Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Early Access Adventures!

I've played a number of in-development or early access games in my day.  Most of the time I spent with MWO was during its long beta phase, which was something of a honeymoon for its community.  Dawngate, which I still think was the best MOBA that has been developed and presented to date, never left its tentative Early Access state.  My explorations into Wasteland 2 occurred in a framework entirely unrecognizeable to players investigating the game today.  But all of these games, in their own right, presented end-states that I could reach, end-states that effectively let me say "Okay, game.  I'm done.  We're done.  Task completed."

That kind of objective oriented play-construct is crucial to the structure of video games.  Jane McGonigal defines games partially through the generative inclusion of that construct into a number of different frameworks: it isn't so much the "play" element that makes a game a game, so much as it's the "outcome," the notion that one is being given a goal and asked to complete it.  Even the most open-ended games present these objectives in some form: they tell you to go somewhere, they tell you to do something, or speak to someone.  Free-form procedurally generated adventure-rogues, like Don't Starve, even present end-conditions, though those end-conditions might be buried six or seven layers deep.  I guess what I'm saying is: I've never actually played through an early access title without its end-game in place.  Whatever E-A titles I've engaged with, I've always been able to recognizeably interact with it as a "game" construct, with an "a-HA!" moment, serialized victory movement, and a cute little end button.

Until I played Darkest Dungeon.

Darkest Dungeon has a remarkable capacity for helping me develop narrative.  It's kind of amazing at it, actually: I'm interacting with characters in a framework that makes me feel profoundly connected to them, a framework that pushes them into conflict and forces them beyond that conflict, changing them procedurally in a way that usually, as a "player," I'd have license to determine.  Losing that license makes play liberating, and makes the narrative outcome genuinely satisfying: instead of permitting me to move through a series of generative choices that I can engage with as "successful" outcomes, or satisfying renderings of scenarios I understood as implicit narrative emergences following engagement in certain activities, it lets me inhabit the headspace of characters, and engage with that most elusive of narrative elements in video games: genuine surprise.

That's quite an accomplishment, but there's a problem with Darkest Dungeon's execution: there's no end to this story in sight.

That's not to say that Darkest Dungeon doesn't have goals for me.  There's a long list of shit that my caretaker wants me to do, all of it oriented around murdering various levels of boss monster in the dungeon.  And then there are my "roster goals."  I'm being encouraged to forge my rag-tag band into a dungeon-delving dream team by leveling up one of each class to a somewhat ridiculous extent.  I can also upgrade my town, so that I can more efficiently train new party members, heal old ones, and purchase trinkets that, ostensibly, are aimed at keeping them all alive.

But most of these goals are behind me.  I've logged a considerably amount of time (around 40 hours now) and, along the way, I've crafted my once terrified team into a well-rounded group of badasses.  They're all kitted out in top of the line gear and the best training I can afford.  Sometimes, I even get them special charms so they can do things like dodge blows a little better, or hit a little harder, or starve without taking damage.  I haven't maxed out all of my peons yet, but a good number of them are close, and the ones that are far-off seem to be the only ones at risk of death anymore: I can push my crusaders through any number of battles, and my hellions and vestals are utility players who can rotate in and out of dangerous missions without batting an eyelash.  I've assembled a stable of rear-line fighters who, at will, can step in to fill the "damage dealing/trap disarming wild-card" role that I find myself constantly flexing to fill.  But only the greenest recruits, recruits who aren't terribly well-suited to delving in the first place, seem to end up on the wrong end of a blade, and without new exploration or repair related goals to take on, my path, as a player, seems to be settling into a kind of lamentable "push, push, lose, regenerate" pattern, where I'm no longer pursuing goals that push me towards any sort of narrative.  Instead, I'm just spinning my wheels, waiting for the right Jester to stumble into my camp so I can level him up to the point that he can go on adventures with one of my unbeatable, dungeon-cracking A-teams.

It's obvious this isn't the developer's intent: Darkest Dungeon is still missing two areas, seemingly based around the oft-unseen Eldritch enemy type, which I'm guessing is still in internal testing.  And hey, I'm willing to forgive them the fact that this is an incomplete game.  I knew that going in.  I'm not upset by Darkest Dungeon's non-ending at all, but it puts me in a strange new position, one that a game has never actually forced me into before.  On the one hand, I love this game, and I've developed a serious connection to my team.  Even Aungier, that daft cunt, has proven herself again and again, and I'd hold off on a dozen killing blows for the chance to insure her survival.  Darkest Dungeons has made me, someone who thrives on improvised risk taking, to play it safe more often than not.  But, without a concrete end-goal,  I'm not sure I'll be able to keep playing.  At least, not for now: Darkest Dungeons has been tremendously fun, but absent new dungeons to conquer, the potential for new narratives feels stymied, and the challenges I've met, which were once the source of taught excitement, have become a kind of pabulum chore for me.  I know that a properly assembled team will be able to beat any challenge I throw them at.  I know that, if I want to level up a newbie, I have to put them through some pretty desperate starting two-steps so that they can get their dungeon legs quick.  I've learned most of the lessons that Darkest Dungeon wants to teach me, and I think, based on what I've seen so far, that I'm actually quite well prepared for the end-game that Red Hook is still cooking.  But if I keep grinding my gears the way I have to date, immersing myself in the lives of these dungeoneering misfits, I know that by the time the end-game content that I'm longing for is delivered, I'll be long sick of playing.

That's a new sensation, one I'm not entirely comfortable with.  I usually play games consumptively nowadays: I start a project, I complete a project, I move on.  It's especially handy with the kind of narrative checklist games that Ubisoft produces, and with brief narrative oriented indie titles, like Gone Home.  But Darkest Dungeon has forced me into a corner: I can ruin the game for myself, or give the developers time to finish what they started, and come back to it later.  Maybe I'll start a new party up for the occasion.  Maybe finish with the people I've already got on my side.  Maybe I'll yet run in to some unexpected challenges and end up having to recruit a new crew.  Who knows.  For now, I'll be waiting patiently, occasionally checking Darkest Dungeon's store page to see if updates have come down the pipe.  I can't wait to see what the Cove holds, and that final dungeon...

Perhaps this is a statement, then, about the success of Darkest Dungeon as a game, and the sometimes ungainly clomping gait that Early Access titles bring to bear.  When the content that I'm engaging with its partially completed, but the "game" element is self-contained, like in Dawngate or Wasteland 2, it doesn't really impact me much.  I can always come back if I want to experience more polished or developed content, or just hang around and watch it grow play-by-play.  But here, the Early Access heading has manifested itself as a sort of poor-man's episodic content.  I'm left waiting for new adventures, without a time-table or a strong sense of what they'll be, or how they'll unlock.  I've got all these toys, and I can spin my wheels ad-infini as needed, but I can't move forward, no matter how hard I push.  Even the dopest Walking Dead cliffhanger wasn't that cruel.

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Delving Into Narrative in Darkest Dungeons!

At first, Aungier didn't really stand out to me.  As a class, Grave Robber lacks the sexy propensity for reliable damage outputs that other back line fighters have, so even though she arrived during my second week at the manor she's spent most of her career since cooling her heels, occasionally stepping in when a party needed a second back-ranks damage dealer and no one else was available, or a Priest (misspelled as Vespel for some reason) was better off in the three-spot in party order because of her particular ability mix, instead of the four-spot, where Aungier excels.

It wasn't until she made a quick hop into the Warrens with a collection of other reserve adventurers, and Bohun, a reliable second choice healer who I thought might be well suited to keeping my band of haphazardly selected misfits alive while they limp-stepped through short dungeons to rank up, that I realized just how good she was at her job.  Aungier quietly hurled knives from the back ranks, danced forward for an opportune killing blow when she needed to and, above all else, kept her cool.  And for her efforts she was promoted before any of her partymates: not because of some flashy, last ditch maneuver that saved the day, or because I favored her heavily, but because she quietly did her job in the back ranks, using her knives to make sure that packs of spiders were weak enough to be killed by follow-up blows once they came into range of front line combatants.

That's also, in a real sense, why she's survived so far.  Other adventurers, adventurers I favored more heavily and threw into combat with more reckless abandon, adventurers I cared about more and thought were better at their jobs, like Tupperbell, Reynauld, Hall, and Paixdecouer, are dead now.  As my A team, I threw them at challenges well before I should have, challenges I didn't fully comprehend, challenges I should've walked away from.  Because of my attention, because of my belief in their competence and desire to see them succeed, they're dead now.  Aungier survives them because she escaped my attention until recently.  I often found myself forgetting who Aungier was when I was putting together critical or dire missions, missions where we lost people (like the great battle with the Wizened Hag and her cookpot, or that harrowing first Long Dungeon exploration).  And so she survived, and has now risen to prominence as one of a handful of adventurers cleared to go on Medium difficulty missions.

Now that she's drawn my attention, I've also got a better sense of just how much character Aungier developed while I wasn't watching.  See, she's one of the best Warren delvers around, adept at scouting that kind of terrain and dealing with the sort of denizens one is likely to find in a Warren, but therein lies the rub: Aungier actually hates being in Warrens.  They stress her out.  So every time I bring her skill set to bear, I'm forcing her to do a job she's good at, in a way that most people in my roster aren't, a job that she also hates.  She has, without me inserting one whit of narrative into her existence without the prompting of the game itself, become a portrait of long-suffering competence who has finally achieved a modicum of success, and is now finds herself in a dangerous position: she's cleared for more hazardous missions as part of a smaller, more elite team of soldiers within my growing army.  How will her story take shape from here?  Will Aungier continue to thrive with her quiet, workmanlike effiency?  Or will her competence become her undoing? 

This is the narrative pull of Darkest Dungeon.  It's not the sort of game that allows you to craft a narrative, the way that Dragon Age: Inquisition or Left4Dead might, with their responsive systems that permit you to make decisions within their limited frames that establish one of a set of known outcomes.  Darkest Dungeons is a set of total unknowns.  The dungeons themselves are just a backdrop, a setting for characters to develop.  The reality of the story taking shape in those dungeons is so much more profound.  That character who snaps and has a paranoid break in the middle of a crucial battle in the Weald might one day redeem himself.  After spending a night drinking heavily, trying to shake the feeling that everyone's watching him, he'll wake up with a nasty hangover.  Then I'll send him on a quick mission with some second-stringers, people I'm less attached to, while my primary party rests up for a more intense mission.  On that sortie that paranoid alcoholic, who once sat in a corner cutting himself instead of fighting with his party, will redeem himself by striking down that psychotic pig-man while one of his teammates teeters on death's door.  After that, he'll emerge from his adventure with a quality.  It could be something positive, like a propensity for dealing with stress, or ire for a particular kind of foe.  Or it could be something a little less positive, like a fascination with corpses, or a refusal to pray in light of the terrible things he's seen.  He'll grow, in part because of choices I make, but also because of how things beyond my control unfold, in and out of the dungeons.

Unlike other Rogue-a-likes, with their unforgiving and sudden swishes of fortune, Darkest Dungeon builds slow.  In Steam Marines, the other Rogue I've been spending too much time on, if I make a single misstep, my party is wiped.  Technicality-no-down-boo-over, wiped in a few turns by a handful of regular enemies I see in every fight on every floor.  If I accidentally turn the wrong way, or misread the terrain, or don't check ammo before I set up guard positions, or just run into something unexpected around a corner without enough action points to flee, it's game over in a few seconds.  The game wears this unforgiving nature on its sleeve, randomizing the names of its marines into ridiculous caricatures.  "Freeze" and "Point" aren't names you can get attached to.  Even "Mac" is barely serviceable.  Steam Marines is going to kill your party from the get-go, and it wants you to know it.  It wants you to get on board for the death-parade.  Its over-the-top dumb naming conventions, its achievements, aimed at letting you tick a new box each time you die in a new area.   When you play Steam Marines, there's no reason to get attached.

But in Darkest Dungeon, you're slowly growing with your stable of adventurers.  You're watching them learn, watching them grow and develop, succeed and fail.  When they die, sometimes it's because you just made one mistake, or there was a spat of bad luck.  Sometimes, it's because you overextended them, or because someone had a morale-break, which cascaded the rest of the party into oblivion, but whatever the cause of your wipe is, you're going to care.  Most adventurers start out as nothing.  You build them up by sending them out on adventures, equipping them with gear and training them in new and interesting skills as they go.  These aren't disposable tools that you break, then replace.  These are assets that you have to invest yourself in in order to build them up. 

And therein lies the rub.  There's some chatter from Rogue fans who find Darkest Dungeon too easy.  It is, in many ways, much more forgiving than other Rogues.  In Dungeons of Dredmore or Rogue Legacy, if my hero dies, whatever.  I get a cute little sentence about it, and they appear in a log of dead heroes, and I randomly generate a new hero to take on the world with.  That's a by-product of the unforgiving nature of Rogue-a-likes as a game type: there's no reason to get attached, since your character is almost certainly going to die, and you're just going to iterate on their story in an hour or two by making a new one.  Darkest Dungeon eschews this punishing cycle of violence, instead opting to ask players to slowly build up connections to their adventurers, sending them out on missions and, in the end, forcing them to sometimes overextend, or field inexperienced parties to complete particularly challenging missions.

So there are fewer character deaths overall, but when those deaths happen it's all the more meaningful.  When you lose that A-list party because you went up against a boss unprepared and exhausted, you're going to feel it a lot more than when you lost that awesome Ninja a few steps into a boss-fight in your fifth or sixth attempt to kill some giant, screaming, flaming skull.  And each death also becomes a learning experience.  I lost a character during the tutorial.  A highwayman ended up in the front line, taking hits instead of a crusader and, sure enough, he died.  Hard.  But that highwayman, whose name is lost (to me, not the game - Darkest Dungeon memorializes that shit to an impressive degree) taught me an important lesson about positioning party members, and the difference between front-line and back-line fighters.  If I'd kept him on the back line, he might still be with me today.  If I'd known to keep some healing items around so I could get up to full-health before boss-fights whenever possible, or if I'd been better at scouting, or if I'd controlled the skeletons that that necromancer threw at me a little better, my adventurers would be alive now.  And that's the power of Darkest Dungeon: it provides me with "never again" moment after "never again" moment, iterating on that tradition until I find myself here, with Aungier, learning an important lesson about keeping strong, reliable adventurers in the wings to fill out my party.  You never know when they might come in handy, after all.  And you never know who might break.  But we'll talk more on that later.

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Appropriation and Brilliance in Shadows of Mordor!

As the bars of "Under Pressure" fade, one of my students raises his hand.

"Did she get sued?"

I shake my head.

"Who?"

"Queen.  Whoever she is.  Did she get sued by Vanilla Ice?"

I shake my head before I launch into a quick lecture on who came first, who won the lawsuit, and how plagiarism is both a toxic force in art, and an important thing to avoid in general.  Then I have my students listen to The Beatles "Helter Skelter," Jay Z's original "99 Problems" from The Black Album, and Dangermouse's superlative Grey Album rendition of the same track, which combines the two into original work.

"Borrowing from great work to create something original, something wonderfully fresh and new that propels the genre entire forward, is okay, even if your acquisition of previously acquired materials is brazen or heavy handed.  As long as you're honest about it," I explain.  Half of my students nod in approval.  The others look bored.  We're no longer listening to hip-hop.  The fun part of the lesson has ended.  It's a lesson I've taught dozens of times since I started teaching composition, one that contemporary writers and artists often lose sight of.  Between high profile cases of direct plagiarism, like Little Brown's decision to publish a spy novel heavily plagiarized a bevy of spy novels, and reiterations or direct copies of video games populating crowded marketplaces, especially as microtransaction mobile games iterate on the Bewjeled/Puzzle Quest frame to an absurd extent, it's apparent that plagiarism is alive and well.

But influence and acquisition remains a crucial part of any serious creative process.  Little occurs in a vacuum; even digressive or discursive work has to form consciously in opposition to the acquisition of external texts, allowing them to influence the work by merit of avoidance or omission.  All art is built on the shoulders of what came before, and progressive or revolutionary work doesn't do something completely new so much as it plays on what came before in a way that allows us to see both work and genre in a new light.

It's an odd coincidence that I started playing Shadows of Mordor the same week that my plagiarism lecture fell on, but it's super appropriate.  Shadows of Mordor cribs heavily from a bunch of games I like, stealing elements of its combat system from Rocksteady's Batman games, open world climbing and stealth assassination from Assassin's Creed, non-linear plot development through world-map missions from later Grand Theft Auto entries, and its story from Tolkein's Middle Earth worldscape, naturally enough.  There's very little new in Shadows of Mordor on its face.  It's mostly cobbled together from bits and pieces of other video games.  Granted, they're all excellent games, games I love playing, and it has original characters, though those characters meet some less-original characters along the way, and strongly resemble original characters other people have come up with an explored previously in other video games, books, and films, contained within the universe of Middle Earth and beyond, but there's really nothing new here.

And yet, as I move through the lush jungle and mud pits of Mordor, I'm struck by how fresh, how raw and pulsing, Shadows of Mordor feels to me.  It's a perfect example of how you can take an array of concepts, not a one of which is original in and of itself, and assemble those recycled ideas in a way that is simultaneously derivative and original, combining known elements into an unknown whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

I think part of this is owed to where Shadows of Mordor puts its focus.  Where Rocksteady's Batman games are obsessed with a strange hybrid set of boxes where combat occurs, but always feels somewhat restrainted (Batman doesn't kill after all), Monolith's Shadows of Mordor revels in its cartoonishly violent combat.  Where Batman viscerally maims and incapacitates his foes, Talion rips through them.  Instead of leaving them, limping around a campfire, writhing in pain, he flashes in and out of combat, sword blazing, fucking shit up.  Batman's combos were satisfying.  They let me knock goons down so I could try my hand at puzzles, or check areas for collectibles.  Shadows of Mordor's combos let me disembowel orcs en-masse, in a dizzying array of gore that my Lord of the Rings-film loving teenage self would've freaked out over.  The borrowed systems at work in SoM actually feel more at home there than they do in their original titles.

Well, some of the time.  The climbing bits feel less like puzzles and more like shifty guessing games, as if the soul was sucked out of the Assassin's Creed-y bits.  But it's difficult to begrudge Monolith that: climbing is presented as just another movement mechanic, another way to navigate the open world which, while we're on it, feels kind of small.  I understand that the maps are split up, and that they're meant to be navigated back and forth, again and again, in service of mini-missions and achievement challenges, but at about thirty hours in, I already feel like I know this world almost too well.  Where GTA 4 had a density to it that always kept me guessing what would come next, and Assassin's Creed's cities presented sprawling landscapes that I don't think I could fully explore even if I wanted to, by the time I left the first area, I felt like it had begun to wear out its welcome, even with the sudden influx of graug that came with the unlock of a fresh area to explore. 

It's not that the landscapes aren't pretty; they are.  It's just that the Tolkein-esque personality that the landscape ably represents somehow just feels pabulum or generic.  That's less a failing of Shadows of Mordor, in a sense, and more a mark of just how remarkably successful Tolkein's work has been over the years: his setting was revolutionary, and has been copied and modified in tiny ways, saturating our culture so much so that when it's represented with loving accuracy, it feels like it's been done before, even though it's the progenitor of nearly all modern fantasy settings.

And, to be fair, there is one new thing at the heart of Shadows of Mordor: the nemesis system.  By adding a dynamic political layer to the game, and orienting some player progress around that system, Shadows of Mordor does manage to provide quite a bit of personality.  It's iteratively generated personality, personality that randomly emerges in the game in ways that are equal parts eye-rollingly bad and delightful, but it is a definite hook.  And as I move deeper into the game, I find myself becoming more invested in that system.  Getting to know my orc-foes one by one, then pitting them against one another, or butchering them all wholesale is more compelling to me than the game itself.  I've already got a sense that Celerybramble, or whatever his name, is probably going to Palpatine me, and that Gollum is going to Gollum, and that weird-blonde-warrior-lady is going to be some kind of quasi-romantic interest, so there's little to drive me forward in the main quest lines, spare a desire to get new toys to use against my orc frenemies. 

And if those toys resemble things I've seen in other games that I loved too?  Well, I won't mind.

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Simultaneous Success and Failure of Black Flag's Streamlined Systems!

After nearly a year of pussyfooting around, I finally finished Assassin's Creed: Black Flag on my last week of "vacation."  It was time consuming, but not because it was especially difficult.  Assassin's Creed: Black Flag is easily the most accommodating of the Assassin's Creed titles I've played to date, a far cry from the first Assassin's Creed rhythm-puzzle style of play, which required fluidly moving in and out of combat, and punished minor mistakes with swift and merciless desynchronization.  No, Assassin's Creed: Black Flag's accommodating nature was actually the aspect of it that gang-pressed me into doing something I almost never do with a game: tracking down every collectible to get a 100% completion rating.

Don't get me wrong, my OCD is often tapped by games and wrung into a kind of strange aberrant productivity that propels me to try the same stupid task over and over again in the hopes of unlocking some kind of meaningless achievement or bonus item I don't need.  But usually there's a ceiling to it: the shitty "shoot around a wall" puzzle in Wolfenstein that I have to solve to find that gold, requiring an hour of trial and error, is going to lose me.  I just don't care about gold that much, the puzzle structure is too obtuse, and I want to hear the next hilariously bad piece of dialogue coming down the pipe in the main story.  I'm going to have to solve dozens of other poorly designed puzzles while I play as well if I want to get that sweet, sweet 100% feather in my hat, which means fewer jokes-about-sex-with-a-Polish-woman per hour, and more controller-snapping frustration infiltrating my good-enough shooting.  Fuck that!

Black Flag curtails this boredom by making all of its achievements more or less achievable, out of the box.  Some of them take more work than others - one in particular, requiring me to kill two people who only stand together very briefly at the start of their patrol pattern at the same time, required the interdiction of a guide - but for the most part, they're all laid bare.  Collectibles are highlighted on the map.  What's more, "Accomplishments," which were gated in previous Assassin's Creed games, are also highlighted from the get-go.  Not only can I see where I need to go to get all the sweet, sweet collectibles out of the box, I can see what I need to do to unlock cheats, costumes, and other stuff I know I'll never use.  The end result is a kind of amplification of my instinct to chase shiny things in video games, a propulsion towards readily accessible achievements: if I can see an end goal in sight, I can tackle it, and I'm a lot less likely to be discouraged if I have to beat my head against a wall to do so (and I did, quite a few times).

There's also a great deal to be said for how well-designed Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed titles have become.  Black Flag is a remarkably well crafted game, and the puzzles reflect how the intuitive controls that have been in place since the first title in the series have finally been matched with level design that actually permits players to apply the same intuitive principles to navigation that they already apply to movement.  If I see a challenge on my Objectives readout, or a collectible hanging in mid-air, I can usually see a path to it in my environment, or get a sense of how a path will emerge if I keep moving around.  That's a far cry from the first Assassin's Creed's wacky "flag system," which required me to explore areas I'd never explore and do things I'd never do, or even consider doing, to find items I didn't really need.  Black Flag marks a laudable movement away from the hard-core notion that exploration is its own reward: it codifies it to draw players into new places, and then lets players to take in the scenery if they like.

And holy shit, the scenery!  I actually spent a half-hour one night sitting on top of an ancient Mayan ruin, staring out into the ocean.  There was nothing to be gained by doing so, no achievement on the docket, though I had been drawn to the area by a collectible marker on the map.  It was just a beautiful sight, and it gave me a chance to reflect on just how amazing the world that's been crafted around me in this game could really be.  That's the real power of Black Flag: it's not that it can compel me to collect random bits of light, it's that it can compel me to collect random bits of light while making me feel like I'm being rewarded just for navigating the environment.  To someone who grew up playing Everquest on a broken 3D-add-on video-card that interpreted the entire landscape of the game as white polygons flushed in pink shadows, the fact that a developer has created an environment I take in with the same intensity I apply to a painting is insane.

But it is a painting, in many ways.  Artists worked hard to design those areas, and make them into beautiful, functional works.  The effort is hardly new, it's just that the quality of the finished product has improved so dramatically and completely that here, at long last, is an environment where I can sit and take in not just an image or a character or an object, but a world.  The medium of games has always aimed at accomplishing this, it's just been striving against invisible barriers along the way.  Black Flag surmounts them without apparently trying to do so - in aspiring to craft an immersive landscape, they so fully succeed that I can immerse myself and simply inhabit a space if I choose to do so.  At one point, I found myself sailing a great distance without using travel mode, taking in the sounds of the sea, tacking against an oncoming wind, the same way I would in a real sailboat.  The end result wasn't tedious or awkward.  It was wonderful.  It reminded me of sailing with my dad, and it actually made me understand the process of tacking against the wind more fully.  Inhabiting this virtual world, full of cute little shortcuts, and avoiding those shortcuts, made me understand something sailors have been doing as long as they've been sailing.  I could do this, mind you, but I didn't have to.  If I wanted to, I could just move the ball forward by disabling things like "wind impacting sea travel," or I could just open up a map and press X over the map icon I want to travel to.

And therein lies the rub: Black Flag arguably streamlines itself too well.  Most of the story missions are easy, particularly if you ignore the optional objective requirements.  You can breeze through some of them in five or ten minutes, which makes the story often feel less like a narrative frame, and more like a kind of checklist: killed this guy, killing this guy, will kill this guy.  Occasionally the pace slows down, but it happens in fits and starts: some missions will pass in swift, violent fugue, others will drag on with conversation set against beautifully realized landscapes.  The very ease that made me seek out every last chunk of collectible love in the game feels off, somehow, when translated into narrative structure.  I find myself missing the kind of drawn-out carriage chases and pope-fights of Assassin's Creed 2's definitive revision on the series.  Instead of taught chases through ancient ruins, I'm permitted to circumspectly stroll around the outskirts of them until, poof, stab in the neck, cutscene, memory-reset.

I think I might be alone in lamenting this change.  Assassin's Creed has always been an ambitious series with some remarkable heft behind its gameplay and environment design, but the first game consisted of missions that involved long periods of buildup that most players found unpleasant.  I say most players, because I never felt that way: to me, they were raw catharsis, the opening movements of a dance I learned in my youth that I stumblingly perform without thinking, again and again.  Every entry in the series has dedicated itself towards balancing these disparate elements: AC2 made the story missions more character driven, and broke up the pattern that the first Assassin's Creed's limited mission types imposed on play.  AC3 made the landscapes and models of play more diverse by making dedicated play in fully realized non-urban environments a staple of the series, instead of a break from play-as-usual, and made its story missions into more scripted, individuated sequences.  Black Flag is a step back from that script-heavy production, in one sense, but in moving away from those longer, more directive mission archetypes, it's generated a framework that allows it to streamline things that are, I think, sometimes best left drawn out: character development, narrative development, and dialogue all exist partially divorced from play in Black Flag, occurring largely in cutscenes, or in long sequences of naval travel.  That is not to say that I especially liked following people down the streets of Venice while carrying a box, but I did enjoy bantering with a slaver as I chased him across the rooftops of Jerusalem, uncovering the complexities of the plot he was a part of through his taunts.  I miss the space for that sort of banter to occur, and that's exactly what Black Flag, with its superlative streamlining, the same superlative streamlining that permitted me to dig through every inch of the game world, has eliminated.

I'd lament the loss further, but I can't bring myself to linger.  There's just too much other amazing shit happening in Black Flag.  And then there's Unity, floating on the horizon of my backlog, inching closer with each tack.