Sunday, August 3, 2014

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Buried Treasure of Assassin's Creed 4!



While I've been gearing up to sink deeper into AC4 I've found myself distracted from every conceivable vector: wrapping up teaching a summer course, trying to become a better Dawngate player, farming experience and C-Bills to ease my transition into piloting Kitfoxes in MWO, and restarting work on my massive manuscript now that my health is stable.  But these distractions aren't the real issue keeping me from moving ahead in Assassin's Creed 4's story; they pale in comparison to the real culprit, the infectious, all consuming, ever stimulating naval combat that saturates the bulk of AC4's gameplay.

From its humble origins as design-afterthought in Assassin's Creed 3, in AC4 naval combat blossomed into a fully fledged game all its own, a sort of marvelously distilled and revamped engine for realizing something that was at best clumsily grasped at before.  Where Assassin's Creed 3 made fumbling gestures at a ship to ship combat and promises that it simply could not fulfill with the tools at its disposal, AC4 has done the unthinkable and turned those crude systems into something greater than the sum of their parts, a kind of game within a game that arguably surpasses the game itself, a game within a game that evokes fond memories of older, sharper games that sucked my time away more effectively than most modern titles I encounter today.

See, AC4's naval infragame is actually quite a bit like the classic Pirates! Gold.  Not completely like it: you've really only got one ship, even though you're building a fleet in the background and, as such, never have to make challenging decisions about which ship you want to fight whom with.  The ship boarding combat is much more sprawling and developed, which makes sense considering the game AC4's naval infragame exists inside of.  And the third person camera that dictates the flow of the action is a big shift away from Pirates! Gold's elemental top down combat and exploration engine.  The packaging, come to think of it, is completely different in nearly every way.  Only the setting parallels directly to Pirates!, and even that's a bit of weak tea - Pirates! Gold was all about building up a personal legend through pillage and conquest.  AC4 is about propelling yourself along a naval storyline parallel to the game's central plot. 

It's difficult to articulate just how AC4 simulates the experience of Pirates! Gold in a new format.  The best way of describing it is to invoke the Machine Spirits of Warhmmer 40K: there's an invisible heart beating deep inside of AC4's naval infragame, and that beating heart, that spirit, is the same that pulsed within Pirates! Gold.  These games are both about equal parts aimless freeform exploration and intense directed combat.  The hunter and the lazy cat sitting side by side in one headspace, striving towards some invisible goal, constructed largely outside of the framework of the game itself.  This is what made Pirates! Gold great: the game itself was less a series of objectives and more a framework to hang elements off of.  It had goals you could pursue, sure, but these goals were all so optional as to make them non-entities within the game itself.  Finding the Treasure Fleet or the Silver Train was fun, but it wasn't a must-do, though you could dedicate your entire session to trying to track down those events and dismantling the galleons that guarded them.

AC4's naval infragame exists in this same middle space, where it feels less like a segment of a larger game and more like an engine for marvelous distraction.  Where before AC3 made naval engagements a means of acquiring doo-dads and bonuses, AC4 has built a potent delivery system for micronarratives that the player can create, tiny stories flowing from single engagements, from fluid exploration and dozens of victories and defeats played out against the backdrop of a grander narrative superstructure.  That this narrative superstructure is occurring in a sort of disjointed time frame amplifies the queering "inactive" sensation that spending time at sea in AC4 presents.  I could, and do, spend hours of playing AC4, moderately high, sailing from place to place, spyglass to my eye, picking out ripe targets for harvest.

And all of this is occurring early in the "timeline" of the game, with only a handful of the absolutely fucking necessary upgrades unlocked.  There are still ships and combat situations that I straight up cannot cope with, heavy duty convoys guarding massive prizes, fortresses with nasty patrols that leap on me the moment I approach and chase me down before I can take them out.  But far from being frustrating, these challenges hint at the depths as of yet unplumbed by my already excessive naval exploration.  I'm looking at this space and finding more and more to dive into, more and more to explore.  From whaling to treasure hunting to privateering, to say "it's all good" is to make the most profound of understatements: it's sublime.  Pirating is fucking balls to the wall, and what's more, it makes everything around it better.  The island exploration, instead of being a chore I go through to get a marker on a progress bar towards completion, is a kind of breather from the intense naval cat and mouse game that I immerse myself in.  The plantations I run through and raid furtively aren't just combat engagements: they're resource hubs for ship upgrades to come.

The naval sub-game of AC4 is everything I wanted in a modern Pirates! Gold game, and then some.  Pirates! Gold was good, but it had some issues with transparency and a weird romance subsystem that I could never actually figure out.  AC4 has made ship-to-ship combat more nuanced and layered, given me more toys to play with, and made fighting on the deck of a ship more than just a tug of war game with numbers attached.  AC4 made it into a fun, frenetic fuckfest filled with gunsmoke and brutal, acrobatic kills.  No wonder I find myself floundering in its tendrils each time I leave port in AC4.  No wonder I'm not even a little bit curious about exploring Abstergo's offices for hints about whatever sinister plot is going on in the background.  It's all just a distraction from my true love, the open ocean.  Assassin's Creed 4 delivered on so many fronts, but it still found space to surprise me by delivering on a promise it never made: to capture the essence of one of my favorite games of all time and elevate to a level I never dared to hope it could reach in this modern era of noise over signal, of style over substances, of Gold before Pirates.

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