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Assassin’s Creed: Optimal Ennui
By Corvus | August 28, 2008
You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself.
-Gautama Siddharta
Earlier this week, Alex mentioned Assassin’s Creed (AC) in the comments and I replied that the game was all about the sub-optimal path. In fact, it’s one of the things that I find so enthralling about it. It is also, of course, the game’s biggest downfall.
The core focus of AC’s plot and gameplay was the assassination (shocking, I know) of nine or ten key targets. In order to reach each target, the player is required to complete a few data gathering missions that consist of four styles of tasks endlessly repeated. In every instance, more missions are made available than the player needs to get approval to approach the target. The plot-based benefit to completing all the missions prior to approaching the target is that your character, Altair, is given more information about his target and the environment around his target.
Additionally, there are several alternate activities–scaling view points, rescuing citizens, collecting flags, and exterminating Templar knights. The first two activities have a direct benefit to the player. Scaling the view points clarifies the in-game map, revealing the location of data missions and potential escape routes. Rescuing citizens unlocks scholars (mobile hiding spots) or vigilantes (who delay your pursuers). The last two items are strictly filler. Although, by actively pursuing these goals the player does gain a better sense of the environment.
If you delight in roaming big open environments and ogling the design, marveling at the engine’s capabilities, and playing games with the guard AI, then AC’s sub-optimal paths are perfect for you.
Let’s turn our focus back to the data gathering missions. I mentioned that there was a plot-based benefit to completing all of the missions. For some of them, there is also a direct gameplay benefit. The information you collect can be useful, such as low-profile access routes to the target or quick escape routes. Ultimately, however, it’s not anything you couldn’t figure out by scouting the area yourself. Other missions provide the character with very useful items, such as maps detailing archer positions. And it is here that the game suffers from an enormous disconnect.
When Altair receives precise information as to the location of archers, or other key details about his upcoming task, that information is not represented on the player’s map. There are no highly detailed sub-maps, no location markers, nothing. The plot detail is not represented within the game mechanics. This is an enormous oversight. Furthermore, if you take care to remove (i.e. kill) all of the archers from the surrounding rooftops before approaching your target, they are all reset during the transitional scene that you must sit through before beginning your assassination attempt. That means that if you carefully removed the threat of being shot at by archers as you fought your target’s guards… all of your work was in vain. Not only is the environment reset for your assassination attempt, but you are held in stasis during the scene for long enough that any unique approach you intended to take in order to reach your victim is pretty much nullified.
All of the careful planing–the learning about the environment, the removal of obstacles and threats–turns out to be for naught when you reach the central points of the game. The core focus of AC might as well have been an arena fighting game, given how disconnected it was from the rest of the game.
In AC we have sub-optimal paths that actively detract from the key moments of the game. The freedom they promise is not supported by, or integrated with, the player’s primary stated objective. This effectively cripples the game by promising narrative potential that it doesn’t even begin to deliver.
This disconnect between the sub-optimal paths and core focus was many player’s primary complaint about the game (in addition to the climbing being too easy). Players became engaged with the gameplay promised by the sub-optimal paths and were outraged to have that freedom stripped away just when it seemed the most important.
Tomorrow I will be recapping my thoughts of the past week as I’ve been exploring this idea of of sub-optimal paths in storytelling and video games. I’ll also address Krystian’s recent comment, “It’s like saying the goal of life is to die and we are all just terribly sub-optimal beings. It wouldn’t [be] really insightful – it would be just a grave misunderstanding of the essence of human existence.”
Tagged:assassin's creed, storytelling, sub-optimal routes, video games. | 4 Comments »
August 28th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
I find an interesting comparison between Assassin’s Creed and Crackdown; both games are essentially about killing a number of characters belonging to different factions.
Crackdown has an optimal path designed in such a way that provided you know where they are you can kill the three primary targets straight away and finish the game. However by choosing to first kill some or all of the secondary targets you decrease the difficulty of accessing and assassinating your primary targets. Kill a faction’s arms supplier and the enemies you face in future will have less powerful weapons available.
Also by not going directly to your targets and instead exploring the environment you upgrade you characters abilities, through use, and become better able to carry out the assassinations when you do choose to attempt them.
Lightweight in terms of any pure narrative structure, Crackdown does inform you of your ability to target secondary characters first but leaves the order in which you do so, and whether you do so at all, up to you. The play of Crackdown exists almost exclusively in it’s sub-optimal options, but it never feels like these actions are diversions or meaningless additions, instead you do feel like you are whittling away the opposition and making things easier for yourself.
August 29th, 2008 at 11:08 am
There were a few assassinations in AC where I was able to be clever in my own way, but that was like two out of ten of them. Those were definitely the best missions, though. Once I actually took down a fleeing target by shooting him with arrows until his health whittled down! It was marvelously un-assassin like (I SHOOT YOU TIL YOU DIE) but still memorable.
September 4th, 2008 at 4:15 am
The climbing being too easy – ROFL! Ah, because we wouldn’t want to have any kind of fun but Hard Fun, right?
September 4th, 2008 at 5:34 am
I don’t disagree with you, Chris. You know that it’s my favorite part of the game. As someone with experience in animation I can’t help but appreciate the beauty of what they’ve done with it.