Hot on the heels of Joe’s Assassin’s Creed 2 post on Cult of the Turtle…
I enjoyed the kill verbs in both Assassin’s Creed games. Particularly rooftop kills. In the first I’d bound happily from building to building, pouncing on unsuspecting guards. In the second, I delight in sneaking up on them and throwing them to the ground below.
But as I did so, I couldn’t help but feel I was acting out of character. And while I appreciated that the game gave me the freedom to do this, I found myself wishing there were in game consequences that reinforced the overall narrative tone (particularly in the second game where Ezio will occaisionally question his assassination of the primary targets).
Guards, after all, are not a renewable resource. Their deaths would be sure to be noticed. Their families would be sure to be angry. In the first game, it would certainly increase the numbers of beggars on the street. In the second, the Templars would have turned public opinion against you until even your friends found you to be a political liability and be reluctant to associate with you.
And yet… bound, bound, bound, bound, pounce, aaaaaaugh!
It strikes me as one of the many ways in which Ubisoft Montreal didn’t go far enough in their attempts to provide a compelling narrative experience via gameplay. Good storytelling requires consequences for actions and the structure of the Assassin’s Creed gameplay and storyworld seems ideally suited to a more comprehensive approach.
Almost there, but not quite.
The same might be said of wargames. A handful have modeled “public opinion” as a metric to be managed, but most ignore the idea that warfare extends beyond soldiers to their friends and families.
A quick fix would have been to allow the player to KO unaware guards. We already get the tools to temporarily incapacitate enemies with thrown sand and smoke bombs, why not a bop on the head with the cestus or a sap to “permanently” incapacitate them?
The wanton murder of the hired help also struck me as being very out of character, and I would have been a lot more comfortable with it if the small fry could have been dealt with non-lethally. But then the convenience for the player eventually overrode the perceived ethics of the character, and add to that the fun of throwing them into the canals…
I never did figure out how to throw sand. Was there a tutorial on this, or something? I never really pulled off a sweep outside of the training ground, either.
And I never really used consumables.
A sap, a la Thief might have solved the problem, but I’m not sure it’s in keeping with the theme. I think hand-waving things as knock-outs vs kills is just a cheap way around it. It’s not what the players are going to think of it, unless the guys get back up somehow. And then the players will want to incapacitate them more completely, I’d think.
I’m rather inclined to say that quick fixes are the bane of good game design. ;-})
But even if you included a knock-out option, the kill verb shouldn’t be taken away and there should still be in-game consequences for your actions.
I’m not sure how to reconcile the theme with Ezio’s character/player conscience otherwise. He’s a disciplined assassin bringing death to those who deserve it, or a serial killer. The game doesn’t really enforce the need for evasion that something like Thief does–Ezio’s ample health and the easy combat make assassinations and stand-up fights routine.
More severe consequences for killing the guards would make KO’ing a viable option for players, especially outside of missions (is a guard’s life worth a chest of florins or a feather?). Of course it’s all the same to the player, mechanically: I want to get from here to there and that’s in my way, how can I eliminate it. At least that would be a less cold-hearted tool, if that’s the way you’re inclined to think.
Anyway, not trying to play backseat designer or derail from the topic.
I found the casual murder of guards disconcerting as well; all the more so when I got a snippy game warning about Ezio not killing civilians if you chose to kill those annoying minstrels.
I actually spent some time trying to play the game without killing any guards, to stay in keeping with Ezio’s good guy persona. It makes everything extremely difficult, if not downright impossible. I think I lasted about 3 hours before the repeated rooftop chases made the game so tedious it was no longer enjoyable.