One of the most memorable moments from the entire Assassin’s Creed series takes place near the beginning of Assassin’s Creed 3, when Haytham Kenway ended the collection of a team of killers in Nowy Świat. At least the player is convinced that they are killers. In the end, Haytham uses a hidden blade, she is just as charismatic as the previous heroine of the Ezio Auditore series and has – until then in the campaign – he played as a hero, throwing native Americans out of prison and beating conceited British Red -Tacts. Only when he says the known sentence: “Let the father lead us”, it becomes clear that we actually follow our sworn enemies, the Knights Templar.
For me, this surprising configuration represents the full implementation of the Assassin’s Creed potential. The first game in the series introduced an intriguing concept – find, get to know and kill your goals – but the story department did not succeed, both the hero Altaïr and his victims were completely devoid of personality. Assassin’s Creed 2 took a step in the right direction, replacing Altaïra with a more iconic Ezio, but he did not utilize the same treatment for his opponents, with great bad Spinoff Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Cesare Borgia, which appeared as particularly poorly developed. Only in Assassin’s Creed 3, imprisoned during the American Revolution, the developers from Ubisoft devoted enough time to develop the hunter as hunters. He borrowed the game, from configuration to payment, and as a result he achieved a tender balance between the game and the narrative, which has not been repeated so far.
While the current era of RPG has been largely well received by players and critics, a wealth of articles, videos from YouTube and forum posts agree that Assassin’s Creed has been falling and for some time. However, what exactly is responsible for this fall is subject to discussion. Certainly indicates the increasingly unrealistic rooms of contemporary games that you faced with gods such as Anubis and Fenrir. Others question Ubisoft implementation of a variety of romance options or, in a heated case, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, replacing his fictitious heroes with a real historical character, an African samurai called Yasuke. Despite my personal nostalgia of Xbox 360/PS3 games, I would arguing that this is nothing. Instead, such a fall is the result of a gradual abandonment based on the characters of the series, which until now has been buried deep in a huge sandbox.
Over the years, Assassin’s Creed has planted his original formula for the adventure of action with lots of RPG elements and live, from dialog trees and levels based on XP to boxes, DLC microtransactions and equipment adjustment. But the larger the up-to-date parts became, the empty, and they began to feel, and not only in relation to countless climbing, areas located, but also their basic story story.
Although, allowing you to choose what your character is saying or doing, she should theoretically make a general more addictive experience, in practice I discovered that it often has the opposite effect: because the scripts become longer and longer to take into account many possible scenarios, they think that they lack the same Polish level as a game with a more restricted range of interaction. The concentrated, script -like adventure script of the series allowed sharply defined characters that were not slim by the structure of the game, which requires his hero to be compassionate or brutal under the influence of the player’s whim.
So, while the game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has more content than Assassin’s Creed 2, most of them seem wooden and insufficient. This, unfortunately, breaks immersion; It is too often obvious that he interacts with computer -generated characters and not convoluted historical characters. This is clearly contrasting with the era of the Xbox 360/PS3 franchise, which in my humble opinion created one of the best magazines in all games, from the fiery “Do not follow me or anyone else!” A speech after defeating Savonaroli, the tragicomic Monilioquy Haytham, who eventually kills his son, Connor:
“Don’t think that I’m going to caress your cheek and say that I was wrong. I will not cry and I wonder what could be. I’m sure you understand. Still, I’m proud of you. You showed a great belief. Resilience. Courage. All noble features. I should have killing you a long time ago. “
The magazine has suffered in other ways for years. Where newfangled games tend to be simple for digestible dichotomy of killers = Good and Templars = Bad, earlier games have reached great length to show that the border between these two orders is not as clear as it seems at first. In Assassin’s Creed 3, every defeated Templar uses his last breath to make Connora – and thus, the player – he questions his own beliefs. William Johnson, a negotiator, says that the Templars could stop the North American Indian genocide. Thomas Hickey, a hedonist, calls the mission of killers unrealistic and promises Connor that he will never feel fulfilled. The Benjamin Church, which reveals Haytham, declares that “this is a matter of perspective” and that the British – from their point of view – perceive themselves as victims, not aggressors.
For his part, Haytham is trying to shake Connor’s faith in George Washington, claiming that the country he creates will be no less despotic than the monarchy from which the Americans tried to free – the claim that sounds all the more true when we discover that the order of burning the village of Connora was not passed by the popista of Haytham Charles Lee, but Washington. At the end of the game, the player has more questions than answers – and the story is stronger to her.
Looking back at the long history of the franchise, there is a reason why one song from the nickname Assassin’s Assassin’s Creed 2 Score, “Ezio’s Family”, resonated with players to such an extent that they become the official topic of the series. PS3 games, especially Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed 3, were their basics-the experience based on the character; The melancholy guitar strings “Ezio Families” were not aimed at causing the renaissance of the game, as much as the personal trauma of Ezio consisting in the loss of the family. Although I admire the wide-ranging building of the worlds and the graphic loyalty of the current generation of Assassin’s Creed games, I hope that this uncontrolled franchise one day will decrease and once again provide focused, adapted stories that made me fall in love with this. Unfortunately, in a landscape dominated by huge sandbox and single player games with live service ambitions, I’m afraid it’s not a “good business”.
Tim Brinkhof is an independent writer specializing in art and history. After studying journalism in Nyu, he wrote about Vox, Vulture, Slate, Polygon, GQ, Esquire and others.
