1. Horrible Enemy A.I
I understand there’s a lot going on in Assassin’s Creed. It’s vast world is full of places to go and things to see, including the dull home base you’re sent back to after each mission, three fully realized and beautiful cities teeming with life and things to climb on, and the wide open stretch of land connecting it all called The Kingdom. All of it adds up to a pretty high population count for the game to keep track of, but as the rather long loading screens encountered whenever you move from the Kingdom to a city can attest, nobody’s asking the thing to juggle them all at once.

Enemy A.I. is a problem throughout the game, and the first major stumbling block between the person playing the game and the feeling of being a real assassin they’re hoping to attain. Just trying to ride your horse from the Assassin’s temple to the city where your first victim lives will see you attacked half a dozen times – evidently assassins are the only sort who ride at a trot (or god help you, a gallop), as moving faster than a crawl past The Kingdom’s idiot guards will betray your true nature as a deadly killer. City guards are a bit brighter than their country mouse cousins, but even they will turn on you for such heinous crimes as standing still for a bit or running down the street (though scaling the sides of buildings is apparently perfectly acceptable twelth-century behavior).

Diehard fans of the game have argued that, after completing your third assassination, you’re given the chance to go immediately from home base to the city of your choosing, so what’s the problem? This isn’t a solution, it’s a patch; a design decision that acknowledges the entire Kingdom area as a tedious, buggy exercise in frustration while at the same time refusing to fix it. Sure, the A.I. in Assassin’s Creed has a lot on it’s mind, but you can’t tell me it would strain things any further to dumb down guards enough so they don’t try to kill you for breaking some unknown equestrian speed limit.

2. Boring Sub-missions
The main storyline in Assassin’s Creed revolves around the nine members of a vast conspiracy that main character Altair is tasked with killing. It’s a job easier said than done – before each target can be eliminated, the player has to embark upon at least three sub-missions to gather information about where and when is best to strike. Said information is collected by pick-pocketing documents from unsuspecting pedestrians, eavesdropping on conversations, interrogating on of the target’s lackeys, or doing a favor for a fellow assassin who knows something you don’t.

And that’s it. For each of the nine missions, you’ll find yourself doing some combination of the exact same four increasingly tedious activities. While pick-pocketing at least requires some level of sneakiness, eavesdropping is done by identifying your target, sitting on a nearby bench, focusing the camera on them and pressing the “Y” button to watch a cut scene. Interrogation is only slightly more involved, taking you with following your target into an empty alley and pressing the “X” button to punch them till they talk. If you’re very lucky, the favor for another assassin will involve killing two high-profile targets without being noticed, but you’re just as likely to end up running across the surrounding rooftops collecting flags that someone has inexplicably placed there in what has to be one of the most ill-fitting and unimaginative mini-games of the year.

For a game sold so much on its open world and the idea of letting the player carve their own path through it, having so much of the gameplay made up by a handful of repetitive sub-missions needing to be completed before you can get on with killing your main target seems to point towards the designers not knowing what to do with their playground once they built it. Just a bit more variety – letting the player bribe or win over corrupt members of the target’s inner circle, perhaps, or even killing and posing as one of them – would go a long way towards making me feel more like an assassin and less like somebody checking off items on a to-do list.

3. Too Big a World, Too Little Interaction
Assassin’s Creed suffers from the same problem that has plagued open-world games since Grand Theft Auto III brought them into vogue – for all there is to see and explore, the only means of interaction with the world available to the player is killing people. Don’t get me wrong, running across the rooftops of Damascus or Jerusalem is one of the greatest thrills games had to offer last year, and it’s going to be a while before anybody tops the easy with which Altair scalpers over the heads of the unwitting masses below. But these huge jungle gyms grow dull once you realize there’s no one to play with – and who’d want to play with you, when the only games you know end in sticking a knife through their ribs? It’s a problem again of too much world and too little variety, resulting in an environment that instead of embracing the player holds them at arm’s length like the human cancer cell they are.

Adding an economy to the game isn’t a complete solution; like any other new feature, it brings with it as many new problems as it does gains. What it does offer is a new means of interaction with the game world – all of a sudden, the player has more to do than just kill guards or skulk on the rooftops. Rather than risking life and limb restocking your throwing knives by pick-pocketing them off of local ruffians, now you can buy more, or perhaps even upgrade the number you can carry at a time. Those horrible beggar women who totally blow your cool by tailing after you through the crowd asking for a few coins? With an in-game economy you could just give them the money, rather than being forced to fall back on the options for dealing with them the game offers you know (that is, knocking them down, ignoring them, running away, or, of course, killing them). Guards could be bought off, help in the form of mercenaries aquired, and so on and so forth. Hell, you could even supplement the jobs handed down by your beardy master by dabbling in a little contract killing to raise extra cash. More ways to connect with what’s around them adds to the player’s immersion in the world created for them, and a world like that in Assassin’s Creed deserves to be splashed around in rather than held at arm’s length.

Filed under: Assassin's Creed, talk about games