Assassin's Creed is Dry Biscuit Dough

Assassin's Creed came out in 2007 for PC and 7th gen consoles. I played the PC version and no, I didn't give Ubisoft my money. Yes, I legally purchased it. As anyone below the age of 50, I have a history with Assassin's Creed and loved what I played, but grew out of it after puberty. I played 1 at a friend's house and owned 2, 3, and 4 but stopped following until I became a sophomore in Goblinschool and went through the Ezio trilogy. So far, I've played every game in the franchise, except the Mirage/ Shadows renaissance era of games. The only ones I haven't beaten are Rogue, cause it's not that interesting, and what I call the RPCreed trilogy because they're roughly 100 hours a piece. Normally, clarifying all of this wouldn't matter, but Assassin's Creed has a lively fanbase. Normally people point to Deltarune or Sonic as the premier nightmare fanbases. In my experience, Assassin's Creed keeps pace without breaking a sweat. You don't need to look far on YouTube or blog posts to catch a glimpse at all this. Assassin's Creed 1 is apparently painfully mediocre, but others insist that it's literally the only actual game in the franchise and every sequel pales in comparison to its perfection and brilliance. And, if you prefer, or even enjoy, anything that came out after 2016 you must be a drooling moron that can't think for themselves and only like to watch pretty colors flash on the screen. Obviously, anymore than that would hurt your thick chimp brain, which is obviously why you don't like the Desmond segments in the Ezio trilogy. You just don't understand high art, poor child. Rage-bait takedowns of the second game are more common than videos articulating how bad Skyrim actually was and you just didn't notice because you're so stupid. Relax. As a video game developer, people arguing about what games you're allowed to like or dislike, or calling people names because they like what you don't is really pathetic, and it makes me glad I never became a part of the fanbase as a kid. This definitely comes back to the fact that the people who have these opinions were between 7 and 13 years old around the time AC started. So, as they went from children with an all-encompassing love for a specific set of games, to adults with an all-encompassing love for a specific set of games, they were none-too-happy to have their childhood trodden upon by a new identity crafted for a new generation. I'm firm in the belief that Assassin's Creed Odyssey will be seen as a beacon of what Assassin's Creed really means by the year 2032 when Assassin's Creed 7: The Great War comes out and kids who played Odyssey will be old enough to post impassioned video essays on YouTube. I'm starting out with the first game, but I'll likely cover every game in the franchise that interests me. So probably not Rogue, none of the browser/ mobile games, nor the DLC expansion games. So, now that I don't need to say any of that in any future segments, I'll get to the meat.

The story for Assassin's Creed 1 is pretty straightforward. A modern day white boy named Desmond gets kidnapped by the in-universe version of General Electric so he can live an amount of time in the body of his ancestor Altaïr Ibn-LaʼAhad to conveniently fill an entire story arc. In Altaïr's story, he's a dick who, after killing a couple of people, becomes less of a dick. He finds out the Templars he had been sent to kill were actually Templars all along and then finds out his wise old master is the baddest of the bad guys so Altaïr defeats him and gets the plot McGuffin. Did I wildly oversimplify the plot? Yes. Did I miss out on any critical plot beats? Not really. I could talk about the sub-plot with Malik, Lucy's characterization as a double agent who later turns out to be a quadruple agent that needs to die because writing is hard and her voice actor wanted fair compensation, and the underlying plots of the Crusader Templar menace. But these things don't really build to anything satisfying or that actively prop up the plot. That's not a serious problem because, up until the third game, Assassin's Creed didn't generally strive for much more than the standard epic action hero plot. I would definitely argue that they felt that way while putting the first game together, but they just didn't have the budget to do it. Because of that, it does feel like there's an extra 40% of this game that never left the design phase, so they just had to spackle over the gaps. Ultimately, they didn't do a bad job, but it's easy to feel. Malik, the guy who lost his brother and his arm, with all blame resting on Altaïr, starts out justifiably mad in the beginning of the story. But after about 3 unrelated interactions, over the course of a few weeks, Malik begins to forgive Altaïr and see him as a true friend. Which is why I think this game is missing a decent bit of its runtime. The developers realized they couldn't go back and write more interactions between Altaïr and Malik, so they just hoped that Altaïr becoming wiser and more even tempered would translate to the audience that people like him again and all sins are forgiven. So it's just assumed he had a character arc when we were never shown one on screen. After sequence 4 he's just cool and wise Altaïr, not mean old narcist Altaïr. The same goes for his master, ‎Al Mualim (I know that just means "The Master" but Altaïr says it like it's his name for some reason, but also just calls him master in plain English. So, I'll do that too to avoid confusion). Only once do we see Altaïr begin asking the right questions, and even then Mualim is the one he asks. Because, presumably, they had the idea to make Altaïr ask questions of his friends and allies about Mualim's behavior, what they think happened when he was stabbed to death and suddenly came back to life, and why his master would know so much about the Templar order. But, I think that by the time this got kicked around, they were in full production and couldn't make any haphazard changes without going over budget or having the higher-ups come down on them. This all makes the story feel a little shaky and deeply flawed, but it never actively bored me. There's some poking at the idea that Templars and Assassins are more similar than they think and some incredibly juvenile writing like "A book that claims the Earth was made in seven days, a best seller." Or "I didn't know you wouldn't stab me. I took a leap of faith." Both of which made my skeleton turn off. We won't see those topics revisited until 3, which manages to trip over itself marginally less. it makes the first game feel like a dough that's been kneaded but is missing the ingredients it requires to become a truly special breakfast treat. It's dry, it's a little bland, I need an egg & cheese on this to make it palatable. There's a few sweet crumbs here and there. I love Desmond's retort that, even when looking at the actual memories of an actual historical figure, there will always be room for misinterpretation. Whether it's intentional or not. Besides those, dialogue functions usually. It's a very typical 2007 video game story. Not even remotely trying to say that games didn't have deep and meaningful stories by 2007. Silent Hill 3, Deus Ex, and Planescape Torment had been out for many years at that point. But, I would argue that Triple-A games had some incentive to not be particularly deep. This game was saddled with CoD 4, Crysis, Halo 3, Uncharted, Mass Effect, and Bioshock. While these Triple-A games have mediocre-to-good stories, and some even touch on themes of inhumane warfare and uncontained libertarianism, they don't dwell long enough to delve into those topics with a fine comb. Or, even be noticeable to someone who focuses on mechanics over narrative subtext. I don't mean this in a "Appealing to the lowest common denominator, don't make the player have to think for more than second" kind of way. It's just generally accepted that a publisher wants their game to say as little as possible actual politics, identity, or philosophy. Especially at this time, when the adolescent male audience was seen as the primary consumer for these games by shareholders. The one gay character in the game has to sheepishly describe himself with innuendo and say things without saying them, despite being mere seconds from death. Even in an interview with The Guardian, the Creative Director said "to try new ways of interacting, that's my personal goal - it's the interaction with the world that's the most important part of the game, it's not really the story." So, I'm led to believe that the game's story wasn't meant to be that essential anyway, instead they focused on vibes. If the game's story is your thing, I think I can see why. It just happens to not be my thing. The story, as you can imagine, clashes with the gameplay somewhat in both theme and execution. Some may use the word "Ludo Narrative Dissonance" which is A: something of a black hole term that is meant to make the argument about the definition of said term instead of what is actually being discussed (related somewhat to Mary Sue, Woke, and Immersive Sim) and B: was coined by a very very silly man that believed murdering literally every child in Bioshock 1 was the only choice that could be made. Instead I'd say Assassin's Creed 1 starts the trend in this series of what I call the GTA problem. In Grand Theft Auto 1-Vice City, you were a wheeling dealing psychopath that murdered anyone you were told to. So, the gamification of lives was an easy pill to swallow. It wasn't until San Andreas when CJ, an adult human with dreams and fears and relationships, who can be forced to murder literally thousands of people and hide in a bush for 15 seconds to get off scot-free, becomes a bit of a problem. Now that the characters and the world are meant to feel believable, the arcade nature of leaving mountains of bodies in your wake, while your brother gets imprisoned for being at the scene of a shootout, makes it all feel a little farcical. Even setting aside the havoc you can perform in the sandbox world of the game, most missions require you to kill a large number of people in cold blood, and in broad daylight, with no repercussions. Does this ruin the game? Obviously not, that's silly. Do I think it makes the story feel significantly more cheap, no matter how desperately Rockstar wants me to care about it? Yup. Assassin's Creed has much the same problem, and this carries over to the future installments until about 4. Never compromise the brotherhood? Compromise this pile of corpses I made to get to my target, old man. I'm mowing down these guards like I've got seconds to live and one of them has the elixir of life. If the world reacted to my presence in a way that felt sensible, Altaïr would be the number one most wanted man in the Middle East. They definitely could have gone about this in an interesting way. The Elder Scrolls series, Red Dead, and Kingdom Come all deal with this by giving you a permanent bounty and employing a justice system to give the player the idea "this society has rules and you can't just steal and murder at will". There's also Dishonored, which instead changes the world based on your level of violence. If you're a deranged murderer who can't help yourself, the world is going to get darker and bodies will start piling up on the streets as people try to hide from your wrath and fall to illness. They could have certainly done one of these, but I just assume there wasn't much time or money to focus on anything besides the core mechanics of the game and environmental design. However, the budget and time constraints did breed a lot of creativity in the game's presentation. All of the cutscenes do something I actually enjoy by letting Altaïr move around in the space. It does cause some goofiness as I'm given the power to make him wiggle and spin around, but it's a genuinely immersive and cost effective way to present in-game cutscenes without sweeping camera angles. I would move Altaïr to turn around at the most dramatically appropriate moments and actively get as deep in the crowd as possible to camouflage myself during cutscenes. If you show me enough respect to hand over control of my character during plot-important beats, I'll usually return that respect. The glitches that show up on the screen that prompt you to cut to a better angle for a second were somewhat annoying. Mainly because I felt much more immersed with a single continuous camera that rarely cuts to the most important thing in the scene. Actually, on the note of presentation, this game (sometimes) is genuinely beautiful. Cresting the hill, nestled between valleys, you ride towards the city of Jerusalem. Towers shoot up over the walls that seem like relics of architecture even in the early Medieval period, and the city is so big that a haze obscures half of its wonders. If ever there was a piece of concept art that felt realized, that's the one. The moment-to-moment visuals of the game are... fine for 2007. Something of a Max Payne problem in which the textures on characters look nice, but they didn't have the polygons to spare, so things get a little stretched or warped. Also, I'm just gonna say, Altaïr's robes look dumb as hell. Bro looks like he's trying and failing to cosplay as himself. Bought an Assassin's Creed hoodie at Hot Topic looking neck-ass. The game also really relies on the Breaking Bad methodology that states "If the characters are in Mexico, piss on the screen." For Acre, a war-torn city, this system works to key you in on the drab lives of the people here and how the air has become more smoke than oxygen in some parts of the city. Whereas, when I'm just going to Damascus, I don't really understand what an orangey beige filter is supposed to communicate to me. Or, why Jerusalem is a sickly bluish-greenish gray. If I had to guess, the level designers knew they didn't have the resources to make each city wholly unique in architecture, so they just used some shorthand to tell the player "This city is gray, this city is blue, this city is orange, etc." While I could tell Damascus apart from Acre, it would be based on the filter and nothing else. Otherwise, the game would just feel like a beige-brown soup of sand and concrete. Which isn't a problem with the setting, as we can see from Mirage, it's a problem with the technology and trends of the time.

The gameplay is mediocre to awesome. Seriously. I think the gameplay, for me, has the most highs and lows of the franchise. The parkour is way deeper than it looks with vaults, air assassinations, chaining ejects, throwing yourself to the side to get somewhere you definitely weren't supposed to be, so much to play with. But, it has no flow at all. Does the game have a tutorial for any of this awesome tech? Absolutely not. You have to gather extensive info on your target by doing information gathering missions and you only ever have to do half of the possible amount, so the other 3 you can just do to gain some extra useful info on your next victim. How do you find these missions? Well, the quest giver gives you a vague direction to go in and you have to synchronize at different Ubisoft towers until you get lucky and find one. Every target has a build up and, except for one or two of them, you can actually take them out silently and escape using the opportunities you came across just by using your sleuthing skills. But the valuable intel you gathered isn't marked on your map or even recorded with more than a short blurb, so if you don't know the map by heart, good luck finding the special thing that makes the assassination easier, bozo. Plus, there's literally no downside to just fighting your way into and out of every assassination mission. The combat is actually somewhat daunting because you can't spam attacks or kill everyone with a single counter. Perfect timing is rewarded and the enemies react organically to how well you're doing while fighting them. But, once you do get the generous timing of the hidden blade down, combat goes back to being a snooze fest where you counter-kill one guy, use the Shock & Awe mechanic to kill the next one, and begin an infinitely more boring version of chain killing from Brotherhood. So, it's best to handicap yourself and rely on the sword to let the enemies stand somewhat of a chance and let you pretend there's tension. The levels are gorgeous when taken as a whole, and it really feels like they thought of the areas as a living space first and a parkour course second. But, all of the buildings sorta look the same unless they have significance to that map. So, you're usually following your compass and not your environment. They want you to get right to the action, so they cut out all the filler of the overworld and didn't stuff it full of uninteresting side objectives for 100% completion. But, they did make the Kingdom map before realizing how truly terribly it was designed and, not wanting to let their hours go to waste, they force you to travel through it, exclusively, for the first 3 hours. The missions you pick up let you choose what you want to do. Does tailing someone sound boring? Never have to do it once. You can meet par and scrape on by. But, since finding investigation missions is a pain in the ass, you'll usually take what you can get. Which, sometimes, involves collecting flags??? Aren't I here to take another man's life? I'm just so hot and cold on this game. This is my third playthrough of this game and I still don't know exactly how to feel. Genuinely, I think that comes from the fact that every element of this game was done better in future games, but never all in the same place. The black box missions of Unity totally outshine the ones in this game, while fixing every problem I had with the combat. The parkour system in the Ezio trilogy is just the one from this game, polished to perfection. AC 3 is a much better meditation on the futility of justice, liberty, warfare, and destruction of culture. Meanwhile, AC4 just has a downright moving narrative with characters written so well you can tell what they're thinking based on how many extra beats it takes them to answer a question. All but a handful of games in this series blow this one away from a thematic and visual design standpoint. Altaïr, as a character, is just better written in Revelations. But, the problem, I think, is that every game has to be broken in some ways and be a huge improvement in others. Nothing has come to the plate to just be this game again but better. Mirage sorta tried. It was revealed to be a sleight of hand, because it barely resembles this game in all but location. So, I kinda agree that Assassin's Creed 1 is the only game that feels like Assassin's Creed 1. And, that's kind of a damn shame.