Assassin’s Creed

Pardon me for the less blog-like writing style of this round. I’m clearly channeling my academic and journalist sides while flashing back to a presentation I attended at E3.

“We had nothing except a way of doing things,” said Patrice Desilets, Creative Director at Ubisoft Montreal, as he introduced the background of the then-named Project Assassin on the Cracking the Code of Creativity panel at E3 2006. Previously, the core team behind Assassin’s Creed had worked on games with existing Intellectual Property, namely Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Desilets saw originality as an opportunity, and the team studied and researched based on inspiration from historical accounts of assassins during the Crusades.

Desilets expressed an interest in bringing historical accuracy into video games: “It’s important to capture the reality of the medieval times and our own history—our own history is much larger than games currently represent.” However, it quickly became clear to the team that their target audience, the 18-to-35-year-old male bracket, had a varied understanding of this history, as pointed out by Desilets: “In focus groups when we went and asked what the Crusades are, responses were all over the place.”

Once the main concept idea of playing as an assassin during the Crusades formed, the team didn’t see a choice in where to go, but instead focused on how to get the gameplay they wanted. “At an early stage we wanted to do a mature game—something real; real human behaviors in an action adventure,” emphasized Desilets. He later added, “We knew the characters had to be really fluid, level design was the key, and graphics had to be up to par, but then we had to come up with something new.”

Prior, Desilets suggested implementing the Sands of Time rewind and replay feature and removal of the checkpoint and save game system for all games universally, but it became clear that it would be too difficult for engineers to ensure this feature across Next-Gen consoles. Left with the responsibility to innovate within the Project Assassin gameplay, the team set out to prototype the experience they were going for. “The design was all about the character and interaction with environment, and how you translate that into your controller,” Desilets stated.

What resulted was an interesting take on the background story as well as narrative and interactive role of the main player character to legitimize the unrealistic abilities to restart failed missions, save the game, and re-spawn that would otherwise detach the player from immersion in the gameplay. In doing so, Assassin’s Creed intertextualizes the gamer’s self-positioning in similar action adventure genre games.

Reworking of the Sands of Time game mechanics are clearly seen in Assassin’s Creed–there is an emphasis on the ability to climb smoothly up buildings and leap from certain positions. Like the other Prince of Persia games before it, Assassin’s Creed is a spin-off from the 3D platformer genre combination. If you can look beyond the graphics and to the structure of the environment, you will immediately understand the game as a revised platformer in 3D graphics. Assassin’s Creed does more than the Prince of Persia series though, as it combines other forms of interaction with non-player characters, such as colliding, talking, and avoiding.

However, variety in the locations of these interactions has more room to build on. Essentially, you repeat the same actions over and over. Combat in the city against guards when caught is dependent primarily on a strategy of deflection, and as much as you do have a choice in your actions, specialization is narrow. This might not be as noticeable in a world that appears to promise less interaction, so here Assassin’s Creed simply sets up the player with such amazing physics, graphics, and possible interactions that it then appears to fall short in gameplay where other games may not.

Obviously there will be an Assassin’s Creed 2, so this leaves me expecting to see what the team can do to improve player agency. While the player can physically move during cutscenes, this is simply lifted from Half Life, and only creates the illusion of control. Further, variety in environments and progressive steps is key. Otherwise, the player is hung up on spending too much time exploring without new content to appreciate (Shadow of the Colossus is a great example of a game which successfully uses environment exploration due to its variety in scenery) and not enough time actually assassinating (often also hindered by more cutscenes to show the player the plot point he/she has reached).

Beautiful game, incredible physics, interesting intertextuality of the gamer’s role–now let’s see what they do next with an engine they better understand and more time to develop on an established IP.