A few weeks ago, I picked up Assassin's Creed Valhalla on sale, as I had enjoyed the previous entry, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, enough to dump around 200 hours into it, going so far as to get the platinum trophy. After maybe a dozen hours, I was having a decent enough time, enjoying the satiric tone toward Christianity, the combat was as tight as it had been for the last few entries in the series; all was good. Something made me think back to the previous style of AC gameplay, the approach the series had with gameplay for most of the series, from the first game through to Syndicate.
I had loved the series at first blush, playing through the first game on my brother-in-law's new PS3 while house sitting years ago, adoring the triple dip of entries with Ezio. Something happened around ACIII. I didn't finish the game. Worse, despite the hype of a new generation, I didn't get more than a handful of hours into the acclaimed Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. It wasn't that I hadn't enjoyed them entirely; I had just lost steam. I ended up not even purchasing AC Unity, wary given the launch issues and persistent bugs the game was having very publicly. I ended up getting AC Syndicate a while after launch on a sale and never got further than the late title card. The gameplay felt different enough from where I had last left the series that I felt a learning curve to it all I wasn't, at the time, willing and ready to cope with.
Time passed, the series took a year off and when it came back, it was with a loot system and a combat approach that felt close to Dark Souls than where the series had come from. I was back in. The story seemed to be jumping off from a new zero point, given that I had no idea what had happened with Desmond, or the weird snippets of video game developer meta-commentary I had seen a little of in my short time with Black Flag, I welcomed being in with a familiar yet new approach to the framing narrative. Origin and Odyssey were great fun, well written, and left me ready for more. These weren't games I was going to buy at launch, as my budget just isn't what it used to be with a couple of kids, a mortgage, and so on, but I was back and having fun with the bloated mess that is the modern Ubisoft open-world design.
Back to a few weeks ago.
My nagging curiosity for the games I had more or less missed got the best of me. I quit, closed, and uninstalled Valhalla on impulse. No going back now. Now, I had a copy of Black Flag on disc for PS4, but getting time in front of the TV for long stretches is tough with a 4-year-old who wants to do yoga, watch music videos, or a movie.
Lucky me, the Nintendo Switch version was on sale for less than a bottle of whiskey, and oh hey it comes with the spiritual sequel Assassin's Creed Rogue which looked OK, so let's go. Sneaking in sessions with Black Flag where I could in handheld mode and getting the 4-year-old hooked on sea shanties, sailing, and letting her run around when I was able to find safe jungle areas (she's just now getting a handle on 3D character movement and camera manipulation) when she asked to, I managed to get through the game in just under a week. I'll be damned. I was back in. Yes, the boat stuff was fun, but that wasn't the whole draw. That game made you feel like a competent, deadly badass very quickly. Jumping onto the deck of an enemy ship only to absolutely shred the first few hapless sailors to dare attack, followed up with 4 deadly shots from a comical array of flintlock pistols pulled from who-knows-where. Do not fuck with Edward Kenway. Even the framing narrative kept me curious enough to pay attention when I was there. I didn't hack EVERYTHING or read all the emails or whatever, but the vague nature of how I wandered through the Montreal office was satisfying for me.
I considered taking a break with Black Flag done, but I didn't have anything in the backlog nagging me or anything, so why not charge right into Rogue. After all, it shared an app with Black Flag and I had heard it was considerably shorter. Let's go.
Rogue caught me off guard. I knew it continued on in the newfound sub-genre featuring the tender story of a man and his unbridled love for the sea, boats, and off-key drunken singing, but I had no idea that it largely stuck to the North Atlantic, New York City, and the capitol region of New York. I know these places! I get to murk fools in Albany!? That's funny to me and I am here for it. Referencing the local tribe of Native Americans, the Abenaki? I have a bunch of friends that are Abenaki! Neat! The gameplay stayed more or less true to the badassery displayed in Black Flag, with the added wrinkle of gas and gas masks being a factor, not a favorite, and now the game is also kinda Gangs of New York? Oh shit, I'm a Templar? OK then! Short, sweet, a nice little addendum to Black Flag. Oh, what's this stuff in Paris? Huh, a time jump...huhhhhhh. A stealth lead-in to...
Oh, Assassin's Creed Unity. I had a copy of it sitting in my library thanks to a sketchy CD Key site sale that netted me a PS4 copy for something like 97 cents. I mean, how I could I not just throw that on the backlog pile for basically free? I installed it and jumped in. My friends thought I was nuts, but at this point, it was whole hog on the mainline entries or bust. Imagine my surprise when this game was more than decent! Visually, there was a lot of love in Unity. It made sense, Ubisoft is a French company at heart and their national pride shines in this game. Paris and the bit of Versailles featured are lovingly detailed and beautiful. I hadn't been as impressed with crowded streets in a game since the first game in the series. The combat had a rhythm to it that was harder to master than the previous games, but very rewarding when you got the hang of it. Great swordplay at the end of the day. I daresay the only thing that didn't click for me this time was the cast of characters. I wanted to give a shit about Arno and Elise, but I was never given enough to get there. A plucky smartass rogue isn't enough for a 30+ hour game anymore. The map icon bloat was at an all-time high here too, combined now with a coop mode that I wasn't going to touch, and oh boy the propensity to toss the opportunity to spend actual cash money on upgrades. Easy enough for me to ignore all these years later, but combined with the launch technical issues, I understand the dark spot this is in the series history. Still, more fun than most would have you believe, and holy shit is it still pretty. The framing stuff just didn't hit for me here. Honestly, it left little enough of an impression I couldn't tell you what was up with it for better or worse. Another week or so down, and I probably completed the smallest amount of side activities in this one, but it was done!
I had spent a little time with Assassins Creed Syndicate before undertaking this weird journey, and had bounced off as many of the mechanics felt a little too foreign at the time and I was left ultimately confused by what was happening on the edges of the game. Nothing huge, but I had many other options for things to play at the time, so I moved on. Coming back to it with my recent weeks' experiences, this game clicked for me in a HUGE way. This was the masterclass in mechanics built across the series up to this point I had been waiting for. Lots of gadgets, lots of approach options, more segregated assassination moments, and a good build-up to them. The dual protagonist approach employed here allowed for a great story of sibling love and rivalry, with both Evie and Jacob Frye feeling like they either could have lead the game in a solo fashion, though still leaving it all feeling improved for having both. The subtle differences in playstyle between the two become more pronounced as their methods diverge plot-wise, leading to a crescendo that I had almost expected to openly pit the two against each other. Syndicate also marks maybe the first instance in which a game protagonist is as excited as I am, the player, to be given a grappling hook launcher complete with the suspension of the laws of physics. Treating my time in Victorian London as a loose game adaptation of Gotham By Gaslight, my versions of Evie and Jacob rarely left the rooftops, descending on the unsavory elements of the city's worst alleyways in a cloud of smoke, throwing knives and fists exploding out of the darkness before zipping back to the rooftops and away before the dust had settled. Look, I've been aching for a new Batman game, OK?
Given all of that, one would think I'd have a more favorable opinion of the only add-on content I had decided to tackle in all of this, Assassin's Creed Syndicate: Jack the Ripper. I enjoy some true crime. Not *all* true crime (seriously, stop recommending your favorite podcasts, most of them are either in bad taste or at least rarely stick to facts from cases, ugh), but OLD true crime is probably my favorite, as there's no one connected left alive. It all feels a little safer to look upon with fascination when you know you're not "enjoying" the details of how someone's close relative was killed. Regardless, I loooooooove Jack the Ripper speculation. From Hell? Good stuff. Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper? Got all the achievements. AC Syndicate's take of ol' Saucy Jack? Woof, not so much. There are some good things here. Making this a more or less stand-alone experience, jumping in decades after the events of Syndicate proper and not taking much of any time to explain the events in between? Love it. Let me fill in the blanks with the little tidbits you're showing me. Let me feel smart and reward me for paying some amount of attention. Rushing through a presentation of the Jack the Ripper crimes and baiting a mystery that contains ZERO twists along the way? Why am I spending my time with this? OK, they've added a mechanic surrounding invoking fear in your targets and their cronies. Patch this into the main game so that I might fully embrace the Victorian Batman game that was never made. Instead, we get a version of Evie Frye, complete with a fully leveled up skill tree that I had completed in the main game BUT NONE OF THE ACTUAL GAMEPLAY BENEFITS bestowed by said upgrades. Seriously, I can look at the full tree of abilities right there, and then see that none of them are taking effect in what I am playing. Stripping out the ability to customize how I fight is almost forgivable until you stack the levels on the enemies higher than in the standard game and make me re-earn equipment of a suitable level. Now, in base Syndicate, I completed nearly all of the given side activities. Most were both fun and rewarding. Come Jack the Ripper, I bounced as soon as I was sure I had enough of the good gear and upgrades to tackle the story sections. The story sections end with a wet fart. The sections playing AS the Ripper would have been a neat aside, but they're so narrow in scope and approach, you may as well just show me a well-directed in-engine cinematic. Why have I written more about the thing I liked the least in the little experiment than the things I loved? Because I expected this to be the high point to end my trip back in time. Instead, it left me with a sour taste that it took some time to shake after the credits had rolled.
What did I learn going back through a franchise that stands largely as an example of open-world game dev hubris? That each game is earnest. So many working on these projects care a lot about what they put into it. Each title is a nuanced different take on a similar framework. For all of the accusation of copy and paste design as gets levied against this series, there really is more variety and splashes of experimental color in there for those willing to look. I expected to be burned out on games as a whole for a while considering the pace at which I have just run through these titles, but instead I'm somewhat reinvigorated on the open-world genre. There's a language to it that is something you don't get in other places, and that's something to be explored and articulated as we go forward playing, making, and talking about games.
It is, of course, hard to spend this many words talking about Ubisoft games without acknowledging the reports of systemic abuse within the company. It's deplorable and certainly can color perception of the end result we as consumers get to directly interface with. I don't have any answers as to how I even feel about spending money on any of this at the end of the day. I don't buy any of it at full price, and as much as I can pretend this is a moral action, I won't. It's firstly a budgetary consideration on my part. Do I think a wide boycott would serve the situation well? In the AAA space, I don't think so. For every higher-up that commits abuse or looks the other way when another does, you've got hundreds in the development trenches, putting in the real hours and burning the lean tissue to make this stuff. I don't know the way forward from that, other than to hope there can be some sort of regulatory shift in the industry. Perhaps unions can help protect the well-being of the creative and programming staff in ways that serve multiple goods. Let's hope that change can come from within. Until then, I think it's good to, at the least, keep bringing it up in spaces where we talk about games, and knowing that it's OK to not have all the answers.
I think I'll go back and reinstall Valhalla now, and continue the adventures of my firey anti-christian, black metal Viking princess.
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