Gaming Irresponsibly

It is difficult to describe exactly what Assassin’s Creed is at its core. This is a symptom of a lot of sandbox games, although you’ll be hard-pressed to find anybody describing Assassin’s Creed as a sandbox game. Where such Jacks-of-all-trades, Masters-of-none games have trouble committing to one really good idea and fall short on every individual level, Assassin’s Creed does not. Rather, the game is executed with care and it achieves most of its goals with ease. It creates an amazing, realistic world and breaks previous boundaries of interactivity, integrates fluid and dynamic combat with gameworld navigation, and dresses it all in a unique and vastly deep historical setting which immerses the player to a degree other games do not.

In most videogames we’re used to playing, the environment is an obstacle to our advancement. The walls (invisible, many of them) that encase the world in which we play are static, unmoving, and annoying. They are the boundaries meant to direct our play experiences toward what the game has to offer instead of toward the irrelevant asides our curiosity jumps at. Many of them are pretty, to be sure – breathtaking vistas, grand sunsets, and beautifully and exhiliaratingly scripted set-pieces — but we see them for what they really are: programmed bumpers designed to keep us on the shiny lane and out of the gutter.

Assassin’s Creed, though, allows us to shatter the boundary of the environment by doing something few games have before accomplished: letting us reach out and touch it. In the game, Altair can take hold of the physical world itself and climb all over it, up and over the paths set by the games we used to play. It’s this freedom of movement and exploration that makes this game shine, where it transcends what we used to think about what it meant to play a game. Add to this incredibly liberating feeling a nifty combat system and a good control scheme, and we’ve got ourselves a game which does what all the fancy special effects, sounds, and stories of scores of other games couldn’t: it immerses us in what’s been created. We feel like we’re actually there because (and looking back now doesn’t it seem so devilishly simple?) we can reach out and touch what we’re looking at.

Other games lend the idea credence, Shadow of the Colossus being the best example (and executed so much better than even Assassin’s Creed, but that’s another article for another day). In that game our ability to climb is relegated not by tapping a button but by having to hold it, emphasizing the sense of grip. When the controller begins to vibrate as our avatar’s strength wanes, our thumbs press down that button ever the harder, our hands ache, and we are pivoted to the edge of our seats, believing with every mesmerized ounce that if we could only hold on for just a little longer!

There aren’t many games that immerse the player as well as Assassin’s Creed should, and this concept is the reason why. In other games we feel detached, but here we believe. Or, at least, we could, if the game didn’t try to unravel our belief at every turn. For some reason I’m having trouble conjuring, Assassin’s Creed developers Ubisoft took a very interesting and innovative concept and jumped off the deep end of the pool. Because the game isn’t actually set in a well-chosen slice of human history to tell a compelling story with deeply impactful moral undertones and told using a series of new and groundbreaking gameplay features. No, no, that would have been boring, run-of-the-mill. They went the bad horror fiction route of it all being a dream, only it’s a sci-fi dream, which means that it’s not a dream but a simulation, but since the Matrix already did it it comes across as stale and uninspired. Or perhaps it’s because it wasn’t in any way necessary that it feels stale and uninspired, I’m not sure which.

What exactly is the point of bothering with immersing players in a rich and detailed world if the whole point of the game is that it’s not real? We already have to contend with the spatial wall of experiencing the game through a television via a handheld controller; now we experience it as a game within a game. And it’s not as though that’s even the point: Assassin’s Creed makes no effort at social commentary with this setup (the whole “we control puppets that bend to our will but really we’re the puppets bending to the will of the in-game AI or to the will of consumerism” thing, ala Metal Gear) and so the extra narrative feels tacked on, like this great core game underneath was buffeted during development by producers who demanded this paltry, cliché, pointless aspect be brought in just to sell seats, spice it up, and make it palatable for the masses. Thing is, if they had released the game it should have been, they might have learned that gamers actually have a pretty big appetite for this stuff. The sci-fi is less a clever twist and more an overused crutch the developers used to excuse their inability to find more creative ways to integrate necessary functions like health-bars, loading-screens, and navigational beacons.

I’ll throw out some examples and a few ideas alongside and let them make my point. In-game you’ve got a lot of messy HUD elements like a boorish sci-fi radar which tells you exactly where to go. You’ve also got in-world cues to help out, too, like hawks that fly around the targets already represented on your radar (and your pause-screen map, for that matter). So what did the guy who programmed those hawks have to say when they tacked on the all-seeing radar? The immersive, unobtrusive, subtle in-game cue is made useless by the radar that didn’t need to be there (by virtue of the fact that twelfth-century assassins didn’t know what in the blazes a radar was). The map you have access to shows clear-cut lines on a fancy digital interface, but why not have a paper map with handwritten notations and markers appearing as you discover them? Each mission (to assassinate a target) is divided into two parts: information gathering and the assassination itself. Suffice it to say you spend a lot of time gathering information, but you don’t have to listen to a word of it, because the map tells you exactly where to go and what to do at all times. Why even bother recording the dialogue of the fellow who tells you where to begin your investigations if the radar leads you to each and every one anyway? Not for storytelling, not as part of the narrative, that’s for sure.

A lot of people complain that the information-gathering missions grow quickly repetitive, and they’re right, they do, but that’s because the game undermines the point of gathering information by doing it for you. The radar leads you to each point, handy prompts tell you what to do every time (even when it’s something simple, like “sit on a bench and listen”), and they tell you where to go next. You don’t gather information, the radar does, and when it’s decided it’s finished it tells you where to go to find your target, nullifying the whole purpose of all that information you allegedly gathered by leading you there by the hand. You don’t get to plan and attack, you don’t get to analyze and decide, and aren’t those some of the best parts about being an assassin? Agent 47 seems to think so. What if on this paper map I have suggested we even got to write our own markers with a pencil, make our own notations based on the information we had ascertained? What if we had to find these missions ourselves, find the targets ourselves?

It’s as if every time the developers hit a wall they couldn’t hurdle they just turned to the sci-fi pool and drew up a good enough excuse. How to transition from “being chased by guards very aware of your presence” to “hidden and safe and able to resume exploring” was literally given a function referred to as “hiding mode.” Instead of something fluid and intuitive, like hide (a really quite simple instruction) and blend in with a crowd, we must endure this blatant, unapologetic setting for a few moments before the screen wipes and beeps at us the all clear. There are other examples, but I think you get the point. It’s a shame, too, because the engine subverts one of gaming’s oldest banes – the invisible wall – by letting the character simply interact with it in a realistic fashion. It’s too bad the game’s creators couldn’t find ways to subvert the bane of development walls in a unique and creative way, too.

Perhaps worst of all is that the sci-fi element becomes a vehicle for the game as a series. Meant as a trilogy, Assassin’s Creed carries to the next episode via the thin outer layer created by the poor excuse for a narrative. So now instead of one game’s potential being ruined, we’ve got a whole series’s potential being ruined. The inner game works so hard to make us believe in it, but in the end any belief it’s built is shattered by the outer part when it reminds us that the invisible walls are still there. That we have not escaped them. Greedy publishers, shortsighted developers, or maybe it was our fault because we let them get away with it. I don’t know who to blame, or if it would matter if I did. Assassin’s Creed casts off any hope of being the work of art (like, I again mention, Shadow of the Colossus) it should have been because it buys into the idea that gamers can’t appreciate works of art.

But that, too, is another article for another day.