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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