Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Eggregious Storytelling Errors of Assassin's Creed 2!

After conquering Bioshock 2 I decided to take a break and go back and finish some of the many games Bioshock 2 had left ruined in its wake, foremost among them Assassin’s Creed 2. Assassin’s Creed 2 was fun, no question, but compared to Bioshock 2 it was just...lacking somehow. Bioshock 2 had tunnels and stories and little girls and Assassin’s Creed 2 had a largely incoherent cast of characters who never really developed and plot twists and freerunning and a story that made me lament the mentality governing the writing and design of games today.

Hence the essay.

Just to start off, as frequent readers know, I don’t think there’s anything endemically wrong with the ability of games to tell a story. Just to prove it, and be constructive, I want to go over how a few of the more successful games actually accomplish storytelling. Half-Life, Bioshock, Far Cry 2, even the first Modern Warfare, draw characters into their world through character. It’s the key to almost any engaging story, populating the world of that story with characters that people care about and can relate to. Even Modern Warfare 2 manages to do this, giving you squadmates that you care about, squadmates you’re supposed to feel bad about when they almost inevitably die. The root of all storytelling lies in characters, the manner in which they’re developed and portrayed.

It’s a well accepted truth of books and films. Sunshine, for example, has an absolutely retarded plot. It’s the journey of the characters which make the story it tells engaging, Kappa’s journey towards his own death which compels us to keep watching after the film veers off the rails into horrible horror territory. In fact it was less how poorly the finale of the movie is executed that drew me out of the film and more the fact that it seemed to stop caring about the majority of its characters, giving moderate face time to a handful of people and killing them off in dramatic ways that said nothing we didn’t already know about their relationships with one another. The same could be said of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. If we didn’t care about Oscar as a character the book would be an exercise in frustration, but because we see ourselves reflected in Oscar, because he’s such an interesting, likeable and pitiable character, we want to see his journey. Even when it’s asinine, when he sits around making Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, he’s still an interesting guy.

The problem with games is that they take so much of their storytelling from boiler plate, low risk, high return action films. The hero gets the girl because he’s the hero and he should get the girl. The hero trumps the villain because he’s the hero and heroes normally trump villains. It is the way of things and it is not our place as consumers to question these laws. Games like Painkiller do an excellent job with this sort of absurdity, constructing contrived and ridiculous narratives and completely divorcing them from the games themselves. Serious Sam is another great example of this old school first person shooter sensibility, wherein we are given less of a story and more of a playground to cause carnage.

When this sort of storytelling becomes sincere things can get a great deal messier. STALKER, for example, has an elaborate and entirely incoherent plot about some sort of wish granting tree/room/monolith located at the center of a nuclear reactor. Mirror’s Edge is about a city government with the means to completely dominate its population which cannot stop a single young woman from destroy their entire monitoring system for some reason. These stories, while awful in and of themselves, aren’t any more absurd than say the plot of Gravity’s Rainbow.

What makes them poor isn’t just their serious treatment of their own ridiculousness. Its their lack of character, a problem which easily extends to games with much less absurd and potentially better stories. For example Dawn of War II features an epic tale of alien invasion and human perseverance, an easy topic to make into a great story. But it falls flat, not because the aliens aren’t strong enough or the game’s action repeats itself too often, but because Dawn of War II’s characters are, by nature, stereotypes which never develop. They level up, but they never change. And why should they? They’re hundreds of years old. Never mind that the first Dawn of War actually had character development (which, in hindsight, served as the single saving grace of its single player campaign) for the same set of characters. Dawn of War II is about an epic struggle where a group of hardened marines remain strong and tough in the face of adversity, and as a result it is snooze worthy. Good luck keeping your eyes open during those wacky conversations between Space Secretary and Gruff Space Soldier number three.

Assassin’s Creed 2, however, didn’t have to go this way. It opens up slowly and invites you to develop Ezio as a character. As you learn about the world and see more of it you begin to change and grow. You learn about your past, your family, the cities you inhabit and the people you share them with. The first ten or so hours of Assassin’s Creed 2 are just remarkable in how ambitious and successful they are at drawing you into a world and making you feel like its somewhere you belong. The villains you fight are developed from the ground up and grow and change with you as a character.

But after the boat ride to Venice all of that changes. Once Assassin’s Creed leaves the smaller towns of Italy for its big cities it largely loses its sense of character and begins to bombard you with new faces, barely pausing to let you adjust to the influx of names you now have to remember in order to properly identify your assassination target. Venice’s lose memorable character, Rosa the thief, went completely out the window towards the end of the game, inexplicably replaced by her completely inept boss and a group of his similarly inept compatriots. none of whom seemed to grow as anything more than cameos in my mind. Compared to the streets of Florence where I’d learned my trade, Venice was a cold and dull place. Even the prostitutes seemed lifeless and when the inevitable twist came, an absurd and tortured thing that never needed to happen, I felt less intrigued as to just who was and wasn’t an Assassin and how that had influenced their actions and more bored by the fact that the game decided to lump all of its supporting characters together so artlessly.

What makes it even worse is the fact that Machiavelli is rammed in there for no apparent reason. The author of the prince, and guy that your intolerable boss routinely quotes without context or cause, appears late in the game and literally does nothing, aside from nod a few times and tell you to, no lie, kill the pope. This sort of absurd bullshit is where Assassin’s Creed 2 jumps from “competent” to “boiler plate” to “absurdly bad.” That the game’s credits are introduced by the phrase “What the fuck?” is no mistake – when the animus is turned off you’ll most likely be laughing out loud at the absurd twists that Assassin’s Creed 2 lays at your feet. In fact, just for fun and humor I’m going to lay the entire thing down in one nice fat spoiler filled paragraph? Ready? Go!

You journey to Rome to infiltrate the Vatican and assassinate the pope. Why? He’s the guy who killed your dad! Also, Machiavelli tells you so and no game is more about you doing what various people tell you to do than Assassin’s Creed 2, especially in its last three or four hours, depending on your skill. Now, bear in mind at this point you’ve fought the future pope several times with intent to kill, but the game engine stays your hand, inexplicably. Not the way it does with the Robert de Sable, where you’re treated to a brief cut scene explaining why you don’t end the sucker you just wrestled to the ground. No, Assassin’s Creed 2, which has spent most of the game building you into an unspeakable badass, forces you to fight the pope to be to the ground twice and never permits you to stab him in the neck. In fact you never stab him in the neck period, which is completely inexplicable. It’s not like Ezio’s vengeance is the only reason to kill him. But I digress. I was summarizing the plot.

So you’re journeying to Rome to assassinate the pope. After a lengthy series of fights along the battlements of Vatican City you’ll be treated to a brief forced stealth section. Then you’ll run along the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel and leap down, blade first, on to the pope. Done and done, you’ll think. But not so fast, gamer! The pope will push you off with his psychic pope staff, the murder everyone in the room with his pope powers. Luckily you have a magical apply that lets you make completely unnecessary copies of yourself so you can beat the pope up the same way you did before. Unfortunately, despite beating him, the pope won’t play by the rules. Instead he’ll use his pope invisibility power and stab you. But no worries, you’ll get better. Post-stabbing you’ll go down into the Vatican basement, which looks like a spaceship, and challenge the pope to a bare knuckle boxing match. After defeating him you’ll decide that he’s learned his lesson and unlock the tomb of some Roman gods who were, in fact, aliens, using the pope staff. They’ll tell you about solar flares and how shit is crazy dangerous and how the film 2012 had some great points and how you need to find one of their arks in order to survive this mass extinction events. But they won’t be telling you. They’ll be telling future you, playing through past you. If they were really meta they’d be telling player you, using future you receiving information from past you as a second mouthpiece, but everybody misses an opportunity for metatext occasionally. After this you’ll be treated to a brief fight scene with the douchebags you previously escaped from, dispatching them easily. Then a villain will inexplicably tell you that this isn’t over and drive off in the back of a van while you stand there, dumbfounded, and let him.

Aaaand...curtain.

All of this is bad, sure. And I described it to a stoned friend of mine as I played and she seemed to be quite amused, so it could be that it’s just targeted to a specific gaming market, but even so, it seems like it could’ve been saved so easily. By having some sort of meaningful character resolution for either Ezio or Desmond Assassin’s Creed 2 could’ve leapt from good game to great game. Instead it ended with a laughably poor series of story twists strung together by characters I’d since stopped caring about, which is a shame because there was so much potential for growth there. The cast of characters who operate the Animus 2.0 aren’t stereotypes in the slightest, and the brief interactions you have with them are some of the games best moments. Additionally Ezio’s relationship with his family early in the game is much of what makes him both an interesting character and what makes the game so compelling, but by the time you’re forced back to the manor to conclude things these interactions are no longer present. Despite your mother, uncle and sister’s presence in your life they never change, never speak, and never discuss what you are become or the goal you move towards. It is equal measures inexplicable and frustrating to deal with as someone who absolutely loves storytelling in games.

And it’s all because Assassin’s Creed 2 had so much promise. If it had been shitty all the way through I’d feel more the way I do towards Mass Effect 2, a little angry but not betrayed. But because Assassin’s Creed 2 opens with such a remarkably well crafted character experience and because it so effectively destroys that same experience by game’s end through its poor pacing and its decision to constantly introduce inexplicable new characters to the fold it actually makes me mad. It makes me mad because its representative of what the industry does wrong when they try to tell a story.

Games are great models to make you relate to characters and watch them develop. Bioshock does it particularly well, despite robbing you of any real agency, by providing you with histories and allowing you to recast the world around you to some extent. But gamers and game developers don’t always have the storytelling chops to tell the sort of epic tale they sold their marketing department on. And instead of bringing in professionals they just hand it over to someone who has particularly good grammar and crap out some characters interactions that sound cool, hardly bothering to edit them at all. That’s sort of where the whole problem lies. There’s little economy in the story of most games. They’re all too willing to throw as much in as possible in an effort to make the experience somehow richer or fuller. Mass Effect 2, for example, barely develops any of its many characters in any detail, offering only a brief, dismissive attempt at development to each of Shepard’s crew. You might be able to develop your romantic partner in a little more detail, but depending on who you choose that might not happen either. As a result I cared less about my actual characters and more about whether or not I would get that extra gamerscore for getting the entire team through the last mission alive. The characters never felt like characters to me, and indeed how could they? It’s difficult and perhaps a bit foolish even to try developing as many characters as Mass Effect 2 does.

And that’s what games need to learn. It’s not enough to save the world or get the girl. Those things make you feel good, but they aren’t good stories in and of themselves. They become good stories when they’re populated by people we care about, people who we get to see develop and grow through the course of our games. And until the people who receive hundreds of millions of dollars to design games get the memo on this we’re going to keep seeing games like Assassin’s Creed 2 with remarkable potential wasted on boxing matches with the pope.