Sunday, September 28, 2014

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: There's Something About Assassin's Creed IV!



Amidst the torrent of new titles cluttering my Steam list and my rare free moments of thought, I've started playing Assassin's Creed IV again.  I put it down months ago in favor of endlessly repetitive Mechwarrior drops and the odd daily quest to work towards working towards the next loot drop in Neverwinter, suddenly bereft of the free time I'd once had to aimlessly sail about, pausing on to pillage whatever local establishments were available at the moment.  Now that I've come back, the pattern of things came almost too easily to me.  The natural, flowing control of AC4, paired with its well arrayed host of grind-y subplots, made slipping back into its contours easy.  I've been doing all the things I put off, things I felt took me out of the game proper for too much time.  I've been digging up treasures and capturing forts, only starting up the storyline again when I run out of space to explore.  Now only a handful of areas of ocean are covered by the forts still out of my control, and my treasure maps have gone from an overwhelming heap to a paltry handful, linked to areas that are either inaccessible, or simply don't exist in the game yet.

That's great, because I've obsessive compulsive and the more loose ends I see in a game, the more I want to tug at them until I see the whole thing come undone, but it's not why I'm writing about AC4.

See, AC4 came back into my life alongside a bunch of single player games and some action heavy summer movies.  It came back into my life at a time when I was exposed to a nigh appalling count of action sequences, occasionally sublime, far more often baffling in their composition and construction.  As I watched those action sequences, I realized something: Assassin's Creed 4 is actually better at composing action sequences than action movie producers, and it does it all procedurally.

I'm being a little hyperbolic, sure.  Assassin's Creed IV is just as often clumsy and infuriating as it is sublime, but those sublime moments, through their very presence, are a sort of victory for games as an art form.  There's been a long standing quest to make games more cinematic, something developers all too often try to do by removing player control for the sake of injecting "cool" stuff into the course of play.  You'll lose control of the solider you're controlling so you can witness a particularly grand explosion.  The RTS will cut away to a quick cinematic interval so that I can understand how cool these characters can be when they're not just repeating a single attack again and again.

The sensibility behind making games more like action movies has always been that the player is the problem; that is to say that player input of any kind will ruin the cinematic genius that the developers had in mind.  It's an old mindset, one that developed in an era where players really couldn't do anything but watch story unfold, but in an era of in-engine cutscenes, it feels a bit silly to still be cutting away from the sake of exposition.  Half-Life 2 took that sort of business entirely in house, making it all the more appalling that purportedly cinematic games only decide to live up to their lofty claims when I'm not around to ruin everything.

Assassin's Creed IV certainly doesn't ditch the cinematic cutscene as a means of exposition.  In fact, it relies heavily on them still, a strange occurrence considering the first Assassin's Creed's approach to storytelling.  And even then, the cutscenes aren't actually that cinematic.  There are more bombastic, and more interactive games out there; AC4 couldn't shake a fist at anything Telltale has put together on those fronts.  No, I'm not extolling AC4's capacity for cinematics.

I'm extolling its ability to portray its own action.

See, when AC4 is firing on all cylinders, it's something to behold.  Suddenly the awkward, stuttering momentum of the game is gone, replaced by a fluid, gorgeous stream of purposeful movement from kill to obstacle to kill.  The way AC4 unfolds makes me feel the way those cinema-grade action sequences are meant to: like I'm a part of some sublimely violent ballet, like I'm both witness to and participant in an event that is, in a phrase, objectively cool.  AC4 better renders those moments than any game I've ever played, contextually generating responses with a variety and tactility that most games can't dream of mustering.  It's one thing to see an enemy flail realistically.  It's quite another to watch the game render double assassinations or context specific combat moves in response to my inputs and the game's capacity to puzzle them out.

The end result is something empowering and spectacular, in the most literal senses of both words.  It makes you feel godlike, and distracts you with its raw, abiding coolness.  It mitigates the layer through which I control Kenway, so much so that I find myself slipping into the flow of play and, for a few seconds, controlling his movements unselfconsciously.  As someone who plays a shitload of games, this is far too uncommon.  Most of the time I find myself playing a particular game, I find myself overwhelmingly aware of the input system I'm engaging in.  After all, my mastery of it will determine how well I can perform in the feedback/reward environment of the game's structure.  Encouraging me to ignore that relationship is akin to asking me to stop thinking about elephants; it should be an impossible task.  And yet, Assassin's Creed IV has done it, which is probably for the best, considering how sloppy its controls are and how clumsy its action can be when it isn't being sublime.  If it were any less adept at making my flailing motion into something watch-able, any less fantastic at making those actions simultaneously seem action-movie-esque and like a direct result of my influence as a player, AC4 would be conspicuous in every way.  But when it fires on all cylinders, I find myself forgetting, not that I'm in a game, but that the inputs I enter into that game come through the mitigating structure of a controller.  In those moments, I'm thinking in the language of the machine.  The controller might as well just be a part of my hand.

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