Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Reflections on Assassin's Creed: Revelations!

Since I moved to Brooklyn, I haven’t had a TV where I live. Which means a lot of games I want to play, games like Mass Effect 3 and Bayonetta and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations have all been side-lined. I thought this would change when I moved, but it hasn’t. It might when I move again, but I’m not sure right now. Right now I’m sort of used to life without a TV, for better or worse.

But I’m not really cool with living without Assassin’s Creed. I love the Assassin’s Creed games with a fervent passion, and the kind of play they deliver has been a tremendous hook for me since I saw that first weird triangle back in 2007. Since then the series has changed a lot, shifting gears to an annual release schedule and offering up some of the most delightfully horrible storytelling in gaming today. I’ve wanted to play Revelations, really wanted to play it, since I heard a name title in the series was coming out. Then I heard some pretty believably poor things about it, and I got a little bit bummed out about it, but knew I’d play it when the time was right.

Then a Steam Sale reared its beautiful head and I picked up a copy of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations for twenty bucks. Score! I was excited to start playing, so excited that I was legitimately upset that my schedule kept me from really sitting down to play for three whole days. I wanted to make this game a big entry in my daily gaming diet, and I wanted to give its into the time it needed to digest in my brain.

Then I started playing the game and, within an hour and a half, stopped. I was disappointed. It was as if the scale of the game had been reduced in every way. The game opens on an island with the single most annoying unseen character from previous Assassin’s Creed games. You don’t know who I mean right away, I’m sure, but you’ll know immediately after you begin Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Then it REALLY opens with a series of corridor missions that serve as a tutorial, a tutorial that it’s difficult to see the facility of, given the effectiveness of previous, considerably less horrible tutorials. This is followed by a period of the game where you are, no shit, dragged on the ground behind a carriage during a high speed carriage chase before being dropped into a river and washed on to a shore some distance away with none of your fancy movement powers, the abilities which usually form the core of Assassin’s Creed games. Acrobatic leaping was replaced with frantic limping. Suddenly I was press ganged into playing a meh action game. The magic was gone and the frustration began. I finished the arbitrary challenges that were presented to me so I could recover my movement powers, then opted to stop playing for two days.

When I came back, I moved on to the next memory with the non-aid of my perennial unhelpful and irritating Animus-mate. I found myself in Istanbul, recently after its conquest by the Ottoman Empire. Yes! I thought. This is the Assassin’s Creed I love. Exploring the city, uncovering unlockables, getting into fun, unexpected antics. Then, I started getting into Den Liberation battles. A little more irritating than I remember them, but whatever, do-able. Then I started getting into Den Defenses, which are essentially a tower defense game no one asked for, which no one in their right mind would ever want to play. It’s as if a mix of the profound balance issues that make up play in Assassin’s Creed, which the raw enjoyability of the play normally eschews, are suddenly laid bare. Some units are totally worthless. Some units are absolutely crucial, and must be employed in a very precise way to complete these challenges. And the game is totally unconcerned with pointing out which one is which to you. Sorry if you were hoping for some sort of guidance, you’re not gonna get it.

These tedious bits might be more forgivable in a larger environment, but there’s something about Istanbul that makes it feel much, much smaller. Perhaps because most of it is unlocked from the get-go, or perhaps it simply IS smaller. I don’t know, but I know that, with less than forty percent of the game completed at this point, I’ve run the length and width of Istanbul on its map and feel pretty well acquainted with it at this point. Unless a massive portion of the city remains to be unlocked, which does not look to be the case from what I can tell, the game is going to mostly take place in this tiny re-creation of Istanbul, one of the more spectacular cities in the world.

It seems that the energy that once went into populating this city with vibrant characters, missions and nooks and crannies to explore has instead gone into building some occasionally spectacular ruins, and some tremendously middling action-oriented scripted sequences. Now, the ruin exploration sequences are fun, don’t get me wrong, and they hit the climbing-puzzle spot that I come to Ubisoft games for more often than not. But the action-oriented scripted sequences are just bad. Bad in all the ways that Assassin’s Creed doesn’t have to be bad. They lack the scope and intensity that the action sequences in Assassin’s Creed 2 had or the freeform chaos that Assassin’s Creed the First left in its action sequences. Instead it’s as if we’re put into a corridor brawler in three dimensions and asked to flip out briefly in a small collection of sets that usually feel hastily designed, when they aren’t re-hashes of areas from previous games.

The Assassin’s Creed that fans know and love is here, but it’s buried under mistakes, mistakes that feel like they’re emerging from Ubisoft’s insistence on making Assassin’s Creed into an annual franchise. I understand why they’re doing it: they’ve got to appear competitive with groups like Activision and EA, who are desperately scrabbling to get out games with words in their titles that will get people to buy them. But here’s the thing: this isn’t necessarily a positive trend. In fact, I’d argue it’s quite negative. When you get into a development cycle that revolves around putting out the same title year after year after year, you often do your games and, by association, your gamers a disservice.

Cliff Blezinski had a great piece of wisdom for game designers, one which they all too often seem to ignore: you always want to stop an activity while participants are still enjoying it. That way they’ll want to come back for more. Letting them sit with that want helps build it up and gives you time to refine your next play experience. It’s an unmitigated positive, one that Revelations ignored. Rather than just letting players sit and enjoy Brotherhood, which made some pretty amazing design choices and managed to keep the Assassin’s Creed series fresh, they’ve essentially generated a game that re-treads the ground that Brotherhood showed us previously while inserting content that feels untested. They’ve added things to their fantastic game that ignores what makes the game great where it doesn’t simply fight it outright. I don’t need a tutorial to show me how to slide down a hill, nor does the experience of sliding down a hill feel particularly rich or enjoyable to me.

Has Assassin’s Creed: Revelations made me unsure of Assassin’s Creed 3? Sort of. If this is the direction they’re taking the series, it might be moving into a place that I’m not interested in. But I’d be lying if I wasn’t going to buy Assassin’s Creed 3. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the core play of Revelations: the running, jumping and acrobatic fighting is all fantastic. And goofing off with over-the-top historical figures is great fun too. But it’s not hard to look at the looming feature creep of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and see within it an ugly beast that threatens to slow down or possibly even overwhelm that core gameplay. It’s also hard not to look at the number of scripted sequences and get really, really frustrated. Holy shit, dudes. Your first game was a genius mix of light scripting and free-form play. Every game since then has taken a step back from this concept, and it’s been your sole detractor. Don’t fall into the pit of trying to make everything more cinematic. Just let it happen.