Look yes I know, the whole Assassin’s Creed future-plot setup is kind of silly. The “aliens gave us the Apple of Eden” crypto-Truth bullshit is just embarrassing. The Borgia family, though… They had history. Not a codex entry, not an expository cutscene, not a hundred NPCs saying “oh look the Citadel is big and important, look how big and important it is [it is big and important]”, but actual literal history. Yeah okay you probably won’t see the PBS documentary explaining that the Borgia killed Ezio’s uncle or whatever – but that doesn’t undercut the sheer menace of your love interest being held in the Papal prison, or the hilariously overwrought bacchanalia of the collapsing church in the fifteenth century. So if the future-plot seems weak, it’s mostly in contrast to the incredibly strong feeling of historical significance you get from exploring Ezio’s memories.
AC: Brotherhood & Project Legacy
Written by:zach
A lot of things about that game reduced me to a sailor-mouthed termagant. Targeting an enemy in some missions was an effort in futility. Cut scenes would change the weapon you had equipped without telling you. Certain missions denied you access to parachutes without telling you. Horses were incapable of riding across a one-foot drop. In fact, most missions involving horse-riding (whistling for a horse that ran past you AND KEPT GOING even when you pursued, jumping off a horse to a beam above, dismounting from a horse without triggering a hostile take-down of a civilian) were hair-pullingly frustrating. Some missions had to be restarted because NPCs didn't spawn or bugged out. The camera was always working against you.
As for "inventive" ways to reload after failing in some way, such as dying or not saving an ally, Prince of Persia did this well by pretending it was a story being re-told. Any mistakes were fixed by the prince muttering, "No, no. That's not how it happened."
yeah i have a nasty habit of sometimes making my point through hypertext links instead of in-line with what I'm saying – I make the sands of time connection explicitly but only through a hyperlink linking the "that's not how it happened" footnote to a bing search for that phrase + "sands of time". i'd break that habit but I'm in love with metatext just as I am in love with not always capitalizing things.
Some of the complaints we have around AC are around shit that's been around forever – the reviews of the first game talk about the inconsistent platforming controls, terrible camera angles, nonsensical targetting. but most of my complaints are around new elements that have been grafted onto the engine. It's those things that really seem the wonkiest – the horse stuff is a perfect example (jumping off a horse once sent me flying into the sky – infinitely!) as are the parachutes (I regularly would log in and out to find the 15 parachutes I just purchased were now, inexplicably, gone. I learned my lesson after trying to jump off a building and finding I had 0 parachutes). In a sense I am more forgiving of the wonky platforming and terrible camera angles just *because* it's been that way since day 1 (although I agree they are a hilariously high barrier to entry/enjoyment – but hey, as far as I know, there might be a significant technical challenge there, which is why it's still around after years of very specific complaints). the new stuff acting buggy is the most telling symptom of a game adding lots of significant new features in just a year (not a lot of time to add brand-new features and test them thoroughly)
quick hit:
another strength of filtering the player from Ezio through the animus: ezio's decisions are a foregone conclusion. the player doesn't *have* to agree with the decision for it to go forward (unlike RPGs which frequently resort to a "will thou rescue the princess / but thou must!" loop) – so it's up to the writing to justify ezio's decisions so they make sense through cutscenes revealing motivations etc.
contrast this to the final decision the player makes as Desmond – which is very much a "but thou must!" moment.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButThouMust
I don't see why people are saying the aliens part of the future plot is the most ridiculous thing they're ever heard…it is almost exactly like Christianity except it was an entire race as opposed to one creator, and the Pieces of Eden are their technologies that are advanced far beyond human technologies so they seem like magic, but to them would have likely been commonplace things.
The motivations in the future plot are the same as in the past plot, the templars do terrible things and manipulate people. If it didn't change from 1100 something in Altair's time to the late 1400's and early 1500's in Ezio's time why would it change from Ezio's time to the present? They're trying to use their piece of Eden to control people and putting it up in a satellite would boost it's range.
I can agree with the decisions and the "but thou must!" concept, but Assassins Creed isn't a choose your own adventure story, it is "This is what happened, this is what we're trying to learn from it." so in my eyes that argument is completely and utterly out of place, almost like trying to knock The Ocarina of Time for not giving you the option to spare Ganon from being sealed away.
As for the platforming…it is awkward at first but once I got used to it it flows very well and I rarely have problems with it…why is everyone complaining?
As for the other glitches, every game has glitches. I've seen a few minor glitches and a few little targeting problems, but considering how rare they happen you can't really knock the game for them.
For me the alien stuff isn't the most ridiculous stuff I've ever heard, it's just kinda slapped on at the last second. In contrast to the other "unrealistic" parts of the story, the Animus and the Bleeding Effect, it just gets mentioned once or twice and never really explored. But the Animus, as a plot device, is very well explored – from the production of it (funded by secret Templar efforts and jealously guarded) to the hijacking of it by the Assassins, to the Templars using it en masse as a training device for its members (I love that the multiplayer is canon). And the bleeding effect is used as a bizarre cliffhanger at the end of the first game, but the next 2 games continue to do a great job of developing it (hallucinations, Lucy's concern for Desmond's mental state, Desmond's determination to keep going anyway, subject 16's insanity). In contrast all of the alien stuff is 11th-hour cryptic exposition stuff that never gets explored or explained at all. The cryptic conspiracy plot inserts itself really successfully into the game, especiallly through the Truth puzzles (mostly – I really didn't like the ones in Brotherhood as much), but the alien stuff is consistently dumped into your lap at the end of the game and never resolved, not even the big questions like "No one noticed the massive alien compounds beneath the Vatican and Colosseum?". the point isn't that the question is easy to answer ("stealth self-contained power units shielded from detection with mind control rays and a Someone Else's Problem field around it"), it's that the game doesn't spend the time to explore these questions itself. sure, there's still the 3rd game, but after 3 straight games ending with mystical unexplained bullshit, i would have preferred to at least acknowledge some of these questions by now. it's possible the payoff will change my mind about the alien plot, but right now i'm pretty unfulfilled and apathetic about it.
I think one solution would be to have Minerva do a data-dump into Ezio's mind that resolves itself as Animus data, so Desmond's animus session gets hijacked and he can learn more about the aliens – maybe even AS an alien, or at least Adam. That would be a great way to get the player involved – you don't have to give EVERYTHING away, but it would be much better than giving NOTHING away. And you could also use the chance to talk about what the PoE and Apple of Eden actually do, and how they work, instead of the kind of bizarre wild abuse of power you end up with in the last few Ezio memories with no acknowledgement of how over-the-top it is.
The thing about the future plot is that you meet exactly 1 Templar, the doctor who kidnaps you. The rest of it is all second hand information from Lucy and Sean. In the past plot, you see the Templars. You feel the impact of their actions. You learn their names and recieve their deathbed confessions (an aspect I've always loved). In the future, it's just a line of text – The Templars have cell phone tracking! In the past, it's personal – the Templars hung your family in the town square.
I see what they were going for in the final thing, and I'm not saying it was –wrong–. It's just they shifted the metaphor of control. Previously in the game, you were Desmond, full stop. He did the exact actions you told him to, but you didn't focus on that too much because 90% of the time you were Desmond played as Ezio/Altair – where you have the Pupeeteer thing, and the Animus to guide you back on the path when "that's not how it happened". And then, in the last minute of Brotherhood, it switches from "You are Desmond" to "You are controlling Desmond to make him do something he really doesn't want to do" – inverted the layer of abstraction the player is familiar with. Again, it's not good or bad – it's just very jarring in a game that normally does a great job with the whole ludonarrative dissonance kind of thing.
My biggest problem with the platforming is that you will be perched on a ledge, and you will press a direction and hit jump, and you will sometimes jump at a complete right angle to where you wanted to go, falling off the ledge and killing yourself. Or climbing and pushing a direction and watching Ezio completely refuse to go in that direction, then pressing another direction and watching him go exactly where you were trying to direct him before. Is it an inevitable consequence of a free-form control system? Maybe. Could you do some design work to make sure it didn't happen as frequently? Almost certainly (one idea: use eagle vision a bit more to show where jumps are going & verify you have them lined up by highlighting – this would be very useful in the combat-free exploration dungeons.also maybe use eagle vision to highlight climbable paths – although that might hurt the puzzling aspect of it a bit). Same for bugs – yeah yeah bugs are inevitable, but I hit more than one bug that made me restart a mission, and I've suffered more than a few hard crashes, and even the minor bugs like parachutes disappearing reproduced pretty consistently. I don't think I "knocked" the game for them, as much as pointed out that this is what happens when you try and build something in a year – there just isn't enough "bake time" to find bugs and get them fixed.
ANYWAY thanks for reading & for the comments, i do appreciate some good ol-fashioned disagreement 🙂 and sorry about the dual-comments blogger's commenting system is A PIECE OF SHIT