when will he stop acting like a fool? an assassin’s creed 1 post

I’m on a bit of an Assassin’s Creed odyssey lately (not playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, just on an odyssey through Assassin’s Creed), going in a weird order – I’ve just completed the first game a few days after completing Unity, which is sort of the last one that’s on the same train of thought as the first one. With the amount of Ass Creed I’m playing, you’d think I really liked it, but it’s Just Ok. But interesting!!!

AC1 is a pretty fascinating game now. When it came out I was disappointed with it; I was one of a lot of folks who were expecting and hoping for something more Prince of Persia-y from what seemed to be a lot of the Sands of Time people, and certainly I wasn’t expecting all this Future Bullshit. But now that it’s 2000 years later I can appreciate it for what it is: a surprisingly lean, uncluttered game with only the very first tentative, unobtrusive gestures in the direction of what would eventually become Ubisoft’s customary rote open-world game-gruel.

It feels like it had a massive budget, but 90% of it went on exactly two things: World and Animation, with everything else very scope-vigilant and done relatively on the cheap. There is very little voicework for the amount of game, very few types of occurrence, and lots of clever little ways to save work. I was surprised at how repetitive the whole thing is, but it strikes me how much I prefer “do the same thing over and over again” when it really is the same thing, and on a small enough scale that this feels like progress, rather than 50 different types of thing instanced 500 times. You have 9 guys you’re going to kill: kill one in each of 3 cities, repeat 3 times, and each visit we’ll open up one of the 3 districts in each city. This really walks a line; it dripfeeds you just enough new shit just often enough you stay enjoyable, scraping by by a gnat’s wing, feeling very very tight and economical, but still, I reckoned, a little too long.

Each kill requires you to first do some amount of “walking amoung the people” (eavesdropping, pickpocketing, etc) gathering intel on the guy, not because the protagonist feels he needs to but because he’s being punished for acting rashly in the past, and I think that’s a bit of a banger as motivations for busywork go. I actually love the setup of the protag taking the maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted” at face value and being told “oh you took that literally did you you fucking idiot”. Gamers need this said to them more often. I’m a sucker for “arrogant asshole is forced to learn some humility” protags (like Sands of Time’s) and Altair surprised me by being a good one with a couple of interesting relationships (Malik and Al Mualim).

It’s probably hard to communicate to anyone any younger than me how amazing the parkour functionality was at the time, and I was surprised how well it still holds up here straight after the much-more-polished version of it in Unity, but it does. There’s a lot of friction here that was lost in later games as these systems got smoothed out, which isn’t really a criticism, because that’s exactly what I would have done with it, but I do think it might have been a mistake. The smoother the climbing is the less you can focus on it, it has to become a means to an end, and then you smooth it out even more because it’s no longer the point. One thing I was sort of shocked that I had no memory of, which you can see in the video above, is that the hostile AI is completely able to cope with this type of navigation. They chase you across the roofs so competently it’s incredibly difficult to escape at times; you’ll think you’re okay and when you turn around there’s 20 guys hopping across the parapets. Doesn’t happen in later games, which is a shame also, I think.

The game is still full of stuff I hate that I’ve never been able to overlook before, which I can now, for whatever reason, maybe I’m just a chiller guy. I hate the abilitease, that your boss revokes your ability to not fall over when you bump into someone, how it never stops showing you tutorials, how it requires a minimap (and it really does, even though you can turn it off). But I had a good time and played it sort of to study it, and it works well that way.

Meanwhile, the Future Shit no longer bothers me, even though the story would work without it, and the Desmond sections are carefully placed to alleviate the fatigue of the three-city loop, which works, so I see their value now. I’m more bewildered by how more recent ACs, like Shadows, discard it only almost completely, still at pains to say “this is a computer simulation of someone’s memories!” even though you don’t know whose, or why, no meta-plot is furthered, and nothing is extracted from the idea at all anymore.

Anyhoot, I’m gonna keep playing these. They all do 60fps on Xbox now, some of ’em 4K as well. There may be more blog posts. When will I stop acting like a fool.