player involvement in stealth. Don't make stealth a simple "push button" like it was in the original game. That's neither challenging nor interesting for the player. It should require some effort on their part.

The changes to notoriety in Revelations came a close second to this step backwards when it came to gameplay. Managing notoriety was never particularly challenging, and seemingly this led the designers to believe that it wasn't particularly valuable. However, ditching it in favour of templar awareness was a very poor decision. Managing "templar awareness" for the sake of preventing a potential attack on an assassin den was far less personal and engaging, and had less direct impact upon the player. The player typically had to perform a significant number of "unacceptable" actions after hitting maximum awareness to provoke an attack, which meant that getting a full meter didn't seem like cause for concern. A notorious Ezio did potentially have to makes changes to his behaviour (even if small or subtle) to avoid attracting attention or at least minimising it.

The better choice would have been to tweak the consequences of attaining notoriety and making it more difficult to reduce notoriety. The abundance of posters made it a trivial task to keep notoriety low, and heralds could easily be bribed and then pickpocketed for a significant decrease in notoriety. If the number of posters had been dropped, and pickpocketing a herald resulted in a vast increase in notoriety, then a far better balance would have been struck. Or perhaps offering increased dangers but with a potential small bonus to performing actions/missions while notorious would have provided a better risk/reward system for players.

Plus no-one particularly wanted a tower defense minigame...

Finally, it would be remiss of me to fail to mention the combat and assassinations in the game in this discussion. The introduction of additional assassination methods as of AC2 made the series remarkably better. Actually being able to leap and kill someone, or toss them down onto the street while hanging on a ledge was a huge step forward for player freedom. But this isn't the only place where combat took a step forward.

The variety in enemies provided a significant improvement in combat across the series. Requiring players to switch up their tactics a little made combat more interesting, even though the difficulty has never really ramped up across the games. The variety in weaponry provides a range of tools that allows the player to switch up their killing method and their attack style, from fast and furious to slow but lethal. The only potential drawback here is that as the series has progressed, there are arguably too many options with too little difference between them. Why is the crossbow more advantageous than knives, and which bomb loadout should the player use, and how useful are they really? There's a lot of choice, but the differentiation between those choices seems minimal, meaning that those choices don't really seem to offer a whole lot to the player.

Crossbows and throwing knives and assassins... oh my!

The greatest problem with combat is that the player doesn't really ever feel like they are under significant threat, and even when they can take a sound beating quickly (as can happen in Revelations), it doesn't really provide that sense of threat or danger to the player with any meaningful feedback until the player is almost dead. Just like the concept of the animus itself, there's very little "tactile" or tangible feedback to the player. Combat has never been difficult or a challenge because the fighting system has very little individual complexity. There's no combos like a fighting game or real individual move variety like a beat-em-up. Mostly it's a simple choice of "enemy X, attack A", enemy Y, attack B" with little to no difference in overall approach. There's no fluidity to the system that allows for the player to have free flowing combat when compared to something like Batman: Arkham Asylum/City. If the Assassin's Creed series wants to continue to develop, this is they key area of gameplay that designers really needs to concentrate on.


Overall, the first four entries in the Assassin's Creed has been interesting titles. With varying strengths and weaknesses, this franchise offers an insight into how developers seek to change their formula and attempt to keep a series fresh while retaining true to the core premise of a series. If all the strong points of the series were combined in a single title, you'd have a truly excellent game, but the difficulty that the design team seems to have had thus far is picking how to tweak those aspects to obtain the right balance to fit the overall creative direction. I'll likely make another post on how well they have (or haven't) managed this when I get around to playing Assassin's Creed 3 - until then, I'm calling a close to my commentary on this series.

Assassin's Creed Timeline (Part 6) - Presentation

With the Assassin's Creed series, an aspect that warrants particular mention is the presentation of the game, not just in terms of graphics and art style, but the means in which events, characters and landscapes are provided to the player. No, I haven't played the third game yet, so I can't add it to the ongoing discussion.

The series started off with an expansive yet minimalist presentation style. Cutscenes were done such that the player always retained control of Altair with their semi-interactive style, with the only real non-interactive sequences being the panoramic camera sweeps upon approaching a city for the first time, or synchronising from a viewpoint. Even when control was removed from the player, the cinematics conveyed a sense of scale and completeness of the environment. AC1 was presented as a giant and finely crafted sandbox for the player to explore with as few constraints as possible, and the presentation and gameplay supported this.

The problem with an enormous sandbox is that it can potentially result in a limited about of designed gameplay, an inherent problem of the original game. Thus AC2 came in with its expanded story, but consequently a more prescriptive presentation style. The quicktime events of the cutscenes disappeared, which while perhaps making the player feel less involved, it ensured that the presentation of the cinematic sequences were crafted for maximum effect, with every shot delivering nuance of story and character. While this does lose some freedom for the player, the increased impact of the narrative is arguably worth it.

Not having to worry about "glitches" was ultimately a blessing for cutscenes

The quicktime button events of AC2 were far worse, but these (fortunately) happened infrequently enough that the player didn't really have to worry about them, they didn't make much difference to the cutscene sequences, and they were mercifully dropped after this game.

A changing presentation resulted in a tighter experience from a narrative and gameplay perspective, and focused the player on specific areas and zones. Vast areas that were explored a single time (if at all) were ditched in favour of smaller environments that the player could become familiar with. This helped provide additional impact for the more personal story of Ezio, as it helped the player associate with the concept that he was fighting for people and places that he cared about. While this was perhaps slightly undone by the near identical assassin recruits you trained and promoted, it still increased the player's level of engagement with the setting.

Admit it, you liked seeing other people dive off Tiber Island

There was an overall improvement in the graphical quality of the series as well. While the long draw distance to see vast panoramas has remained fairly constant, the diversity and complexity of the environments has provided some really stunning scenes for the player to view. The fact that the series deals with some pretty amazing architecture definitely doesn't hurt at all, but the art team still manage to pull the detail off with definite skill.

The improvement in the character models and facial appearance is also noteworthy, which was fairly essential given the increased focus on a more cinematic presentation, leading to more close up shots of character's faces that requires that higher level of fidelity. The ability to choose a desired colour scheme for Ezio's outfit was just another small bit of icing on the cake that added a little more character.

So many different colours, yet somehow no outfit looks inconspicuous...

In the first four games, Assassin's Creed moved from wide empty areas to tightly crafted cities. While the impressive nature of the level design of the original game cannot be denied, a narrower focus has probably allowed more players to better appreciate the level of detail and effort that has gone into creating the environments for each game. The presentation of the series has improved along the way even if the scope diminished, and it could be argued that the games became better as a result.

New Screenshot

Just a quick post today in the middle of my Assassin's Creed posts to demonstrate some more of the work I've been doing on The Shattered War. Dialogue has been occupying a vast majority of my time lately, but I've managed to get another level done and have a screenshot for your viewing...

It might look serene, but who knows what's around that next corner?

There are only a few levels I have left to complete, but I'll probably be trying to focus on more dialogue work and getting voice actors to fill the remaining roles for the adventure in the near future.  The vast majority of the dialogue work at the moment is getting the scripts into a readable and understandable format for potential voice actors or getting voice cuts integrated into the game itself. Once that's complete, I'll be putting out a full audition list of all remaining characters that need to be voiced. Stay tuned!

Assassin's Creed Timeline (Part 5) - Narrative and Writing

First things first: Big spoiler alert. I will be discussing the story of all the first four Assassin's Creed games, so if you haven't played everything before Assassin's Creed 3 and don't want events ruined for you, stop reading NOW. 

In my series of posts on Assassin's Creed, I've been talking about each individual game, with some reference to how they fit together. For a couple more posts, I'd like to look at the development of the series of a whole and some specific aspects of design and development. It should come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that the first thing I want to look at is the writing for the series.

The first game is front loaded with exposition, which is both slightly clunky and very bold. For a AAA title to start off with a lot of dialogue just to set the scene is unusual, but it relies on the unique premise in order to pique the interest of the player and maintain their interest. For the most part, it works. The problem is that this technique is maintained through the entire series, as though the designers either expect players to come in fresh for each title, or to have forgotten what came before. Admittedly, televisions shows often give a recap of previous weeks, and they're often seen only a week apart, as opposed to a year or more as is the case with video games. The manner of delivery in AC is just a little more forced - the writers and cinematic team haven't yet come up with a natural method of giving a recap.

Cue Desmond confused face

An interesting aspect of the writing in AC is that it has multiple layers of storytelling. The primary story of each game is centred around the ancestor whose life Desmond is reliving via the Animus, so far, Altair or Ezio. The storytelling in these is reasonably solid, though there has been a distinct increase in quality as the designers have worked out the best way to use the tools at their disposal to create a cohesive and coherent interactive and cinematic experience.

Outside (and inside) of the main story of the Animus, there are other pieces of narrative that fit into the overall plot. The puzzles that hint to a vast conspiracy tracking through major historical events that many people will recognise helps to push this aspect of the storytelling in a clever fashion. The fact that the player has to work to find these puzzles, and then many contain messages that are encoded with ciphers or written in morse code or the like adds to the flavour, though of course a quick trawl of the Internet can uncover all the answers with minimal effort.

Who would have ever though of delivering conspiracy theories through chess?

Perhaps the biggest weakness of the narrative is that of the overarching plot of the series: some cataclysm that will wipe out the Earth if Desmond doesn't do something to stop it. This was introduced right at the end of the second game, though there were vague hints of this before. The problem with this is that despite every character within the game being so interested in Desmond, and him apparently having many important assassin ancestors, he doesn't really feel that significant to the player. He's a protagonist who the player doesn't really know anything about and never really sees much.

In AC1 Desmond wanders around slowly inside Abstergo. In AC2 he follows Lucy out of Abstergo and jumps around in a warehouse. He does the most in AC:B, where he gets to run around Monteriggioni and around and inside the Colosseum, but then in AC:R does virtually nothing again. The problem isn't just that the players don't really know who Desmond is, but that the modern story is doled out with such huge gaps in between that there isn't any continuity of his story. Even worse is that the intentional ambiguity of the story and the "first" beings is that it obscures key facts. How many people knew that the reason that Desmond stabbed and killed Lucy at the end of Brotherhood was because she had actually switched sides to the Templars? I'm guessing it would be a very small number.

Who are you, Desmond?

The vague nature of the overarching plot is obviously so that the writers can maintain a sense of mystery over the upcoming disaster and the solution to survive it, but this vagueness just comes across as poor writing or their inability to come up with any plausible or concrete. It feels like they're relying solely on this "ancient powerful beings" trope to justify the more extravagant ideas that they can come up with to further the conspiracy and the series.

The "Apple" as shown in AC1 had a vague religious air to it, but this was supplanted in subsequent games by the concept that it was created by some past super race of beings than somehow are still talking to Desmond through his ancestors... or by some method that's never really explained. Inside the Animus they don't seem to be heard by the others he's with, and in Brotherhood they communicate to him directly but no one else seems to hear a thing. It's just... magic. This might seem a little nit picky given some of the stuff that happens, but there's a difference between stretching believability and just throwing all pretenses of reality straight out the window. The later really begins to happen (to the detriment of gameplay) at the end of Brotherhood. Running around and brainwashing/killing enemies using the Apple was not only dull from a gameplay perspective, but didn't really make any sense with what had previously happened.

Don't worry, Ezio, a wizard did it.

The stories of Altair and Ezio, as a counterpoint, are typically well delivered. The way their two lives are brought to a cohesive conclusion at the end of Revelations is particularly satisfying. The only potential drawback here is that it definitely feels as though Ezio's story could have been condensed somewhat. Brotherhood and Revelations may represent different stages of Ezio's life, but the games feel as though they were attempting to artificially extend the storyline without adding a great deal of new content. They feel more like the design team experimenting with new gameplay mechanics while throwing small bits of narrative to fuel experience - ultimately it's just Ezio collecting the Macguffin(s). This isn't to say that the stories are uninteresting, and there are some nice turns in the plots of both, but they really don't push the envelope as much as they coud.

What remains to be seen is how the designers will up the ante with AC3 in their narrative. Hopefully they will push it in a direction that will develop the strength of the "main" plot, or at least provide some clarity in its delivery of that part of the story.