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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