Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Assassin's Creed 3 is a Finished Work in Progress!

I haven’t finished Assassin’s Creed 3 yet.  I’ve got a lot of excuses – some of which will come out here – but I wanted to begin this SNS with that disclaimer.  AC3 is interesting, I’ll give it that.  I think it takes the entire franchise in a captivating new direction.  But it’s problematic in a new and distinct way, and some of that is slowing down my playthrough.  The rest is life.  But I don’t want to whine about that.  I just wanted to let you know, I just arrived in New York, and I understand I’ve got about a third of the game left to play according to AC3’s completion meter.

To those unfamiliar with the Assassin’s Creed series, the premise is more or less that a post-structuralist French Canadian designer was somehow accidentally permitted to make a surprisingly smart game framing story and place it in a game built on around kinesis.  Physicality and movement, usually through absolutely fucking gorgeous cities and lackluster, beiged out ruins, form the core of play.  You’re always running around, leaping from roof to roof, climbing up walls.  Sometimes you’re forced into fighting something, but combat is mostly a rote experience.  The only way it ever gets interesting is when challenges are posed to keep players from using all of their incredibly bad ass combat abilities to ruin the game.

The sequels to the first Assassin’s Creed did everything they could to make the game’s story progressively dumber while also presenting some amazingly fun gameplay mechanics and more fucking gorgeous art.  They mostly centered around Rome, Venice and, at one point, Constantinople.  The last one had weird, slightly incongruous musings on mortality throughout as players were pressed into playing middle-aged and old-aged versions of the agile badasses they previously inhabited, characters bent with time and injury who could no longer move swiftly and instead had to use cunning to overcome their limitations.  The last one made me sad.  The stories consistently played fast and loose with history in a way that was, at best, amusing and, far more often, stupefyingly dumb.

Assassin’s Creed 3, the purported final entry into the series, is set in colonial America.

I’d contend this is the single biggest departure for the series.  The previous Assassin’s Creed games played on the spectacle of architecture in ancient cities, essentially providing gamers with a primer on urban landscapes in days of yore.  Even the most desolate districts of Acre were so lovingly rendered that they radiated mystique.  Assassin’s Creed 3 trades the scale and scope of Roman and Arabian architecture for the rustic charm of Colonial architecture.  The cities, rather than sprawling metropolises, are struggling bergs.  There aren’t a lot of buildings with more than three stories.

Since the primary conceit of the Assassin’s Creed series is kinetic movement amidst spectacle, this might seem like an odd, a departure from form.  I certainly thought it was until the game’s main story began to open up and I found myself spending large amounts of time in the New England wilderness.  That’s where I found the real heart of Assassin’s Creed 3, the thing that actually sold me on the game.  The landscapes, my god, the landscapes.

Assassin’s Creed 3 effectively posits that wilderness, trees and all that shit, can exist and function more or less as a city.  It’s telling you that that joy you experience when you’re climbing a building in Rome is actually the same joy you had climbing trees outside Lexington, and it’s going to make you climb those trees to the tippy top so that you can expose the landscape in loving detail.

It’s an odd choice.  I’d go so far as to call it brave.  Gamers don’t usually like the outdoors, and games in general are usually terrible at rendering outdoor environments.  Red Faction: Guerilla does a decent job with its naked Martian landscape, and Crysis and Far Cry 2 do some remarkable things with the Crytek Engine, but usually outdoor areas are re-skinned corridor portions that you’re asked to leap through in order to get to the next indoor corridor portion.   Assassin’s Creed 3 really cares about putting you in a forest, resplendent with animals (that you can kill) and feathers (that you can collect!) and a few patrols of guards (that you can also kill).  There’s a love to how the woods are created, a treasuring quality to these landscapes, only partially preserved today, and even then without any trace of the resilient ecosystem that Assassin’s Creed 3 calls to attention to remaining.

Therein lies the predominant thematic arc behind Assassin’s Creed 3: a wistful examination of a time gone by and a vanished landscape, a beautiful landscape that used to make up most of our nation.  New York is a patchwork of farms.  Boston’s Beacon Hill is bare.  The world is open, riddled with passages that permit those who seek them, presenting ample sights to those who simply wish to enjoy the beauty of a natural landscape.

There are problems behind it all.  The story has gotten even more twisted, with a campaign to kill a specific character that makes roughly as much sense as…well, a thing that doesn’t make very much sense at all.  The bulk of the plot centers around George Washington, specifically an assassination plot that you’re pressed to derail so that a man with the world’s most dangerous mustache doesn’t become general of the colonial army.  You’re conspicuously present at each of the major events in the American Revolution and are, of course, at the center of each of these power-plays.  It might be that I know my American history better than I know the intricacies of the Borges court, but it got to be a bit much for me very, very quickly.  I understand that it’s meant to be a playful take on history, but Jesus Christ.  Paul Revere’s midnight (made midday) ride?  That’s not even good game design.  You know what’s better than weird historical events shoehorned into a story?  Weird historical shoehorning of the most boring event of the American revolution into your game so that you can force players to endure a shitty escort quest.

And the crafting game is criminally buggy.  I lost my ability to send out caravans during the tutorial to a well documented bug that Ubisoft has no announced plans of addressing.  They’ve actually released several patches since it was brought to their attention without making a fix or even commenting on the forum threads that inform them of the issue, so I can only assume that they plan on waiting for PC players to just stop playing.  I also can’t comment on something the designers clearly put a great deal of time and effort into because the single biggest part of it (the part that lets me make money to make the other parts work) is super broken.  Paired with a dishwater dull hunting system and a series of Assassin management games that thoroughly miss the things that Brotherhood and Revelation did well, there’s not a lot of innovation to recommend in AC3, gameplay wise.

With one exception: combat.  Combat has always been a straightforward power-fantasy deal in Assassin’s Creed games.  But AC3 steps back to the first Assassin’s Creed game (and its inspirational antecedent, Prince of Persia) by making combat into a sort of puzzle.  A puzzle rife with cheat buttons (also called muskets, the most fun cheat button I’ve ever encountered in a game ever) but still, a puzzle.  You have to sort out how to kill that redcoat captain or that Pict grenadier.  If you use the standard “wait to counter” tactic you’ll actually die (another shift from Assassin’s Creed tradition) so you’d better experiment and sort out how to match your attacks to each opponent.  Combat events involving firearms and dramatic enemy movements also abound.  It’s a nice change from the “tap X to win” play of Assassin’s Creed 2.

There are also a handful of missions set in the “future” (now our alternate present) that I’m not really going to talk about here.  Suffice it to say, they’re problematic in a new and different way unrelated to the rest of the game.

There’s no thread running through my experiences of Assassin’s Creed 3, except perhaps disengagement.  This is the first Assassin’s Creed game that hasn’t totally captivated me.  I’m halfway through and I really don’t care about finishing it.  I’m going to, I’m sure.  But I had trouble putting down all of the previous AC games even briefly.  Now, even when I was housebound while violently ill, Assassin’s Creed 3 was my, at best, third choice.  Part of it is owed to the terrible story, but another part of it has to be chalked up to the infuriating experience that is interacting with a fundamentally bugged out game.

Hey, Ubisoft: if PC players send out a caravan during the first trip to Boston and it’s attacked, they’ll never be able to use that feature.  Ever again.  Fix that shit.  It’s hard to keep playing your game when I’m not sure that parts of it will actually work.