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.
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