AC Unity
So. The game.
We'll get the obvious out of the way. Paris is gorgeous. I CANNOT stress enough that walking from a darkly lit house into the bright golden light of late afternoon is breathtaking, or watching light bounce off gold trim in a rich house or palais, or watching the clouds drift in, block out the sun, and cause a rainstorm to splash mud and muck up everywhere while running. It's soooooooooo pretty you're left saying, "My god, this is just a VIDEO GAME." I remember when the PS3 came out and as great as the graphics looked it was still a game; we've finally hit the point where you don't necessarily tell the difference.
A lot of the development diaries talked about the three pillars of an AC game. You can tell - here and other places - where they put in blood sweat and tears. The new animations for free-running are stylistic and always fresh as Arno runs either up or down a building (and my gawd, it's satisfying descending a building). The cover system was new to us; though we're told AC fans have been asking for this for years, we looked at it skeptically, struggling quite a bit before we finally "got it," and then it made sneaking into palais and houses fun.
Fighting is fun to watch - Arno is a fencer first, and we like watching his swordplay in particular - meh on the others. The violence is still brutal, and for us at least a little jaw dropping sometimes. The difficulty factor has most certainly ramped up, they don't forgive you for being a newb and we died many, many times because we were and always will be button mashers, and AC combat really doesn't want you to button mash. Two or three enemies is one thing, but with the alarm bells from Black Flag one can easily get swarmed with half a dozen enemies on screen, all screaming and calling you corpse or maggot (which sounds like something else and always makes us double take). Enemy language is particularly brutal - it's not just random sound bites of Italian curses but some very ugly threats, leaving the two of us wishing we could sometimes mute them.
Paris is divided up into different districts, and each district as three sub-districts (burrows?) that each have their collection of chests, crowd events, chests, Nostradomus puzzles, chests, murder mysteries, chests, chests, and oh yes, chests. The number of chests with loot in this game borders on absurd, and most of them cannot be touched until sequence 9 when you become a level 3 lockpick. For OCD twins like us who like to have all chests and loot plundered as soon as possible before we look at memories, this grated on us to not end. The chests come in four colors: white (normal) red (lockpick - soooo many of those...), yellow (initiates, need an initiate profile and to level it up for given chests), and blue (social. aka you need the companion piece or else the chests will just lay there for all eternity noooooooo they must be opened and the map cleeeeeeeeeeaaar!)
By far, the best parts of single player were the Nostradamus puzzles and the murder mysteries. Nostradamus makes you nostalgic for the glyph puzzles of AC2 and Brotherhood. You have to find certain images laying around a particular district, and each picture gives you a poem/clue to the next location. Most of them are not obvious and require you to remember the names of different landmarks, or simply know the Cafe Theatre really well, or just be damn lucky. Murder mysteries play out in a similar venue; like the Arkham Asylum or LANoire games you turn on your eagle vision to find all the clues and then accuse someone of murder. As the difficulty ratchets up multiple people look like good culprits, and you absolutely have to have all clues to make the right decision to get the best loot. One particular memory failed to give us access to one of the clue locations - a glitch we assume - and we were tearing our hair out using the clues we had to determine the culprit - it was the only time we looked up a video walkthrough, to make sure we were right.
On top of these diversions there are Paris Stories and social club missions. The former gives you a touch or nuance of the setting, the latter "frees" the burrows and reduces the number of Templars mouthing off to you. Mission givers range from the assassin council, Napoleon Bonaparte, le Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont (and we will decidedly NOT talk about how much we squealed when we realized they managed to sneak him in) to random schmuck on the street. These missions are generally shorter, sometimes lighter, and quick one-offs.
The big thing they focused on, what they spent the most time on, is coop. Not only are there the standard mission objectives, there are synch points to collect to level up Arno and types of gear you received depending on how well you play. More over, some missions have randomized entrance points and locations for loot that makes every playthrough a little bit different. We did multiplayer only once before this - back in college when a friend let us play their xbox (yes, that far back), and the people on the mike learned that we were girls and, well, some deeply, deeply creepy things were said. Here, however, the players we've been interacting with have been polite - and twice we were lucky enough to play with people who spoke French (and we assume they were actually French, because it was early in the morning when most gamers here in North America are asleep). The breadth of people playing mutliplayer, the pleasant surprise when a player glitches into your game to invite you, has been satisfying when we thought we were never be fans of multiplayer.
And the assassinations, too, are fun once you understand how it's done. You explore the area your target is at and "create opportunities" that make infiltration and escape decidedly easier. There was one assassination in the sewers where, because we blocked certain grates, flooded the tunnels with smoke making escape easy. Another encouraged us to free prisoners who then became allies as we stormed the location. Another had us steal keys that led us into an unguarded section of Notre Dame. The nostalgia for AC1 is strong here; it's not an action set-piece like recent games but rather a "by your style" open concept mission. Tack on optional objectives for challenge and some of these memories will be damn fun to replay.
But - and here comes the but - while there are many things in Unity that the developers spent time on, there is one glaring thing they did not spend a lot of time on: the writing.
This can perhaps be best summed up with "More please!"
Elise de la Serre as a developed, competent, strong female character? More please! An assassin council diverse enough to have a black guy and (le gasp) a woman? More please! Friendship with Napoleon Bonaparte? More please! Bellac? More please!! Arno's ruminations of the Creed? MORE PLEASE!! The main story has thirteen sequences - but each sequence has at best three memories. This compared to AC1 that had six investigations and an assassination; AC2 that had memories that were as many as 11 sequences long; Brotherhood that averaged 4; Revelations that guaranteed 4; AC3 that was 3-4, and whatever Black Flag was. The beginning sequences are as follows: cutscene with the council, one memory where you get the name, and then the assassination.
This leaves no time - NO time - to develop the arc of the character you're supposed to kill. All of Altair's assassinations were distinct in that you took the time to get to know why they were being killed. Ezio was on a quest to add names to his list and learn how for the conspiracy went. Brotherhood introduced each assassination as well as each ally you had to help with the assassination. Revelations even had a red herring. Two of them. But the recent trend of the AC games is to just throw a name at you and set you off. I couldn't tell you a single thing about the people I killed. Soul room conversations have been replaced with Arno having the deus-ex-machina ability to leech memories out of his targets, so instead of moving last words or confessions we get "oh, did you see that face? It's the next target for the next memory! Off we go!" And then we repeat with the report to the council.
Not only to I not remember my targets, I don't remember my allies either. The assassin council? Utterly bland. The Mentor? All I remember about him is the murder mystery introduction memory and the co-op mission that plays off that murder mystery. Bellec? "Pisspot." And it hurts to say that because some of these characters are clearly meant to be memorable. Mirabeau's moments in the council meetings are meant to illustrate the stress he's under and what his arc might look like. Bellec has this breathtaking moment in the murder mystery memory, but there was absolutely zero buildup to that moment. Hell, we don't even remember the names of the other council members; outside the woman and the black guy I THINK there's a third, but damned if we remember anything about him. Arno is meant to be the character who takes personal responsibility very seriously, but he talks less than Altair in the side missions and memories. You can see that the ideas are there, that they wanted the narrative to be sweeping and nuanced the way that AC3 was, but it simply falls short.
And then there's Elise. She's the first female character after Aveline that we respect. She is Ezio of AC2, driven utterly by revenge and blind to everything else around her, ultimately including Arno. Instead of making her incompetent at living like Sofia, she leaves the game to do her own thing instead of making Arno do it all. It's a simple dialogue shift, but it gives a huge boost to making her a character. She's not a damsel in distress but rather doing something her own way. Just those tiny moments make her respectable. Not likeable, but respectable.
We differentiate the two because while we respect her we don't like her. There's only so many times she looks down and to the side when Arno says something, or have her very modern hair wisp over a smokey-make-up eye before it becomes trite. We knew what was going to happen to her the minute Ubisoft announced she existed, and lo, that's exactly what happened. Point for point, beat for beat. The two of us were make predictions on every memory we saw her. "Will this be the one with a fluffy romantic setting? Will this be the one where she [spoiler goes here]> Will this be the one where she [spoiler goes here]? Will this be the one where she [spoiler goes here]?" And it was yes to every one. What's the point of making a female character strong and competent if you're going to grind her under every trope that exists? It's not the insult that Sofia Sartor was, but jeez, developers, why not take a risk?
And I think that's the point where we're at. The AC franchise is suffering the first person shooter problem. We don't play first person shooters because (we fail at them epically but also because) their stories are meant to be trimming as you go from one campaign to another. We fell in love with Assassin's Creed because every memory and story it told was to the development of the plot - either Altair's or Al Mualim's. Brotherhood lived up to its namesake because its memories were devoted to Ezio realizing the need for a brotherhood, working with the npcs as well as the recruits, and using that momentum to kill Cesare Borgia. AC3 was meant to be a nuanced and evocative exploration of the meaning of freedom to the people fighting the American Revolution.
Unity is not united. Arno at the end of the game is alone because of the choices he and others made, and we do not have the cathartic release of satisfaction or the sense that something is building towards a form of unity or even the sense of loss. We're left with an admittedly poignant meditation of the Creed, but it does nothing to articulate the themes - if any - of the game. Even Black Flag had a theme - watch Eddie Kenway fall to rock bottom. His story built that. Arno's does not. And we're left wanting.
More please.
I suppose this is what fanfiction is for.
We'll get the obvious out of the way. Paris is gorgeous. I CANNOT stress enough that walking from a darkly lit house into the bright golden light of late afternoon is breathtaking, or watching light bounce off gold trim in a rich house or palais, or watching the clouds drift in, block out the sun, and cause a rainstorm to splash mud and muck up everywhere while running. It's soooooooooo pretty you're left saying, "My god, this is just a VIDEO GAME." I remember when the PS3 came out and as great as the graphics looked it was still a game; we've finally hit the point where you don't necessarily tell the difference.
A lot of the development diaries talked about the three pillars of an AC game. You can tell - here and other places - where they put in blood sweat and tears. The new animations for free-running are stylistic and always fresh as Arno runs either up or down a building (and my gawd, it's satisfying descending a building). The cover system was new to us; though we're told AC fans have been asking for this for years, we looked at it skeptically, struggling quite a bit before we finally "got it," and then it made sneaking into palais and houses fun.
Fighting is fun to watch - Arno is a fencer first, and we like watching his swordplay in particular - meh on the others. The violence is still brutal, and for us at least a little jaw dropping sometimes. The difficulty factor has most certainly ramped up, they don't forgive you for being a newb and we died many, many times because we were and always will be button mashers, and AC combat really doesn't want you to button mash. Two or three enemies is one thing, but with the alarm bells from Black Flag one can easily get swarmed with half a dozen enemies on screen, all screaming and calling you corpse or maggot (which sounds like something else and always makes us double take). Enemy language is particularly brutal - it's not just random sound bites of Italian curses but some very ugly threats, leaving the two of us wishing we could sometimes mute them.
Paris is divided up into different districts, and each district as three sub-districts (burrows?) that each have their collection of chests, crowd events, chests, Nostradomus puzzles, chests, murder mysteries, chests, chests, and oh yes, chests. The number of chests with loot in this game borders on absurd, and most of them cannot be touched until sequence 9 when you become a level 3 lockpick. For OCD twins like us who like to have all chests and loot plundered as soon as possible before we look at memories, this grated on us to not end. The chests come in four colors: white (normal) red (lockpick - soooo many of those...), yellow (initiates, need an initiate profile and to level it up for given chests), and blue (social. aka you need the companion piece or else the chests will just lay there for all eternity noooooooo they must be opened and the map cleeeeeeeeeeaaar!)
By far, the best parts of single player were the Nostradamus puzzles and the murder mysteries. Nostradamus makes you nostalgic for the glyph puzzles of AC2 and Brotherhood. You have to find certain images laying around a particular district, and each picture gives you a poem/clue to the next location. Most of them are not obvious and require you to remember the names of different landmarks, or simply know the Cafe Theatre really well, or just be damn lucky. Murder mysteries play out in a similar venue; like the Arkham Asylum or LANoire games you turn on your eagle vision to find all the clues and then accuse someone of murder. As the difficulty ratchets up multiple people look like good culprits, and you absolutely have to have all clues to make the right decision to get the best loot. One particular memory failed to give us access to one of the clue locations - a glitch we assume - and we were tearing our hair out using the clues we had to determine the culprit - it was the only time we looked up a video walkthrough, to make sure we were right.
On top of these diversions there are Paris Stories and social club missions. The former gives you a touch or nuance of the setting, the latter "frees" the burrows and reduces the number of Templars mouthing off to you. Mission givers range from the assassin council, Napoleon Bonaparte, le Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont (and we will decidedly NOT talk about how much we squealed when we realized they managed to sneak him in) to random schmuck on the street. These missions are generally shorter, sometimes lighter, and quick one-offs.
The big thing they focused on, what they spent the most time on, is coop. Not only are there the standard mission objectives, there are synch points to collect to level up Arno and types of gear you received depending on how well you play. More over, some missions have randomized entrance points and locations for loot that makes every playthrough a little bit different. We did multiplayer only once before this - back in college when a friend let us play their xbox (yes, that far back), and the people on the mike learned that we were girls and, well, some deeply, deeply creepy things were said. Here, however, the players we've been interacting with have been polite - and twice we were lucky enough to play with people who spoke French (and we assume they were actually French, because it was early in the morning when most gamers here in North America are asleep). The breadth of people playing mutliplayer, the pleasant surprise when a player glitches into your game to invite you, has been satisfying when we thought we were never be fans of multiplayer.
And the assassinations, too, are fun once you understand how it's done. You explore the area your target is at and "create opportunities" that make infiltration and escape decidedly easier. There was one assassination in the sewers where, because we blocked certain grates, flooded the tunnels with smoke making escape easy. Another encouraged us to free prisoners who then became allies as we stormed the location. Another had us steal keys that led us into an unguarded section of Notre Dame. The nostalgia for AC1 is strong here; it's not an action set-piece like recent games but rather a "by your style" open concept mission. Tack on optional objectives for challenge and some of these memories will be damn fun to replay.
But - and here comes the but - while there are many things in Unity that the developers spent time on, there is one glaring thing they did not spend a lot of time on: the writing.
This can perhaps be best summed up with "More please!"
Elise de la Serre as a developed, competent, strong female character? More please! An assassin council diverse enough to have a black guy and (le gasp) a woman? More please! Friendship with Napoleon Bonaparte? More please! Bellac? More please!! Arno's ruminations of the Creed? MORE PLEASE!! The main story has thirteen sequences - but each sequence has at best three memories. This compared to AC1 that had six investigations and an assassination; AC2 that had memories that were as many as 11 sequences long; Brotherhood that averaged 4; Revelations that guaranteed 4; AC3 that was 3-4, and whatever Black Flag was. The beginning sequences are as follows: cutscene with the council, one memory where you get the name, and then the assassination.
This leaves no time - NO time - to develop the arc of the character you're supposed to kill. All of Altair's assassinations were distinct in that you took the time to get to know why they were being killed. Ezio was on a quest to add names to his list and learn how for the conspiracy went. Brotherhood introduced each assassination as well as each ally you had to help with the assassination. Revelations even had a red herring. Two of them. But the recent trend of the AC games is to just throw a name at you and set you off. I couldn't tell you a single thing about the people I killed. Soul room conversations have been replaced with Arno having the deus-ex-machina ability to leech memories out of his targets, so instead of moving last words or confessions we get "oh, did you see that face? It's the next target for the next memory! Off we go!" And then we repeat with the report to the council.
Not only to I not remember my targets, I don't remember my allies either. The assassin council? Utterly bland. The Mentor? All I remember about him is the murder mystery introduction memory and the co-op mission that plays off that murder mystery. Bellec? "Pisspot." And it hurts to say that because some of these characters are clearly meant to be memorable. Mirabeau's moments in the council meetings are meant to illustrate the stress he's under and what his arc might look like. Bellec has this breathtaking moment in the murder mystery memory, but there was absolutely zero buildup to that moment. Hell, we don't even remember the names of the other council members; outside the woman and the black guy I THINK there's a third, but damned if we remember anything about him. Arno is meant to be the character who takes personal responsibility very seriously, but he talks less than Altair in the side missions and memories. You can see that the ideas are there, that they wanted the narrative to be sweeping and nuanced the way that AC3 was, but it simply falls short.
And then there's Elise. She's the first female character after Aveline that we respect. She is Ezio of AC2, driven utterly by revenge and blind to everything else around her, ultimately including Arno. Instead of making her incompetent at living like Sofia, she leaves the game to do her own thing instead of making Arno do it all. It's a simple dialogue shift, but it gives a huge boost to making her a character. She's not a damsel in distress but rather doing something her own way. Just those tiny moments make her respectable. Not likeable, but respectable.
We differentiate the two because while we respect her we don't like her. There's only so many times she looks down and to the side when Arno says something, or have her very modern hair wisp over a smokey-make-up eye before it becomes trite. We knew what was going to happen to her the minute Ubisoft announced she existed, and lo, that's exactly what happened. Point for point, beat for beat. The two of us were make predictions on every memory we saw her. "Will this be the one with a fluffy romantic setting? Will this be the one where she [spoiler goes here]> Will this be the one where she [spoiler goes here]? Will this be the one where she [spoiler goes here]?" And it was yes to every one. What's the point of making a female character strong and competent if you're going to grind her under every trope that exists? It's not the insult that Sofia Sartor was, but jeez, developers, why not take a risk?
And I think that's the point where we're at. The AC franchise is suffering the first person shooter problem. We don't play first person shooters because (we fail at them epically but also because) their stories are meant to be trimming as you go from one campaign to another. We fell in love with Assassin's Creed because every memory and story it told was to the development of the plot - either Altair's or Al Mualim's. Brotherhood lived up to its namesake because its memories were devoted to Ezio realizing the need for a brotherhood, working with the npcs as well as the recruits, and using that momentum to kill Cesare Borgia. AC3 was meant to be a nuanced and evocative exploration of the meaning of freedom to the people fighting the American Revolution.
Unity is not united. Arno at the end of the game is alone because of the choices he and others made, and we do not have the cathartic release of satisfaction or the sense that something is building towards a form of unity or even the sense of loss. We're left with an admittedly poignant meditation of the Creed, but it does nothing to articulate the themes - if any - of the game. Even Black Flag had a theme - watch Eddie Kenway fall to rock bottom. His story built that. Arno's does not. And we're left wanting.
More please.
I suppose this is what fanfiction is for.